Special Work Report - Various Items (Patreon)

Hello again!  Last week I was in Seattle on some gamedev matters so I wasn't able to type up a post.  Since I have a mix of some gamedev items and a smaller bit of comic work I thought I would combine my report into one post this week for all patrons.  Thank you for your patience!

The first item I'd like to cover is the whole reason I was in Seattle in the first place.  In addition to being our programmer Jason is also our sound and music wizard. We have a few music tracks he's composed that we've used in older game demos, but we were still feeling out the sound aesthetic we need to really compliment our game.  Rather than send files across Discord's sound codec I flew out to Seattle so we can work together to find the right sound.  The track at the top of this article is a sample of the new instruments we picked out applied to an existing track, but I think it captures the feel of what we aimed to achieve well.  

According to Jason, " these [instruments] are from the Ministry of Rock II VST.  Specifically Gibson guitars, Lakland bass, and Gretsch drums." We wanted to find something that sits at the crossroads between blues and metal, we kept pinning "early Black Sabbath" as a reference point but we worked to find our own sound.  We tried tuning guitars so they have a really sharp high end and a nice deep fuzziness in the lows, as well as a drum kit that had good, bright cymbals, something like Led Zeppelin's Rock & Roll. The comic half of Dead Winter has always been very music focused so I wanted to try to keep the game sound in line with the feeling set down in the comic, and I think we were successful.  Moving forward with the rest of the game's soundtrack we'd like to keep this instrument set as like the core "band" playing the tracks, with different accent sounds and flavor for individual songs, so getting the sound just right was really important.

Before I left on my trip I shifted from comic work back to game art to cover some items Jason requested so he could code up those elements of the game.  The first was a results screen for the end of a stage.  

I made a nice thin frame that matches the aesthetic of the pause screen, and made the whole thing large enough that there would be a block beneath each health bar space.  The inspiration for the format is Metal Slug's results, where a bit screen comes up and you tick down score items and your numbers go up.  For characters who aren't yet active in the game I made a filler graphic that can go in their box, which are all displayed above.  I wanted to give them a kind of flavor where if a character isn't being played yet they're in Tombstone doing their other job, in a really mundane way.  We're working on making it so you can pick up a controller and join a game in progress, so if Alice is in the field for a few levels Lizzie can get off her waitressing shift and join her!  In the comic all the characters are based around their mundane jobs being applied to heroic circumstances so I wanted to keep the flavor of, these characters are still working people in their respective rights. I always felt like you didn't need to be specially chosen or have a star-crossed destiny to be heroic, it's something that calls anyone, so this is a small way to maintain that undertone.

While building these assets I also made a modified variant for the condition of "a character was chosen, played, got game over and either chose a different character or didn't continue, thereby having entered and then exited the field":

I didn't want to be like "oh they died" so I thought of profession-specific ways to say they're laid out in the infirmary.  Monday has always been the one quirk to the "ordinary worker" rule since being a contract killer isn't really ordinary, but in Tombstone he is working as a clerk in the Mayor's office so I'm trying to play a double entendre angle with his presentation in the game, for the fun of a game player who hasn't read the comic yet.

The second item I needed to do for Jason was put together assets for something we'd discussed before.  When we were designing our health items and powerups we floated the idea of a vending machine that could give you a choice of three random items you could buy.  Tying it into the score tallies above, we had defined a rule where if you game over/continue you lose all your points so there's incentive to not keep dying, and we thought one way to get people to care about maintaining their score is to put a dollar sign in front of it and change nothing else.  The idea of making points "dollars" stems from the fact that Tombstone has its own currency so American greenbacks are basically worthless, but they have perceived value to survivors outside of Tombstone so we could say picking up money could be useful during exchanges with them.  We don't want to build an "economy" in this game, that's feature creep, but we thought about how if you have these dollar bill points, you can have the option to spend them to get guaranteed items, rather than wait for them to drop from the environment.

We built this asset we can drop into any level chunk and, using the context-sensitive Action button, you can open up a menu to see which three health or powerup items are available to purchase at a given time:

The idea for the pricing is, if you keep dying and continuing you won't have a lot of money, so in teamwork sense a player who is more successful can spend their points to help their teammates who are struggling.  Also, there could be a cost/benefit decision in playing for better time or higher scores.  Also-also, since it's the end of the world this guy who keeps putting vending machines everywhere has a monopoly on his market, he can charge whatever he wants.  So rather than making the prices equivalent to "beating one random bad guy" amount of points, it could be like beating a screen of enemies before you can afford some +Melee_dmg gloves.  To make this work I had to draw new assets for all the players so they have a defined pose when they're in a mini-menu like this, and I kept it short and quick, just one frame each:

One of the perks of building a game based on a comic I'd spent a decade writing is if I need a tertiary character to fill a role I can go back into my comic and pull out something I'd already created to tie the new thing to an old thing and make the whole thing feel like a connected whole.  In the case of Diamond Doug, the wasteland entrepreneur, he's actually a guy from page 482 of the comic, an intermission one-shot:

I had the idea back then of a guy who finds jewelry zombies might have eaten along with the rest of people and now in the game he's a guy who sees fortune in helping random adventurers out in the wild.

To make these vending machines self-contained I decided to draw them with a truck battery and some jumper cables on top, but then I thought about what if a player tries to jump up there?  We'd also been planning to have enemies who shock you with electrical damage so these vending machines could be a great opportunity to test out the [electrocuted] state before we build those enemies.  If we're to add a new state to the game it needs a clearly defined purpose, and the difference between being in normal hitstun and being in electrical hitstun is is that the electrical hitstun state lasts a longer time and, unlike normal hitstun, you're not invulnerable to taking additional damage, so putting an enemy in the game that can shock you would freeze you in place for a while while their companions land shots on you, presenting good cause for you to avoid getting shocked.  

I made a three-frame cycle for the electrical damage loop.  I basically drew one shock-pose, copied it and squished it and then made another copy where I blacked out the silhouette and drew a skeleton overtop, so the assets were super efficient to make.  I wanted to include little secret details in the skeleton frames, like Lizzie's busted rib- I'm honestly very proud of how Lou's skill came out.

This was the bulk of my work for this past interval.  When I got home from travel I didn't have quite enough time to get the comic page done as much as I'd have liked so I focused on fleshing out the sketch work of the last few panels so when I ink it I'm not flying completely blind.

One of the important things I wanted to define in this page is what the three Yellow Poncho characters looked like, since I'm going to be drawing them a lot in the coming pages.  I also wanted to define which of them had what kind of weapon, so when I plan out my fight scene I can choreograph it smartly.  When I was growing up we had a lot of trees in our yard and my dad kept a pruning saw in the garage, and that always stuck out to me as kind of an interesting modern polearm, so one of the Yellow Ponchos is going to be a pruning saw guy.  

The other panels I really tuned up from the last post were the two corner-rounding shots.  I redrew them from scratch and I think I got much better expressions out of it.  I wanted to get the clap of the book snapping shut to pop which I think the older sketchups didn't achieve.  Also, the specific title of the book isn't important but I wanted it to sound like a vaguely romancey fantasy novel and this was the first title to come to mind.  I try not to overdo references but I think this one might be veiled enough to fly.  I think compared to my last post of this page I've cleaned it up enough that I'm not filling in blanks and I can just move forward quickly. 

I swear, this time I don't have any other pressing gamedev items I need to address, I can just focus on the comic now. I think I've said that a few times already this month but things keep coming up, I really mean it this time.  Next week's update will be all comic work.  Thank you again for your patience, I hope this combined comics and games post has been fun!