deadwinter

Comic Report #131.3 - Hurry!

So here we are, got the finished page ready for you without needing to stay up until 5 or 6 in the morning. I'm kinda proud of that. I can't separate the text from the background on this one so the "textless" page is gonna be texty again, sorry about that. It's just how it's gotta be.

At the outset of this art I worried that I might not be able to capture the frantic energy of the chase scene music sequence, just for the energy of the action being so much different, but I think th...

Comic Report #131.2 - Lookit It Go

Hello! I've got good news today: after last week's update I managed to hammer out almost all of the rest of the page, and I'm set to be able to get this thing finished up this weekend; you should be reading it Monday morning at the latest. Keeping up this momentum I can probably get the next page up around or just after the end of this month, and that'd be a 150% increase in my page output, which I think isn't too bad. There's nine pages to go after this one, but I won't think too much ab...

Comic Report #131.1 - Momentum

Hello again! Got a status update for you today. This week I didn't get quite as much work done as I'd planned, but I got it to the point where it's all downhill from here. This week I'd been taking some more time to work on my health and well-being, I've been exhausted but I gotta keep the train rolling. I've also been putting a bit of time towards getting something together to make a gamedev post on here- I haven't put one up for a little bit for a myriad of reasons, but I want to get ba...

Comic Report #131 - Keep It Rolling

Okay so! I'm committed to trying to get as many of these pages drawn as quick as possible, and I'd just put one up a day or so ago, so here's the rough sketch phase of the next page for you. There's no time to dilly-dally, we gotta keep up momentum. Today I got most of the next page to share with you, and I think by next week I should have a good bit of progress towards completing the page. It definitely won't be ready this month, but I think I might be able to get two pages done in Novem...

Comic Report #130.2 - Textless(?)

Howdy! I got a textless page to share with you today. Or, kinda textless. I'm gonna be putting it right up on the main site after I send this post, but I want to keep with my practice. I think this is the first page like this where I'm encountering this situation in, uhh, maybe the entirety of the time I've been doing these write-ups. I'll post about that a bit, and then I'll put the comic up on the site for realsies.

So! What I usually like to do on here is post the full artwork ...

Comic Report #130.1 - A Lot Of Guys

Hello again! This week saw steady progress on the first page of the big action sequence, I'm expecting I can have the whole page finished within this week, which is a pretty good mark for getting these done quicker than usual. I've got a few things to share about this page so I'll just get right into it.

Being the second page I'm drawing on my new tablet, I'm really acclimating to the new hardware and feeling a lot more comfortable laying down my tones. There's some soft modeling of ...

Comic Report #130 - Here We Go

And so it begins. This week I got a lot of comic done, which I'm happy about, since I have a lot of comic to do to get this scene in the archives. I'd said last week that I need to up my turnaround time to achieve what I want to do in a reasonable timeframe, and I think this is at least a good start to working towards that. I think I can get this comic page finished either by this time next week, or by the end of that weekend, and then I can jump onto the next one. I might be able to fit ...

Comic Report EX - Planning and Preparation

This week I wanted to get all my ducks in order and make sure I had everything I needed prepared to tackle a monumental task: one last musical choreography scene before I lead towards the end of the comic. The song is Queen's Dead on Time, off their 1978 album "Jazz"- as always, the choreography is intended as a read-along with the artist's own original studio recording, I don't take credit for their work and the presence of the lyrics are included to allow a reader to match the pace and flo...

Comic Report #129.3 - Aaauughh!!

Here's the new textless page for you! First one on the new tablet, and hoo boy is it a doozy! There ended up being all kinds of background details on this one and I, drunk off my new-found drawing power, decided to go in and include all of them. Or most of them, at least. I'm typing this now and I see one detail I forgot to add, I'll be popping it in when I go in and do the text. I'll leave it to the reader to figure out what it is when the final page goes up.

I have this thing whe...

Comic Report #129.2 - A Knock At The Door

Hello! We're rounding out to the end of the month and I'm happy to say, I'm on the last phase of the comic process and I should have this thing wrapped up before the weekend is over. I'm gonna be a bit quick today since I'm close to my target and I wanna just get to it. Once this page is done I'm gonna be in the Music Zone and I don't know exactly how long I'll be in that zone for, but I'm gonna have to do as much of it as I can as fast as I can to keep up the flow. For now, though, we're...

Comic Report #129.1 - New Glass

Okay so, this has been an exciting week for me. Between last week and now I managed to get my inks and flats down on this page and start getting into some painting. The painting is what I'd been looking forward to the most about this new tablet, and this page is gonna be the first testbed for what my new tablet can do. Today I'm gonna talk a little bit about that, and also reflect on my old tablet, because I feel as though I've found some new truths in my old art in comparison.

For a...

Comic Report #129 - Back To Business

Hello again! This week I got my new drawing tablet in, and on Tuesday I set it up and made sure everything was working correctly, and I think everything is back to normal. I was hoping to be a bit further ahead on my comic page progress this month than usual, but what can you do? Regardless, I wanted to make sure I had some comic work to share with you today, since it's what we're all here for, so let's get right to it, then.

This page is intended to be the launching point for the c...

It Finally Happened.

Hello! I've got grim news today: after sixteen years of valiant service, my drawing tablet finally gave up the ghost. I'd been preparing for this moment for a few years now so it hasn't really come as a surprise, but it does mean I'm on sort of a forced vacation from my work until my new tablet arrives. It's in the mail now, on its way from sunny California to my New England doorstep, so I should be back up and running Tuesday evening, barring any unforeseen calamities. The tablet held o...

Comic Report - Planning the Action

Hello again! So, I'm glad I got that comic page finished when I did, because it turned out that three vaccines at once knocked me out for the entirety of Friday. Man! Lemme tell ya. I did manage to begin prepping a little bit for the next scene of the comic, so I thought that today I could go over my big action choreography process without spoiling too much of the fun. Today's update will be a bunch of that, a lot of broad ideas without getting into the specifics, so depending on how muc...

Comic Report #128.4 - FISH

Hello! I'm in a spot of trouble today. Okay so, you see, I had an opportunity to schedule my vaccine updates for today, including the new Covid booster, so I got, three vaccines at once, at the pharmacy's recommendation. I'm doing the right thing, you know? But afterwards I realized, oh no. I haven't finished this comic page yet! So I'm all vaxxed up and now I'm a ticking timebomb before that Covid booster hits, so I'm trying to get this squared away as quick as possible before I crash....

Comic Report #128.3 - The Lineup

Hello! Thanks for waiting for me. I've made it about halfway through the page this past week, I think I can get it wrapped up in the week to come. The end of the month is coming up so I think landing that target will get me back into the rhythm for regular updates again, I'm gonna make it my priority to get this thing wrapped up by that target. In the meantime, here's where I'm at so far:

As I've been painting my foreground figures I've been blocking in my shapes for the final backg...

Update Coming on Sunday

Hello! Just wanted to pop on here real quick, I need to travel for family events on Saturday so I'll be putting up the weekly report on Sunday. I figured it was that or Thursday and I wanted to spend Thursday putting more work into it, so it'll be going up a day later than usual. See you then!

Comic Report #128.2 - Onward

Hello! Been spinning my gears up this week getting back into the flow, I've got some good progress on the next page to share with you today. It's taken me a bit of time to shake the rocks out of my head and get back into painting- shipping a game really, really takes a toll on you, and my body definitely needed to recover- but I've got some good momentum now so I think I can carry forward into a real productive week this week. I'm gonna try to get the next couple pages finished quicker tha...

Comic Report #128.1 - Getting Back To It

What a week! It's been ten days since we launched Kitsune Tails, and the reception has been overwhelmingly positive! There's been a lot of bumps and a lot of anxieties and a lot of shot nerves; but I think, overall, people like the thing we created. We received 500 reviews, 99% of them positive, on Steam, which to my understanding means our game is tracked for good visibility. I'm hopeful but I'm also completely toast. I spent the whole week watching what people thought about our game, w...

Comic Report #128 - Pulling It Back Together

This week is the big one. We finally shipped our game on Thursday, people are playing it and it sounds like they are mostly enjoying it. I've been in a pressure cooker of stress since then, and I feel like microwaved hamburger. It's those first days, you're not actually sure if people will like what you made, you're seeing people play and your heart stops for a second anytime someone posts a weird physics interaction or a stage layout thing you didn't catch. My nerves are shot but I think...

Reflection - So What Now?

The other month I wrote up a post about how I came to arrive where I am, and people seemed to like that, so I think today I'm going to write about where I'm planning to go in the future. This is the last weekend before Kitsune Tails releases, it's only five days until a non-Dead Winter project I worked on actually makes it over the finish line and while I'm a bit relieved by that fact, I've also been hammering out a lot more last-last-last minute art assets for our cut-off deadline on Monday...

Comic Report #127.5 - PAGE

Finally! Here's the textless new page for you. I think I've said everything I possibly can about it across the past month and a half? of time, so I'm gonna let this one just speak for itself and get to putting the speaking into it. I mostly know what I want the page to say but I have to remember some of the wordings I intended when I drew the page in June. I don't intend to make gaps like this a regular thing, but in nine days you'll get to see what the reason for it was for yourself. Tha...

Comic Report #127.4 - alkfcaoljk;efoi

Okay so: hi. It turns out I wasn't quite as out of the woods as I thought I was. When I said at the start of June that we were pushing towards our release date a reader on her commented "good luck", and I understand that now. We've got eleven? more days until this thing ships and I think I've done everything I can to get it in the best possible shape, but I dunno, there's always more to do all the way up until launch. I had more time to make progress on the comic, though, so I got somethi...

Comic Report #127.3 - The Final Countdown

At the start of this month I wasn't sure if July would go by really fast or really slow, and right now it's feeling like it's going really quickly. We're halfway to August and I'm doing cleanup and some final fun little art tasks for Kitsune Tails, and in about two weeks I'll have credits on a shipped and finished game. I'm at the bottom of the barrel for things to be working on, so I've been putting a lot more time into painting the next comic page. I feel like we made it. I feel like w...

Comic Report #127.2 - It's So Close

Hello again! Welcome to July, the final home stretch until my extra work obligations are off my plate. It's been a hot week and I've been grinding out a few more things but SGDQ has been on so I've had good background noise playing while I've been working. The good news: I've wrapped up the last real thing I need to do for Kitsune Tails so all the Want To Haves are all drawn, and I'm mostly doing playtesting, level decoration and drawing some fun extras. My workload is easing up but I'm n...

Comic Report #127.1 - Emerging From Hell

Hello again. July is just around the corner, and we're running out of task items to complete on Kitsune Tails. As of this writing it was just announced that we're adding "sliding down hills", as seen here: https://peoplemaking.games/@eniko/112701789764555604 I have devoted almost all of my time to helping get this game in the best state it can be, and I thank you for your patience with me. I did, h...

Comic Report #127 - Plot & Scheme

So it's been a busy month for me, but I didn't want to keep making posts about things I can't really talk about all the time, so I tried to find some time to start blocking in the next page. I've decided instead of crushing myself trying to hit my month-line mark, I'm gonna split working on this page across June and July, so I have time to balance it with the other time-sensitive things that I need to work on. This works out for a pretty neat reason which I'll get to in a moment, but the sa...

Reflection - How Did I End Up Here??

So this week I'm in sort of an awkward position. We have a pretty firm deadline at the end of this month and I've been putting all my time into making sure I meet it with enough time for everyone else to get their work done. I have this big worry that I'm not gonna find the time to make progress on my comic obligations this month, and I don't want to post nothing here, but I also can't post what I've been working on so I'm like, what do I do? How do I navigate this situation? So today, I t...

Happy Pride Month!

Hello again! It's a short work week this week, with the comic updating on Wednesdayish? And I didn't want to do yet another month of "here's my thumbnail phase of the comic" posts, so I thought I'd do something a bit different this time. Also, I have good news to share as of today: Kitsune Tails has a proper release date now! August 1st! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1325260/Kitsune_Tails/<...

Comic Report #126.3 - It's Time

Hello! I got the textless version of the new page here for you, a little late but this will not become a regular thing. I expected to have this page done yesterday, but I learned at the last second that we were actually dropping a playable demo of Kitsune Tails for Steam Next Fest, so I spent a lot of time promoting that and reading what people thought about it. You can try it yourself, here! https://store.stea...