Aikonia Guest Comic Week
This past week marked the end of the second chapter of Aikonia and we couldn’t be more pleased with the results. Our readership has grown substantially over the past months and for that, we are thankful. To celebrate, we had a week of guest comics depicting some hilarious non-canon scenes from around the Institute. We really appreciate the time and effort the guest comic artists put in for us; clearly, their passion and talent for comics shows.
You can find links to their respective websites and deviantArt profiles here:
1. Shelbie P. “KoniraThax” - Delirium
2. Jared Saul - Poor Shark
3. Ranu - Sugar Stars
4. Jared Markley - deviantArt Profile
5. Jake Richmond - Modest Medusa
6. Nick Roger - deviantArt Profile
We hope you enjoyed the guest comics as much as we did and that you’ll stick around until our next guest week (most likely at the end of the third chapter). Until next time, keep your noses clean and your magic under control!
Thunt of the webcomic “Goblins” made me, and several other webcomics, aware of a Facebook app someone created that scrapes our sites’ content, reposts it without our permission, and - the part the really pisses me off - encourages people to donate to our comics via a link/Google Checkout account we’ve not approved or are linked with.
See the area in the read circle? ”Keep the Something Positive app alive.” We webcartoonists get none of that. That all goes to the guy who set the app up - apparently someone named Lance Strish. No link back to the webcomics he’s taken from. No, “Hey, be sure to support the artists.” Nothing.
This shit happens all the time in Apple’s “We’re Too Busy Counting Money to Have Quality Control” App Store. Now webcartoonists get to deal with it on Facebook, too.
If you enjoy a webcomic - or anything - on the web, please don’t give money to the people who make apps that scrape their content without their permission. Give it to the actual people who make the stuff you like. If you see an app and aren’t sure if it’s “official” or not, ask the creator, but honestly, if it WAS official, the creator would have plugged it on their site.
A good thing to be aware of.
2011: A year in review
This past year has been insane… Insane in all the great ways that accompany seeing your creations come to life and witnessing the beginnings of a truely awesome community. And insane in all the knuckle-whitening ways that comes along with deadlines, paperwork and living up to expectations.
At the start of 2011, we were just beginning to work on Project: Velyria, our very first venture into mmorpgs. There have been several hiccups along the development path, but we have pushed past these issues and emerged in 2012 victorious and almost ready to release the beta version of the game. We’ll update you soon with the new features and some new class and weapon artwork.
This year has also been awesome for Aikonia, our fantasy webcomic written by Timothy Hely and illustrated by the ever-talented Katie Tiedrich. We finished the first chapter of the story, we held several contests, printed posters, and saw our readership numbers soar. In addition, with the help of our great readers, we successfully raised an astonishing $10,000 to print physical copies of the comic through our Kickstarter campaign. We saw fans exchange theories, send in fabulous fan art and just generally create an inviting and entertaining environment. Things have been hectic getting everything arranged for shipping and printing the rewards from the Kickstarter campaign, but rest assured we are moving our butts to get you your rewards. You can expect the extra milestone page to be posted the first week of Aikonia’s third chapter this January.
2011 also marked the initial release of MADSOFT Connect, our community website meant to allow for fans to discuss our works in more detail. While not all the features have been made available as of yet (customizable avatars, trophies, and more are coming soon, promise!), we certainly encourage you to go sign-up for an account if you have not already.
We also managed to make it to our first convention as a team this year! Otakuthon 2011 in Montreal was a ton of fun and we loved meeting some of our readers and other webcomic authors & artists. We are making plans to attend more out of town conventions this year so keep an ear to the ground and an eye to the sky.
In-house projects were not our only focus this year however. Canned Meat Studios (the developers of Me and My Dinosaur 2) and Tile Isle (the developers of Space Chase) were taken under wing. You can look forward to the release of their flash games in the new year. We are very happy to be working with such talented and inspired individuals and we can’t wait to show you the games over which they’ve been slaving.
Of course, our most recent exciting and time-consuming change was moving our company from the USA to Canada. Needless to say, igloo offices are far more cost effective and our local moose population hasn’t caused us too much trouble.
2011, like this blog post, has had its ups and downs. We hope that 2012 will be just as awesome and you, our fans and readers, will continue to be as supportive and wonderful as you have shown yourselves to be in the past. We hope you had a great holiday season and we’ll see you in 2012!
Canadian Corporation Announcement
Hello everyone!
We’re proud to announce that we are now officially incorporated in Canada!
In early 2009, we founded “MADSOFT Games”, a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in the United States, and today, we’ve transferred the company over to Canada and changed it into a Federal Corporation (INC)!
This probably doesn’t make much of a difference to you, but to us, it’s a huge change! And we’re super excited about releasing everything we’ve been working on in the past couple months. Keep an eye on us, because we’ll be doing big things very soon!
