WELCOME TO AMARIA

Amaria is the focus of my first worldbuilding project. It’s a science-fantasy themed superearth inhabited by sparkle humans and other Earth-like but still variously sparkled flora and fauna. It leans hard, being rooted in science, but will inevitably have softer or less developed elements. Sometimes elements of the worldbuilding are just ‘cause I want that thing in the world, or I don’t want it in the world. It’s my project, and I can make it as self-indulgent as I want.

Amaria is being built from nothing. I started with creating a sun, its solar system, and the inhabited planet of focus, Amaria, itself. My celestial bodies in orbit, I went on to develop the physical characteristics of the planet, then eventually moved on to developing its inhabitants.

It sounds like a logical approach, at least to my inexperienced eye. Pick a theme and your restrictions then build from the literal ground up. But Amaria didn’t start as a worldbuilding project. That’s where its current problems lie.

Amaria was the name slapped on a generic “Earth but there’s magic” setting for a short test comic called All Good Witches Have Cats*. I started Cats*’s pre-production in March 2018. It never came to be. My mistake was making the main characters, an unnamed (for lazy “character names are hard” reasons, not creative decisions) young enthusiastic witch, and her friend-turned-into-a-cat ‘familiar’, Kevin, far too engaging for myself. I put all my then-favourite tropes to write in a blender and built them from the smoothie custom made to my tastes. It was an attempt to trick myself into loving the characters enough that there’d be no way I could drop the project. It worked so well I was incapable of keeping the story constrained to the thirty or so pages it was supposed to be.

As the characters’ stories exploded out of their constraints, the world grew with them. Unfortunately, concepts created for a standalone comic meant to be read in three-five minutes are extremely basic. They’re not thought out, and they’re kinda generic. They don’t have to be anything more than that though, as long as they give the character-driven narrative the support and weight it needs. They served that purpose fine! Forming the foundations of a much larger worldbuilding project, though? Nah. But I was stubbornly denying the project and its world outgrowing itself and not thinking about what the project was becoming. I did not kill my darlings when I should have. It resulted in simple concepts forming the shaky, unstable and just downright objectively poor foundation for a more developed world. It worked out about as well as you’d imagine. A lot of time wasted on building myself into a corner and having to go back to dig down to burn everything, including the roots.

Narrative and world both became so unruly I had to shelve anything attached to and including All Good Witches Have Cats*. Work on it died off through 2019-2020, but it was officially shelved in 2021.

I have the desire to create a world though. And That Time We Fought God for Child Custody is filling the niche of practice/test comic now.

Amaria was available, and I had the desire to fix and continue working on it.

So, consider this version of Amaria as being a revitalised, refreshed, rebooted version. Hopefully for the better. I’ll be tracking and sharing its development and progress through this site.