The team met recently, digitally across the world, as people have moved and it now spans multiple continents. As it’s near the beginning of development, most of the talk was about concept art and the script. We’ve got the general gist of the story down. Now, it’s about what we should think about before starting off the comic proper (dialogue, storyboarding and page sketches).

Well, I was going to take a page out of corporate design books and apply it to the indie world in a more fun indie way. Style guides! In the deep dark world of the corporate machinery, style guides are ways to tell a large organization what the “look” and “brand” of the company is, whether it’s the shape of icons or the fonts they choose to the colours that should appear in their mockups and final designs. For Tarus Space, it’s going to be about “what should each of the factions look like?”.

What will be fun to nail down is the look of each of the four factions that’ll appear in Chapter Five:

• Royals under Queen Saruq
• Hussars under Hetman Rzewuski
• Republicans under Governor Marud
• Technobarbarian “tainted” forces under Tyrant-King Ellac

We’ll square down their colours, their flag, have example soldiers for each one, their weapons and so on. It’ll help readers identify each faction clearly from panel to panel and make the flow of the comic better. This doubles as a fun exercise in exploring what might be a “royal” soldier under Queen Saruq. Do they prefer more cloth and surcoats? Are they bright colours? Do both sides use bright colours, just a different scheme? What makes someone look like a technobarbarian? Cybernetics? Patchwork armour?

(Side note: For my American readers, “Republican” in this context means they reject Queen Saruq’s throne and has no connection to the Republic Party of the United States)

Hopefully, this gets fleshed out over the next little while and we can show off a bit of the work in progress.