Comic Report #128.1 - Getting Back To It (Patreon)

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, watching them play it, reading them talk about it, and just that alone has totally sapped my batteries. I did, also, draw up some more Titan Garden characters, building up my buffer for that again- I have a bunch of fairly complicated technical illustrations I need to get through so I figure now is a good time to do that. I also did a bit of thank-you art for the people who have given a kind welcome to Kitsune Tails:

I haven't posted a Titan Garden entry in a bit since I hadn't really done anything except ship this game for the past two months, and I also need to warm up into momentum so I can knock out so this week it's time to warm back up into other things. So today, let's get back to Dead Winter.

Moving from the thumbnail phase to the final page, there are a few things I wanted to change in my final implementation of this page layout, and now that I'm thinking about it there's one thing I might end up changing but we'll see that thing next week. This is gonna be a Liz internal narrative page so I have a bit more leeway with how I plan my text placement. Liz text boxes are nice since they're just rectangles, there's less "bubble space" roundness to account for. I think I can make this one work.

I want the second row of panels to highlight some of the Omnimart crew. They were friends earlier in the comic but then they were gone for a while and now, bringing them back to Tombstone, I do want them to feel like they're integrated into the core crew, so in the shot of the team rallying together, I wanted to highlight the O-Mart's inclusion. I moved Dale to the first panel, since him walking with his bat in his hand fits that panel shape easy, and then I adjusted the camera angle for the shot of Melody and Clark. On the page prior, Randy mentioned that he had some projects he'd rather see our crew use than see the Gravekeepers get their hands on; these big duffel bags are that, and this is gonna be a bit of foreshadowing for a moment in the pages to come. What could it be, what could it be? Let's find out together.

The penultimate shot, right now, is a lineup of the team together, with the core crew in the middle. They'd been split up a bit since arriving in Tombstone, so I thought a shot of them all shoulder to shoulder again would tie back to the root of the comic, and how these guys stick together. I might end up moving this shot down a panel and put a different shot in the penultimate slot: a down-the-row shot of Lizzie glancing to the side at Clark, queueing up a song on his media player. That feels like a significant detail to highlight, it will flow nicely into the pages to come. I'll make it work.

So that's where I'm at today. Big week, big recovery. I'm feeling good to resume moving forward now that our game's doing pretty alright, I can burn energy thinking about other things. I think I can have a good progress post for this page to share next Saturday, so let's see how far we can get. Thanks for sticking with me through all the crunch and the "can't share it" posts, it feels nice to be back on track. Until next time, take it easy out there.