EtherFuture launches weekly 4koma strip

January 6th, 2010

DoHkoma logo

As of 2AM, we revealed the first strip of our new 4-koma series, affectionately named, DoHkoma! (Dance of Heart koma!). Since there is really no hype surrounding us, we kept the name of our 4-koma under the table until the strip was released. For now, you can conveniently check it out at the Dance of Heart website under the “DoHkoma” category here.

What you can expect from this 4-koma strip is random, non-linear, bite-sized humor that pokes fun at the Dance of Heart storyline, characters, and the creators. There will likely be a bunch of “fourth-wall” breaking, but that’s the fun of making our characters say and do what we want within the bounds of their personality. Expect to have at least one strip a week at the minimum. You’ll want to keep an eye out though, as we may have time to do more as time goes on. You can find out the details of why we decided to create a 4-koma here.

If you’ve already read Strip 001, then you already have an idea of what we hope readers will find attractive about these cute, boke/tsukkomi-like strips. Since I’ve already given away a bit of my writer’s influence, I’ll go ahead and say that I had KOU model his character designs after nendoroids. We’re happy about this exploration into this creative style and hope that it will become an addition that many people can enjoy at any time.

If you feel the need to, please let us know what you think! Dance of Heart is still our top priority, so do continue to follow our progress via Twitter or the site itself.

Which social network sites do you use most often? Let us know!

Thank you for reading and Happy New Year to you!
_ALEX

New 4koma project to coincide with Dance of Heart rescheduling

December 28th, 2009

EtherFuture’s lead project, Dance of Heart began back in June on the same day AnimeNEXT ‘09 kicked off. Since then, KOU (artist) and myself (scriptwriter/director) have produced 25 issues of DoH as of today. Despite the hurdles of life, school, computer issues, and that nagging desire to evolve to a level of seamless, accurate production, we’re proud of each and every issue we’ve put out. To those who have given us feedback, waited patiently for the next issue, or just plain forgot about us until now, thank you for even checking us out. Because of you, we are making some changes that we’re excited to share and hope you’ll find worth reading on about.

We have decided to start a lighthearted, minimalist 4-koma series with KOU and I maintaining our respective roles as artist and writer. What we hope to achieve with this is to provide bite-sized, non-linear, random entertainment that we can drum up on a quick, consistent basis while we produce Dance of Heart. We like to laugh and poke fun at ourselves and the characters we love. At the very least, we hope you will find it cute enough to look forward to. As of now, we can comfortably assure one 4-koma strip per week. If we release more, we’ll be sure to tweet you about it.

To provide a more easy-to-consume narrative experience, we will be officially rescheduling the release Dance of Heart issues from weekly to a three-day-release basis. What this means is that once we have produced three or more issues of DoH, we will then publicly release each one after the other on a daily cycle. This way, readers can solidly expect a minimum of three day-by-day releases rather than being let down (and letting ourselves down with unforeseen circumstances beyond our control) week after week, AND receive a smoother reading experience that better suits this kind of character-driven storyline. Along with our 4-koma weekly releases, we do hope you’ll be able to stick with us a bit better and be encouraged to build community with other readers.

We’ll be using Twitter as our core means for getting update notices to you. Twitter is awesome for reaching out to many people at once and establishing a network of common interests. So we encourage you to sign up for an account. To get you started in the Twitterverse, you can follow me (ALEX), KOU, and, of course, Dance of Heart. I also follow other webcomic creators like Megatokyo / Fred Gallagher , Applegeeks’s “Hawk”, and Ananth.

Issue #026 of Dance of Heart will be released this Friday (New Year’s Day) in respect to our initial release schedule (Mon/Fri). The new release scheduling above will be enacted with the coming of the new year. We hope to continue to grow in our skills and that we’ll meet even more wonderful people along the way.

On behalf of our humble creative circle, EtherFuture, we wish you a happy New Year’s Day! Hope to see you in 2010!

_ALEX
Co-founder of EtherFuture

EF Site Dev Update #3

November 25th, 2009

Between this week and last week, more progress has been made since my last site dev update back in July. What was taking so long was my fear of entering new territory with developing a Wordpress-driven website. However, within the last month, I put myself in a position where I had no choice but to complete a WordPress blog at my real job. My work on that has crushed my fear, cleared my head, and enabled me to break through the wall of doubt that was keeping me from writing and deciphering my XHTML and CSS properly.

In a few words, I put a gun to my head, learned some new tricks, and the ball is rolling again. For real.

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New Project: Otaku Pride Custom Themes

October 15th, 2009

etherfuture_opmikulayoutAs promised, I have some good news on the newest project that EtherFuture will be handling. If you would prefer a tl;dr version of this post, a summary can be found in the Projects section. For those who want the whole story…

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EtherFuture: What happened?

October 7th, 2009

In the words of the Otaku Pride 500 Server Error page:

Something has gone terribly wrong…! And yes, KOU drew that and this. XD

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Dance of Heart Creators featured on podcast

August 29th, 2009

doh_op

KOU and I were on the Otaku Pride Podcast this past Sunday as the creators of Dance of Heart! We had a great time talking with the guys and girl of the podcast and shooting the breeze about a good number of topics. We dish out some inside info about the story, the development process, and what Dance of Heart is shaping up to be. Since this is EF’s major project, I definitely encourage you to listen in and let us know what you think!

Otaku Pride Podcast w/ Special Guest: Dance of Heart!

There have also been some content updates on the Dance of Heart site that you will be interested in if you are enjoying it so far.

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