Comic Report #118.1 - To and Fro (Patreon)

So at the start of this month I was like, you know what?  I'm just gonna knock this page out, easy.  No sweat.  I gotta tell you, though, I don't know where this month went.  I don't know where the time has gone.  I do know I put a lot of work towards hitting some game development goals, both in Dead Winter and on my other job, Kitsune Tails, and that's where a lot of my month went.  But!  I'm still going to hit my target for this month.  That's sort of the pulse of my work, making sure I don't go over that line.  I think I was a bit ambitious this month with all the other obligations I had to sort out, but here we are.  I got this week to hit my mark and I think I can do that now that I've put my other obligations to bed.

Last update I had two major problems to resolve on this page:  how to segue into Pat stress-puking and how to convey the punchline as I imagined it.  The first part ended up being a pretty easy layout solution; I'm not planning for this page to be too wordy, just mostly a lot of anxious post-violence panicking, so I cut a diagonal panel break in the leftmost panel to fit four poses into the paragraph.  It's always a bit dicey to split up a leftmost panel, since it could be easy for a reader's eye to miss the lower panel and move to the next panel to the right, but my hope is a steeper cut with the panel divider catches the eye before it can move on too quickly.  I got room to hit the pace that I want, so I think that part's good to go.

The second problem needed a more creative solution.  I needed at least five rows to make this work:  Pat is resolving what to do in his panicked state and so he wants to run away to find the help he's thinking of, so there needs to be a pause, there needs to be pat running away and then there needs to be a blank moment.  Then, to hit what I think is a funny punchline, Pat runs back in, picks up his crowbar and uses it to hold the head in the bag at arms length, taking it with him in the last panel.  So it's panic, leave, pause, return, leave again.  The trouble I had here was in how much vertical space I had to work with- if I cut the page into horizontal strips they'd be too thin to really capture the Gravekeeper laying on the ground in addition to Pat running in and out of the shot.  By breaking the panels up into this stack of little slats I have a thick end of each panel I can use to make sure the details I want are included in each segment, sorta sneaking that extra vertical space in, and looking back at the final layout that's pretty much where I put all the major details, in those big ends.  

The backgrounds on this page look like they should be pretty easy to knock out, which is one of my metrics for how hard a page is expected to be to paint.  I'm gonna do my best to get it in by the end of the week so please look forward to that.  I'll have a more significant gamedev writeup to share after I get this comic in the tank, the long and short of it is Alice is very nearly at color-sprite parity with Lizzie and I'll be moving on to other things to fill out the gamespace, like more background colorizing, more props colored and a second pass idea on player attack effects to help them pop more.  One step at a time, though, let's get this comic wrapped.  Thanks for checking in, I'll have more to share with you next week.  Until then, enjoy the weekend.