Andrew Hussie | |
|---|---|
 Hussie in 2010 | |
| Born | August 25, 1979 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Temple University |
| Occupation(s) | Author and artist |
| Notable work | MS Paint Adventures |
| Website | homestuck |
Andrew Hussie (born August 25, 1979) is an American author and artist. He is best known as the creator of Homestuck , a multimedia webcomic presented in the style of a text-based graphical adventure game, as well as other works in a similar style that were hosted on his website MS Paint Adventures.
Andrew Hussie began posting Jailbreak in 2006. This was posted on a discussion forum and took the appearance of a text-based graphical adventure game. Hussie would post simple drawings with text, and other forum users suggesting commands for the game that Hussie would quickly respond to with a rapidly drawn image. [1] In 2007, Hussie created the website MS Paint Adventures to host his comics; [2] its first three works were Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth. [3] Problem Sleuth would run for over 1,600 pages produced over one year, and during this time Hussie was creating up to 10 pages a day. [1]
Hussie produced the multimedia webcomic Homestuck , which started in April 2009 and ended in April 2016. [4] [5] It tells the story of a group of four kids who play a computer game called Sburb and inadvertently cause the end of the world. Homestuck included images, text, Flash animations, and interactive elements. [4] [6] Homestuck, like Hussie's previous works, started with reader-submitted commands for the characters to follow, but Hussie moved away from this style because, he said, the fan input method had grown "too unwieldy and made it difficult... to tell a coherent story." While Hussie now controlled the main plot of the story and the characters' actions, he said that he still "visit[ed] fan blogs and forums" to figure out small things to add into Homestuck. [7] [8]
Initially, Hussie updated Homestuck regularly, usually about three times a week. However, there were often long gaps between updates, including a pause of over a year starting in 2013, and another long pause starting in 2015. [3] At one point, Hussie described working on Homestuck as less like a full-time job and more like an "all-encompassing lifestyle," saying that the time he spends on the work occupied something just short of all of his waking hours. [9]
Vice noted that Homestuck was "wildly popular during its seven-year run"; [6] as of 2011 it was receiving an average of 600,000 unique visitors each day [1] and as of 2015 it was receiving upwards of 1 million unique visitors a day. [3] Hussie said, "The bigger the fandom got, the more controversial everything was... Practically everything that happened was a serious point of contention—a reason to argue, discuss, to generate pages and pages of heated dissertation on what everything means, and why certain things are good or bad. All of this was supposed to be part of the experience. It was part of the cat-and-mouse game between the author and reader." [5]
By the end of its run, the entire work contained over 800,000 words across at least 8,000 pages. [5] [10] Fans contributed to the final work in a number of ways, including producing all of the music. Over a hundred musicians and artists contributed to the final work, [6] with Hussie commissioning artists for important updates. [9] By 2011 there were eight albums of Homestuck music. [1]
Vice magazine noted that Homestuck "became infamous for its sprawling, overly complicated, semi-improvised, deeply self-referential plot, driven partly by reader input and speculation, as well as the incredible and sometimes terrifying vigor of its fandom." [6] PBS's Ideas Channel compared Homestuck to Ulysses because of the complex and densely worded storytelling the series often utilizes. [11] [12]
The Homestuck Epilogues was a text-only work released in April 2019. It consisted of 190,000 words in a nonlinear novel that was co-written by Hussie and four other creators; Cephied_Variable, ctset, Lalo Hunt, and Aysha U. Farah. [6] [13]
A sequel to Homestuck, titled Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon, began in late 2019. While the story was outlined by Hussie, it was to be written by a team of writers. [14] [15] According to its website, it was updated regularly for about a year "until it was paused indefinitely", with the rest of the comic to be released when it was completed. [16] In 2024 the comic was renamed to Homestuck: Beyond Canon, and resumed regular updates, being created by a new team.
A videogame based on Homestuck, called Hiveswap , was first announced in 2012 and raised over $US2.4 million through a Kickstarter. [17] Initially, its release date was given as 2014, [18] but had a troubled development, including switching from 3D to 2D years after development started. [19] It was later broken up into four episodes: the first episode of Hiveswap was released in 2017 [20] and its second episode was released in 2020. [21] A second sister series, titled Hauntswitch, is also planned to have four parts. Two other videogames were based on Homestuck, Hiveswap Friendsim and Pesterquest.
Hussie has been a managing member of What Pumpkin, LLC. [22] According to What Pumpkin's website, Hussie officially left What Pumpkin in early 2020 to work on projects unrelated to Homestuck. According to the notice, Hussie still retains ownership of the Homestuck intellectual property, but has discontinued all creative involvement in any future Homestuck projects. [23]
Hussie produced a visual novel called Psycholonials. It was first announced in December 2020, [24] and its final episode was released in April 2021. Hussie has described it as a commentary on American politics and on his perception of uncomfortable cult-like atmosphere surrounding the Homestuck fandom. [25]
Andrew Hussie was born on August 25, 1979. [26] [27] Hussie graduated from Temple University [28] with a degree in computer science. [29] [30] He has said that he has "moved well over fifty times". [31] As of 2010 he was living in western Massachusetts. [32]
Ryan North is a Canadian writer and computer programmer.
Rich Burlew is an American author, game designer, and graphic designer. He is best known for The Order of the Stick webcomic, for which he was ranked fifth on ComixTalk's list of the Top 25 People in Webcomics for 2007. He has also written several works for Wizards of the Coast's role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. He owns and operates a small press publishing company, Giant in the Playground, which he formed to publish his comic work.
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Homestuck is an Internet fiction series created by American author and artist Andrew Hussie. The fourth and best-known of Hussie's four MS Paint Adventures, it originally ran from April 13, 2009 to April 13, 2016. Though normally described as a webcomic, and partly constituted by a series of single panel pages, Homestuck also relied heavily on Flash animations and instant message logs to convey its story, along with occasional use of browser games.
MS Paint Adventures, abbreviated MSPAdventures or MSPA, was a website and collection of webcomics written and illustrated by Andrew Hussie. According to some estimates, in April 2016 MS Paint Adventures was the largest collection of comics on the Internet, containing over 10,000 pages among its five series.
Broken Age is a point-and-click adventure video game developed and published by Double Fine. Broken Age was game director Tim Schafer's first return to the genre since 1998's Grim Fandango, and was released for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Xbox One platforms. The game was developed in two acts; the first was released on January 28, 2014, and the second was released on April 28, 2015. A retail version of the complete game for Windows, macOS, and Linux, published by Nordic Games, was released on April 28, 2015. A Nintendo Switch version was released on September 13, 2018.
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Hiveswap is an episodic adventure game developed by What Pumpkin Games and overseen by Andrew Hussie and Cohen Edenfield. Based in the universe of Hussie's MS Paint Adventures webcomic Homestuck, it focuses on a girl, Joey Claire, who is accidentally transported to the planet of Alternia—home of the troll species seen in Homestuck.
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The 2009 webcomic Homestuck, written and drawn by Andrew Hussie, currently holds a soundtrack consisting of 30 digital albums. Besides static images, Homestuck makes use of flash animations and games, which often involve background music. The music of Homestuck is composed by fans, but is published by Hussie through his Bandcamp page under the What Pumpkin record label. Hussie established a small "Music Contribution Team" for the webcomic, which is coordinated by Toby Fox.
The history of webcomics follows the advances of technology, art, and business of comics on the Internet. The first comics were shared through the Internet in the mid-1980s. Some early webcomics were derivatives from print comics, but when the World Wide Web became widely popular in the mid-1990s, more people started creating comics exclusively for this medium. By the year 2000, various webcomic creators were financially successful and webcomics became more artistically recognized.
Notable events of 2009 in webcomics.
Notable events of 2012 in webcomics.
This article presents a list of notable events of 2016 in webcomics.
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