A Walfasser's start guide and essentials

Have you ever wanted to try making walfas projects yourself?
Here's a few things that can help you get started.

If you have never used Walfas before the very first thing you'll want to do, is to play around with it and familiarize yourself with the basics,
click all the menus, see what they do,change characters parts, etc.

After you are comfortable with walfas/create.swf you will want these tools if you want to make comics.
Must haves:
Walfas(aka create.swf): this is the main tool to make characters and scenes, you can manipulate characters, props
    and backgrounds with ease, it comes with many touhou presets and allows you to import your own props.
A screen capture program (eg;AndySnap , Lightshot):Lets you to capture a section of your screen as an image, these images will be used to make the comic.
ComicLayouter:An easy tool that turns a sequence of images(panel images) into a comic.
An image editor(eg;GIMP ,  Paint.net):Although not completely required It's still highly recommended.

Optional:
Flash player projector: May run better than using a browser, you will need to download create.swf onto your computer to use it.
Pressing Control-S while create.swf is open in a browser will let you save it to your computer, or you can download create.swf here.


Once you have the tools to make your comic, you will want to know how to keep your comics clean, and easy to understand.
Stuff to remember(each of these is a link that explains it better):

• Order your speech bubbles from top to bottom, letting the reader get lost makes it hard for them to get into your story/idea.
  
• Keep your text bubbles well sized and a snug fit,allowing the reader to read comfortably without presenting a mess is CRITICAL!
• If you are planning to submit your comic to a group you will want to check their criteria so they will accept it. <- (this is the Walfas Station Wagon criteria)
• Rescale the background instead of resizing your panels to zoom in, resizing can distort your panels and make them blurry.
  
• Limit the visual features and colors of your character,simple is often the best
  

            keep your characters strengths balanced, avoid the easy way out when presented with a challenge(like new powers and such)try to use what's already been established.

• Taking a look through the Create.swf User Manual is also a good idea.
  

Other considerations:

• Break up your text, leaving large walls of text is daunting for some readers and removes chances you could insert more panels for more visual interactions to engage viewers,even just changing facial expressions help immensely to convey thought and the characters emotions(but keeping the whole scene active and occasionally changing the scenery couldn't hurt).
  
• Saving images/comics as pngs makes them smaller without reducing its quality.
• Be sure to check your spelling and grammar, this might seem like a low priority to some but you really want to avoid confusing the reader when presenting an idea/story to someone

             (everyone makes mistakes but even if the errors don't confuse, they distract when numerous and pull attention away from what you want to express).

If you need more info on making an interesting and balanced characters or want some more insights then take a good look through here.