Reflection - How Did I End Up Here?? (Patreon)

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 thought I'd write a little bit about how I ended up in this situation in the first place.

First, though: last week I posted a bit of in-progess illustration work I was doing that kind of tied together a bunch of the project I've been juggling lately. I posted the finished piece on different sites but for your convenience I'll put it here as well:

 I like the way this piece came out. Using the bright highlights with a saturated border between light and shadow was something I explored making the vinyl figures for Titan Garden. I think it came out pretty okay. Please enjoy all the funny ladies I like to draw.

Okay so, now: how did I end up here? I'm gonna skip stones on this and kinda keep things concise, but unless catastrophe strikes I should have a published game out the door in a month and a half and I honestly, never really had any formal training in this at all. It feels a bit surreal, and as I'm typing this I feel guilty about not working on the other things I'm doing as much as this one, but I'm excited to have something finished and complete that I can point to and say, I worked on this and it's done.

So, starting out, I studied oil painting and watermedia in college, and I tried out working as a freelance illustrator. I did this for about a year or two and I ended up hating having to shake clients down for my pay, I got stiffed a bit and decided I'd try to use my art to make something for myself. I'd been reading a lot of webcomics in the years leading up to this and I realized that there weren't any zombie comic webcomics, so I decided that's what I'd make, and so I started working on Dead Winter. The way the art style started it had a kind of watermedia look to it, but as time went on it took on a more oil painting aesthetic, which is essentially just me applying what I studied in school to achieve a look. I used to want to draw more "realistic" looking faces, but when I started Dead Winter I decided I'd just draw what came naturally without trying to force anything, and it ended up a bit cartoony, and through this style I learned to draw more expressively. Dead Winter has always been a lab where I could experiment with my art and grow my craft, I've had my ups and downs working on this thing but it's always been a place where I could find peace when other things collapsed, and I'm glad I embarked on this journey.

Leading up to the 100th page of Dead Winter I wanted to do something special, so I decided to animate it. I've only dabbled a little in animation prior to this, I've never had any kind of formal training in animation, but the way I animated page 100 was to have a bunch of paperdoll variants of still frames I could cycle through in order to achieve the movement I'm looking for without a lot of tweening. Once I'd introduced animation into Dead Winter I started finding other little spots to include it, trying to achieve a different effect with every implementation- this ended up meaning I explored a lot of what you could do with animation, and slowly through a combination of this and my work in sequential art, I kinda sorta ended up learning how to animate things organically. Later 100-mark pages would end up having proper tweening and animation because I tried out animating in easier ways, and now it's a skill that I learned.

My first foray into game development was actually through my interest in Team Fortress 2. One half of that is, this was a game whose moving parts were very on display, it was very clear how everything work and its balance intentions were intuitive and made clear sense. I learned a lot about how games were built and why things were the way they were thanks to TF2, but I also got to try drawing and animating a whole game by taking up work with a member of an old TF2 community I belonged to. Orzo was an old friend who was making a game called Super Obelisk, and I knew a little bit about animation from my comic work, so I started making sprites for him and learned to kinda condense loose animation from comics into a machine-friendly format that a game engine could use. This ended up being a bit of trial and error but I learned how to prepare sprite atlases and tilesheets thanks to Super Obelisk. Sadly the game had to be shelved when more important things came up, but it was an important stone in my journey.

There was a weird time in webcomics where artists were getting picked up for work by something called ShiftyLook, which was a Namco-sponsored art outreach aimed at promoting the company's catalog of old arcade games. I got picked up for work on a very ambitious Dig Dug Choose Your Own Adventure game with animated battle elements; the design phase was kind of loosey-goosey but the pay was really good. Sadly, they wanted about three months of work in six weeks, but I was hopeful for the project so I did what I'm doing now on it, I put my comic work aside and crunched extremely hard to get as much done as I could by the deadline. My spritework I'd worked on for Super Obelisk kinda got refined in this period and my sense of building art assets for games improved in those six-ish weeks. By the end I felt like warmed-over meat, but soon people would see what I was working on. It turns out, the project got canned at the last minute and never saw the light of day. I'd put off my comic to work on this and I think this is the period where a lot of people came to think I'd quit comics and lost track of me. It put a pretty big dent in me, but I came out of that experience with a kernel of knowledge, so maybe it wasn't all bad.

So, back when I started comics, I had this thought that "there aren't really any zombie comics", and in the years to follow I feel like I would understand why. I like working on Dead Winter and I'm glad for everyone who has found joy or meaning in it, but man. Man. It's been a tough sell. It feels like if you have The Z-Word that's an immediate turn-off for a lot of people. I frequently hear peers talk down the entire genre. At times it felt like, there's a wrong kind of story you can tell and I picked it. I didn't see a future for myself in comics, I didn't see any sort of end of the road for me that wasn't going to be a struggle, so the thought I had, after my other experiences, was that I could take this thing I built, I could take Dead Winter, and as a long-term goal I could build something in an entirely different medium. I'd built a world and lore and characters and I had all the hard bits already sorted out, but I had the thought that, long-term, Dead Winter would be better off as a game and a comic than as just a comic. So, combining my skillset with my long-time friend Juno, we set to work trying to build a Dead Winter game, while working on the comic.

The Dead Winter game has probably been one of the most instructive pursuits I'd even taken up. It's been years of building, but Juno and I both came to the medium from basically close to nothing, with bits of related experiences, and we learned by trial and error. We ended up building Dead Winter five? times across four game engines, each time the game almost hit its ideal state we'd realized we needed to account for some other detail and have to roll it back again. Working on this game we definitely learned a lot about scope and planning and what is ideal vs. what is feasible. Long-time followers of this patreon will know I went through a lot of iteration getting my animation style nice and tight, re-drawing some pencil sprites over and over as I tried to figure out how to make them look good. We probably could have released this game a long, long time ago but it would have looked and played kind of bad. We're in a place now where we actually know how to plan, scope and create a video game, which we didn't know how to do when we started, and our game design is in a finalized place and I have help on the high-intensity art asset rendering from S'ret, our third teammate. When Dead Winter's game ends up finished, we have plans for a game to follow. The ambition is to be able to just make neat little games for people, but we all need to do other things as well in order to stay afloat long enough to realize that ambition.

So, I've been spinning my wheels on building and re-building a game for some years, I've been on a couple canned projects and at the core I've been working on a webcomic for nearly two decades. Four years ago I ended up moving to a new city just as the pandemic hit, and I was looking for a little bit more income. I saw a posting looking for a sprite artist for a game called Lore Finder, and I thought, it's been a minute since I did pixel art, but I'm a proper artist, I should be able to manage, so I said hi and did a little test art and shot my shot. Turns out they liked my work and I got picked up to be an assistant animator to the game's lead artist. In this role I learned a lot about pixel art technique, not just animating but how to work within the limitations of pixels. I had a good knack for limited color palettes, but after a bit of back and forth I found my stride on some animations and I was doing well in this role. Then, the idea for Kitsune Tails came up, and I ended up moving into that project, taking on an art lead role and helping shape the look and feel of that game. That was four years ago.

Kitsune Tails is set to drop in a month and a half. I've been juggling it along with Dead Winter comic, game and Titan Garden stuff, as well as freelance illustration work to keep myself housed and fed. It's been a long, weird road, but I need to focus a bit more to see the project across the finish line. I don't think I could have done what I've done without all the other little off-shoot experiences, all the other little projects that never made it all the way, or without the concrete foundation of working on this comic through the uncertainty of trying to find stability doing something I'm good at. I'll have a lot more free time once this work is shipped, and I will be pulling what I learned from shipping this game into continuing Dead Winter's gamedev.

Thanks for your patience with me. Things are probably gonna get crunchier before they get better, but if I can hit the target of "the end of this month" for reasons I can't specify, I think I should be good. I'll try to get more progress on the comic page for you, I don't want to have that work feel neglected. This week wasn't the week for it, but I'm still gonna try to keep it in the rotation. Right now I'm going to get back to polishing up our levels so I can pass this work off to the next person who needs it finished. Until next week, thanks for sticking with me!