deadwinter

Comic Report 31.1 - A Change in Perspective

Hello again!  Thank you for your patience over the holiday week. I'm back with a progress report on my work: I'm in comic-making mode right now and I will continue to remain so until this page is finished and posted. This page has been frustrating to paint, and today I will explain a little bit about why that's so.

As I've mentioned before, one of the elements in making a comic page that takes me the most time is backgrounds that involve a lot of depth and geometry.  It's extremely t...

Holiday Update

Hey guys. I'm just making a quick post to say I've had kind of a busy week around the Thanksgiving holiday so I don't have much to share. I will keep working on the next comic page and give you something substantial next week.  Have a nice weekend, everyone, and thank you for your patience.

Comic Report #31 - Plans In Motion

Here is the sketch phase of the next comic page.  Narratively this page is meant to cement the turn of events from the previous page and set the stage for the rest of the comic to come.  The little rectangle in the lower left of the page is a placeholder for the chapter-end tag- it's been a while but I think this is a good place to close out the chapter and start fresh on the next one.  Due to the pace of the comic in recent years it's actually been a pretty long time since I actu...

Comic Report 30.1 - I Almost Forgot The Title

Here's the textless version of the next page. I wanted to get this finished in this week cycle so I'm really happy to make it a day or so earlier than I thought. If I'm honest that's entirely down to the page's panel count, and while the next page might be light on panels I'm gonna be sinking back into the 8-9 panel pages sooner than later, and all those empty diner booths are gonna have to have people in them- and a couple of the will have to be specific people too- so I'll enjoy this speedy up...

Comic Report #30 - The Turning Point

I've been going hard on gamedev stuff for a while so I decided to turn out another comic page as soon after the last one as I could.  It's partly because I sometimes feel compelled to "prove" that I'm still keeping up with the comic, despite working on it all the time, and also because this particular page is an important point in the story and I really want to get it out there.

I don't want to think about how long it's taken me to reach this point, but for about the last sixty pages or s...

Comic Report 29.1 - A Successful Operation

Here's this week's progress update!  I took the rest of Thursday to knock it out but I'm happy to have the entire thing painted and ready to go in a week. I've been feeling bad about how long making a comic has taken me so I feel good about getting this page done in the time I managed.

I'm really happy with how the last panel lighting came out. I wanted to do a dynamic lighting panel for a while and having two spotlights wired up is a fun lightsource to play with, I don't think I had a pa...

Comic Report #29 - Doctor's Orders

Here's the inks for the next page.  I'm gonna push through it and spend this week getting it done and posted, since I've put a bit of work into game time I need to swing back into comics. I'm always torn about sharing unfinished grey tones vs. sharing the lineart, and I think the lines are just nice and clean and I tend to lose that in the final comics, so I share my inks this week.

I encountered an odd problem in planning this page that one maybe wouldn't expect given the nature of my wo...

Game Journal #42 - The Journey

I spent the entirety of this week processing and exporting all the new art assets I'd been working on so I didn't have time to draw anything new. After everything was exported I checked my files and saw that I've drawn close to 1,300 frames of character animation so far!  So I thought this week I'd share some of the thought process and math behind how I'm drawing this game and how I wind up at such a number.

When I started working on this game I settled on a base unit of time I would buil...

Comic Report 28.3 - The Doctor is In

Here it is!  The finished textless art for the new page before I put some words to it and put it on the site.  I think I got the medical room as cramped and grody as I want it to be so I'm quite satisfied with this page. I'll add Drs. Pheiffer and Parker to the cast page tomorrow, and that will round out everyone I need for that page. 

I'm gonna get back to work and get the text in for this page now.  Thank you for your patience with my work, I always want to do the best jo...

Comic Report 28.2 - Slowly But Steady

Here is a progress shot of the next page. I feel a bit bad at how long I've taken to get this one done, but I'm juggling a lot of things and I shouldn't feel ashamed of that.  I'm committed to working on nothing else but this all the way through to next week, so possibly by the end of the weekend or early next week this page will be finished.

I worry sometimes that I have tendencies in building interiors- that I have a certain way of drawing all paneled ceilings and tile floors, so I want...

Cache Dash - An Introduction

This week's Patreon update is half announcement, half confession.  For the past month or so Jason and I have been working on a side project to help us build income so we can devote more effort into our gamedev careers.  We had hoped to just quietly build a small game and release it as a surprise, so I'd been splitting my time between making Dead Winter comics and character animations, as well as designing and building assets for the new game, and sort of cramming time really hard to ma...

Comic Report #28 - All Hands

Here's the sketch phase of the next comic page.  It's one of my patented two-thread scene shuffles, blending what Lizzie is doing with what Alice is doing. In a couple pages the intertwine will come together and tie off into my next plot jump-off point.  This page is actually exciting for me to work on for a couple reasons, so today's post will be about those reasons and what I'm aiming to achieve.  

Since the beginning this comic has always been about peoples' job skills transl...

Art Tutorial Archive

Since this is a short week update I took some time to go back and clean up my Patreon archive a little bit.  When I first started I posted a lot of formal how-to art posts based around a specific theme or element, using a mix of the art I was working on at the time and pages of drawn and annotated examples to help visualize what I'm talking about.  A little bit of this shows up in my more recent art posts but the early stuff was much more concentrated and focused. There are over 120 pa...

Comic Report #27.3 - Finalized Art

As is tradition, here is the full textless art for the next page.  I wanted to get it done "by the end of the weekend" and it looks like I just barely hit my mark, which I'll take.  I'm happy with Lizzie's expression in panel six, I wanted that to reflect her barely-contained desperation to do or be anything else than where she currently is.  It's about 3am so I'm gonna put some text on the page and try to get it up before I go to sleep, but I wanted to share this art with you for...

Comic Report #27.2 - Cold Cuts

I'm so mad. I was all set to power through this page in a week and I caught a cold at some point and lost my weekend to recovery!!!  I would have had this whole page done by now if I hadn't gotten sick.  That's fine though, I had a backup plan. 

One of the things I've been meaning to try for efficiency is what I call the 70% Method.  Basically a theory I've been pondering for a while is in a painterly style you can hit about 70% of your artwork goals reasonably quickly befo...

Comic Report #27 - Sorta Sketchy

I got a page all done up this week, and in a surprise twist: I'm gonna keep working on it and try to finish it for next week. I think it's doable and I want to prove to myself that it can happen, so I'll knock out this page and then resume game sprites the week after.  

This page compresses a couple details into a few panels.  I want to have the lead-in involve Lizzie finishing up recapping her knowledge of the Omni-mart crew, which she brought up to Lee on page 544 as potentially us...

Comic Report #26.1 - Followthrough

I'm just about at the homestretch of this page so yo guys get to see it early! I used to do lettering before the background to save the amount of space I actually need to paint but since I started making the unlettered versions a little Patreon treat I've been doing the whole thing, and I like how it looks. A lot of the time little details get lost, and I'm a sucker for little details.  I suspected I'd have this done by the end of the weekend and I almost would have, but my roommate let me ...

Comic Report #26 - Something Old, Something New

I got a jumpstart on the next comic page and managed to get a good bit of it done this week.  I expect I should have it finished by this time next week, if not by the end of the weekend. I did a lot of little things on this page, so without further delay I'll share my process thoughts with you!

While I was doing my cast page research last week I spent a lot of time in my comic's archive, and I felt like the way I used to paint pages had a certain kind of character I might have lost sight ...

Comic Report #25 - Spring Cleaning

This week I decided to sit down and do some things for my site I've been putting off for a really long time.  I'd been putting it off so long for how much time and effort it'd take, and it ended up taking me the entire week to get done- I put off my Kanji lessons while I powered through all the art and by the time I got done I had 190 review lessons sitting in my queue! I didn't have time to start the next comic but I'm going to do that in this next upcoming week, but for this week's Patreo...

Comic Report #24.2 - Birthday Update

Hello again!  As is tradition, here is the finished textless artwork for the next page, nice and clean to see all the details on.  Today is my birthday and I wanted to get this done by now, so I'm happy to know I can still knuckle down and power through a page to hit a deadline.  

Since the camers in this strip lingers in one spot between panels I sped up drawing time by painting two panels at once.  For whatever reason making the same decisions for one shot and painting it...

Con Report: TCAF 2017

Last weekend I was in Toronto for TCAF. Canada is a lovely country and I always have a wonderful time when I'm visiting. It's the second year I've done the show, and it was the first time I've exhibited primarily for my game work, rather than for the comic the game was based on.  I learned a lot of things, so for this week's Patreon I thought I'd share my thoughts as a convention exhibitor. 

I've been a cartoonist for about ten years. I started out making comics on the clock at a pre...

Comic Report #24.1 - A Small Detour

I didn't get as much comic work done as I wanted to this week. I had to finish up a work commission this weekend, and when I finished that I realized that TCAF had snuck up on me and is in fact this weekend, and I'll be driving up to Canada tomorrow.  I know that sounds disappointing but keep reading: I have a surprise waiting in the paragraphs below.

For what work I did get done on this page I'm reminded about the problems I created for myself in designing the Mayor of Tombstone.  I...

Comic Report #24 - Background Noise

Hello again!  Here's the sketch phase for the next comic page.  I'm going to type up some words about it, if that's alright with you:

As the story very slowly progresses I've been trying to establish pieces I can call up later on down the line; it's been a lot of setup and establishment for the last sixty pages of comic to shift from "adrift in the world" to "anchored in a harbor". This is one of the first pages where I can start pulling those strings and referencing details, now tha...

Comic Report #23.2 - Set The Scene

Hello again!  Here's the textless version of the page art for you.  I wanted to get this all done by the end of the weekend and it looks like I'll have the next page fully done for the morning crew.  

I'm gonna jump right back into the page and get it the text done and the page posted. After this page goes up I'm going to switch back to one-week gamedev one-week comics, I feel like focusing 100% on two pages balances out focusing 100% on games leading up to ECCC last month.

Comic Report #23.1 - Narrative To Go

So I said I was gonna try to get my Patreon updates back to Wednesday after being pushed to Friday, but I had to work on some commission art over the weekend and Fri, Half of Sun, Mon wasn't enough time to put a dent in my art so I'm taking the incremental approach and hitting Thursday on this cycle.

My background plan from last week came along nicely- it looks like just any old backgrounds, but if you follow the story and pick out the landmarks you can tell where, spatially, they are and in w...

Comic Report #23 - The Great Outdoors

Since we spent all month in February making not-comics I wanted to focus entirely on comics for at least two pages before I start making more game assets again, to keep that ball rolling.  Last week's update was our ECCC game demos, and in the meantime I've been working on the next comic page, which you can see here! When I focus on things that aren't the comic I always get afraid that people think I abandoned the comic, but I keep writing them and I keep making them.

I have a couple scen...

ECCC Report: Dead Winter, Glyphsong; Demos!!

 GAME DEMOS AND MUSIC SOUNDTRACK: Since we've expanded our game demos to support Windows, Mac and Linux, files have exceeded Patreon's 200mb attachment limit. Here is a Google Drive containing our current ECCC game demo builds for Dead Winter and Glyphsong, as well as a music soundtrack by Jason: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5...

Comic Report #22.2 - We're Back!

Back home from ECCC!  Seattle is one of my favorite cities to show in. We got a lot of feedback from people trying out our games- and people found a lot of bugs we missed playing it individually at our respective homes. We'll be posting game demos soon but we just want to get some things squared away so it's a worthwhile download and not just "the version before the version you'll want to try out".

Here's a fun fact:  Yesterday, March 13th, was Dead Winter's 10-year anniversary. &nbs...

Game Journal #33 - Get Up And Go

This week has been a wild ride!  Over the weekend I pushed hard to get the last of my art assets done- most of these won't be used in the build we have for ECCC but they're ready for the build after that.  Jason and I both crunched very hard all month to basically rebuild this whole game in the new engine, we have it roughly where it was last year with a few new features but there just wasn't time to implement some new elements, but that's fine!  The game plays and it -looks- like...

Game Journal #32 - Ready To Roll

I'm very proud of how much work I got done in this one week.  Last week Lou was halfway drawn, and this week he's all-the-way done and we're able to rebuild the game in the new engine back to where we had it last year on the old engine, plus a few new features! As mentioned before, the second half of a sprite set run is always easier than the first half, because a lot of the sprites are edits from their main weapons. Anyways I've typed a lot about that before so I'm gonna jump right in on t...