Hackberry Hollow

While we are talking about writing sprints, lets talk about writing software. At the moment all of us are living in different states so we have to do our writing work online. Luckily there’s some really great tools that allow us to work collaboratively in real time. And all of these programs definitely fall within our budget.

A three-day weekend well spent.

The part of the project we take the most seriously is the story. Sure, we all know that “story is king,” and even the writers who make some of our least favorite movies say the same thing. If chanting “story is king” doesn’t make a better story then what does?

This week’s post and future posts will be released on Fridays instead of Tuesdays. There are a few reasons for this. First and foremost is that we are going to start showing the works-in-progress for our character designs.

As Glen mentioned earlier, today is the 1 year anniversary of the start of the Hackberry Hollow blog. We’re pretty excited about this, and also about the upcoming release of the comic later this year. So to help us share some of that excitement we decided to give the plushie some party gear, and make all kinds of fun updates by spamming our blog with enthusiasm.

In addition to the social networking bandwagon that we have already jumped on we are now announcing that Lumaglyph has a twitter account. (For those of you who are wondering what Lumaglyph is, that’s the name of our studio.) Check it out and be sure to follow and tweet about us using the #hackberryhollow hashtag.

All of us here at Lumaglyph are very excited about reaching the Hackberry Hollow Blog one year mark. And I, with a stronger dose of my usual jittery excitement, was looking forward with great anticipation to today’s blog post. Then they told me they wanted me to write something for it…

In light of hitting the one year mark on having the blog up, I thought it would be fun to do an update on the status of the project. We started the blog when we were about a year into the project. Now, over two years in the making, the script for volume 1 is written and we’re writing volume 2 (out of 5), Shane is working on layouts for the first chapter, Glen is experimenting with character design, and Austin and I are working on a… super secret project in the background. (insert nerdy smiley face here)

Now that we’ve had a blog for a year (to the day incidentally), we’ve decided we should expand Hackberry Hollow into the realm of social networking because—well, everyone else is doing it. Along with something else that everyone is doing, which we’ll announce later today, Hackberry Hollow now has a Facebook page. So if you have a Facebook account be sure to become a fan.

You may recall earlier this week the following from Glen’s post on color blindness (emphasis added):

Now I’m not one to force honesty on other team members, or at least dependability, but I figure a bit of persuasion never hurts. I even added “part 1″ to the title of this post. See how subtle I am? It’s still subtle if you point it out, right?

Read on for a fun status update of this project.

This past week gaming sites such as Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun and others have been covering an unfortunate gameplay mechanic in the recently released Bioshock 2. It has a hacking minigame where it is necessary for the player to identify red and green bars. The problem is that apparently 7-10% of males (and 0.5% of females) are color blind and couldn’t tell the difference.

I didn’t realize how common color blindness is, and since I’ve been living and breathing Hackberry Hollow I quickly realized that our magic system is color coded which will cause problems for our color blind readership. So, how will color affect our color blind readers and how are we planning to address the issue?

As many of you know, September 19th is celebrated as “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” We would like to take this opportunity to celebrate something that is notably absent from Hackberry Hollow.

The story does include pirates, but these are otherwise ordinary people who were forced into a life of crime; far from the goofy scallywags often depicted, but not immune to their own kind of mishaps. We found that just about every possible gag or concept that can be done with “Hollywood Pirates” has been done somewhere in one form or another. When we decided to throw that out and do our own take on what modern-day pirates are like, they not only became far more interesting, but more entertaining and less predictable.

That’s not to say that Hollywood Pirates don’t exist in this world. They do, but their shift ends at 5 and they go home.