deadwinter

Game Journal #31 - He's Back!

I've had a very productive week since last post! After finishing up Monday, and having gone through the motions of adding new feature animations three times, I managed to get half of Lou's new sprites done in a week, which means I'm set to have him fully sprited and animated by this time next week, which puts us on a very good track to have our new demo ready for ECCC! Lou has long been a fan-favorite character, I tried to give his core animations a bit of his jolly personality but with the expa...

Game Journal #30 - Three Down, One To Go

I've been busy this week. First thing's first though, I got some artwork for Glyphsong done so we can have two game demos at Emerald City Comicon. Glyphsong is a puzzle game where you use music to unlock magic spells. There are an initial eight stages, each representing a different basic spell, each corresponding to musical measures of different lengths.  This is meant to be a quick side project so I didn't want to fall down a rabbit hole of animating individual components so I designed the...

Comic Report #22 - The Long Haul

As mentioned before, we got the last minute opportunity to go to ECCC in Seattle March 2-5, we weren't planning on having the chance to go this year since we were waitlisted so we're in the mad scramble to get something to share, which means the comic page is going to have to drop into first gear for a bit.  I want to look out for you guys, though, so I got the sketch phase of the page out, and I'll talk a little shop for you, go beneath the surface on what I'm doing.  Anyways lets get...

Emergency Update (good emergency)

Hey guys, I just wanted to make a quick post about something that just came up. We'd applied to ECCC in Seattle but were put on a waitlist, and I've sort of resigned us to not making it to ECCC this year, but I just got an email saying a table opened up and we can suddenly exhibit there, which is extremely exciting but also really last minute!  ECCC is March 2, meaning we have a month and change to prepare, so it's going to be a bit of a scramble, and that's going to affect my creative outp...

Game Journal #29 - Show Off Your Moves

I was very pleased with how much work I got done this work stretch!  A bit of this is bleedover from last week but I wanted to present the sprites all at once. I'll go top to bottom and explain all my thoughts on what I'm building here, but I basically drew all of the new features for his ranged weapon mode.

As mentioned last week I got a dash cycle in for Monday, but I also added a skid and a dash attack cycle.  The skid is standard three-frame boiling- since dashing makes you go mu...

Comic Report #21.1b - That Was Quick

In my last weekly report I said I'd have this page finished "sometime before the end of the weekend". Well, uhh, I just did it tonight. Here's the letterless version, I'll be lettering it and putting it up before I go to bed.

I'm happy with the lighting in the row-of-faces panels, I think I communicated the light moving from left to right and the light source in each of those positions communicates emotion correctly.  Since eyes read from top left to bottom right having the light on the l...

Comic Report 21.1 - Almost There

Just as I promised last week I'm gonna push through and keep working on this page, and since I'm at that "almost done" home stretch point I'm gonna keep going all the way to the end, which I should probably get done by the end of this weekend.

The major challenge left in front of me is how I want to handle lighing in the strip of expression panels.  I wanted the lighting to be dynamic and reflect the ebb and flow of the emotional rollercoaster but that's gonna take a bit of napkin math be...

Comic Report #21 - Expressions

Hello! I hope everyone either has had or is presently having a nice holiday! I've got some more stuff to share with you today so I hope you're ready.

I think it was earlier this year where I set up this page, with the kid being sent along with a note in her hand, and I finally get to draw the payoff.  For me this page is all about expressions, I want to tell as much of the narrative through facial emotion as possible and I had a lot of fun with that.

The other aspect of this page dr...

Comic Report #20.2 - My Final Form

Just a quick post to share the textless version of the final page, I'm gonna put words on it and letter it and get it up ASAP, but you guys can see it first, as is the tradition around here.

Comic Report #20.1 - Interior, Crocodile, etc

Here's a progress shot of the next comic.  I'm going to keep working on this and I should have it finished by the end of the week, and then I'll switch back to a gameweek afterwards, but I'd like to just push this through to the end as seems to have become my system.

I alternate between preferring interior and exterior scenes, always yearning for the opposite of what I'm working on.  I've just moved into an interior scene, though, which means I'm still doing the thing I was yearning ...

Comic Report #20- Post-Festive, Pre-Festive Edition

Last week was American Thanksgiving and I was tied up with family stuff, and then I spent the weekend focusing on working on my game-week work and I missed the update time to post my comic status report, so here's where it is now!  I have a lot of fun drawing just-woke-up facial expressions and this page is full of them!

A few pages back I introduced the kid with the scarf, and I debated how many pages I wanted to stall her return but I know I have a tendency to decompress things too much...

Comic Report 19.2 - More Page

Here's the pre-lettered page before I finish it and upload it tonight.  I hadn't originally planned to use the window lighting to draw the eye to the subjects but it was something that came up while I was working and I liked it.  As I suspected the interior shots took a lot less time than the exteriors, so I could knock a whole thing out in about a week's stretch.   The punchline on this page is a bit of a throwback, but on my long-update schedule the timescale may not be as snapp...

Comic Report 19.1 - The Great Outdoors

I have an obsessive compulsion, I'm sure of it. When I walk I avoid stepping on cracks, when I drive I try not to turn the engine off until a song is finished, and when I draw outdoor shots I like to make sure every little detail is accounted for.  Way back when I started I would draw backgrounds as just jagged square silhouettes but as time went on buildings became more specific, and when I draw specific buildings I feel compelled to make sure they're as true to their form as any other cha...

Comic Report #19 - Shifting Scenes

After a blistering, uhh, handful of pages we get to meet these two again! This page is set to be a quiet page, not a lot of dialogue is spoken so I let the camera do most of the talking.  Not needing to budget a lot of space for word balloons means I can put a lot more panels on a page, and more panels means more moments to hop across like stones in a stream getting from one side to the other in a pleasant rhythm.

I'm thankful for the time I spent defining all the buildings and the town l...

Comic Report #18.2 - Be Free!!!!

I wanted to push through to the end and just get this thing done and out before I switched to anything else, so without further ado here's the textless version of the page before I put words on it and upload it to the site.  

Two things to mention: the first is I'm pretty proud of the last panel. I don't really use perspective grids because I don't like rigid perspective lines, I like to bend and roll my perspective to both fit into panels and give the eye a sense of movement as it slides...

Comic Report 18.1 - Establishments

Here's my update on this art since last Thursday. I was tempted to skip the isometric establishing shots in panels 1 and 2 until later but I instead decided to just jump in and get them out of the way, so next comic week I can knock out the rest of the figures (which are comparatively easier) and be done with it.  

I left my light spheres active in this progress shot. When I paint a scene I try to maintain a specific light source- in this case its morning, so the sun would be rising in th...

Comic Report #18 - Transitions

Here's my first comic page since coming back from medical leave. This one's a transitional page, wrapping up the confrontation in the alley and moving forward towards the next couple scenes I have planned. Like a gradient of colors, I feel it's important to have your intermediate between one scene and the next in order to keep the narrative fluid, and this is one of those pages.

When I plan out thumbnails and I plot story arcs I have a bad habit of wanting to stretch things out and explain eve...

Comic Report #17.2 - Finally!!

Here it is, here's the textless final version of the next page!  I'll probably update the full thing tomorrow but this is essentially the pre-release preview for you guys.  I dragged my face through these crowd shots, and I found what I think is a good compromise in the last panel to sorta "you get the idea" the shot I want, while also not giving it too much detail to draw focus away from the foreground.  Sometimes the shortcuts are better than doing it the time-consuming way.
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Comic Report #17.1 - Pushing Through

Here's where I am after the past week. Normally if I kept the usual routine I'd spend the next week doing gamedev stuff and come back but I feel like since this is a new cycle process I can make the rules up a bit as I go, and I'm gonna say since I'm near the end of the page I'll spend the next week or weekend or however long to just get the page done and then worry about gamedev afterwards. It doesn't make sense to put a page off an extra week when it's close enough to the end that I could just...

Comic Report #17 - Stress Management

As I predicted last week I didn't have as much time to push through this page as I'd have liked, but it is what it is. I have a fairly substantial medical thing upcoming in my life and that's both a source of stress and a drain on my time and resources, so I try to set goals and work through it. I'll make this post about dealing with stress while trying to focus your mind on something as complex as painting.

This page is bookended on the top and bottom by very specifi...

Comic Report #16: Organizing

I've been trying to find a good balance lately for posting more Patreon updates. The trouble I ran into posting game stuff and then comic stuff was that game stuff is a million little pieces I could share as they're made, which generates more Posts, but comics take me a long time to show the one big thing so I end up having a lot of silence between starting and finishing a comic, which you guys deserve better than to have to excuse.  I'm going to try alternating one week of comics, one week...

Comic Report #15.1 - Finally!!!

Here's the text-free version of the page before I finish it up and put it online! Sorry for the big delays, it's been a pretty rough, uhh, two months?  Holy moley.

I wanted to do a lot with lighting on this page, since the sun is rising over the backdrop building and there's a crest of warm light cast over a dark shadow. A lot of the action is being conveyed in this context through depth, with Monday pushing forward through layers of people, so I tried out lightening the outline a...

A Quick Note

Hey guys,

I wanted to have more Patreon stuff up by the end of April but it slipped through my fingers, so I thought I should make a post to let you know where I am right now.  The next comic page is about halfway done and I'm focusing on that, but April hit me with a lot of medical travel stuff which has absolutely wiped me out. I'm trying to get back on the horse but I guess I'm just mortal enough that its taken its toll on me. I want to sit down and work but I have doctor obligatio...

Comic Report #15 - Drawing a Crowd

This page took me longer than I'd like to hash out the sketch version, I've spent most of my time either working on last-minute gamedev stuff for ECCC, traveling around for medical stuff or catching the cold everyone's been getting. It figures all that would happen on a page with a specific crowd in so many panels, but it is what it is, you just gotta push through it.

On the previous page the crowd scene was easy because except for four people I was making them up as I go, so it's ...

Comic Report #14.1 - Wordless Art

Here's the textless art for the most recent page. I tried to find ways to simplify the crowd scene without going into too much detail (which is usually how I end up ruining myself) so I used the block-in-silhouettes-and-then-sculpt-them-out technique I outlined in an Art Journal post a while back- it's not as detailed but when the camera is pulled back far enough just establishing lighting, shape and form is sufficient.

Emerald City is coming up soon, I'm going to try to start working on a...

Comic Report #14 - Inks

Switching back from game dev to comic mode from now until probably April, so here's the start of the next page.  

The first panel is a shot of the full crowd scene, isometric and from above, and I kinda don't want to deal with the fine inking of all those little shapes so I'm gonna use my silhouette painting method to knock that out in a way that reads well and I'll basically "deal with that later".  As for what I -did- ink, I'm trying out a new inking brush on this page-...

Comic Report #13.5 - Textless

Here's the no-text-bubble version of the last page. I finished it really early in the morning and said to myself, "I'll upload this to Patreon after I sleep" but I got swept up in other stuff and forgot, sorry!  

For this page my primary goal was to convey the size of the mob of Gravekeepers surrounding Randy without giving in and drawing each individual character, and thus pushing the comic posting back by a whole bunch of days.  The four main ones were important, and we've ...

Comic Report #13 - Pushing Forward

I've spent the weeks following Thanksgiving mostly just working on comics, outside of a couple real-life things, and I'm aiming to push through to the end of this one before I shift back to game dev stuff and make some new sprites. I'm trying to strike a balance between the two obligations- now that the four main characters are done it'll be much faster to iterate new game content and hop back to comics, which are a gigantic chunk of time (probably something like 70 hours each to make these days...

Comic Report #12.5 - Whoops!

I forgot to upload the text-free version of the latest page!  Sorry about that. It's been a hectic month for me, moreso than usual. Here it is though!

Comic Report #12 - Momentum

Here's the sketches for the next page. I've basically set up everything I want to so now I can get into action, so I'm easing into that!  Also since I don't have a ludicrous time-consuming panel like last page I want to try to get this one done as soon as possible, so I'm gonna try to be quick about it.  Wish me luck!