Hackberry Hollow

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.

Because yesterday was Labor Day lets talk about how much labor (i.e. creative work) we’ve put into this project so far since we first started it over a year ago.

I’ve been using Klok to keep track of just about everything in my life, and that includes the time spent on Hackberry Hollow. So these numbers are quite accurate. This is how long I’ve worked on this project so far. In total? 807 hours. That’s 20 40-hour work weeks.

Here’s the Klok data shown in a nice graph. The first graph shows the totals for the project, and the 3 graphs after that show break downs of the Writing, Concept Art, and Blog sections (larger version of the graph and details after the jump).

Did you know that there’s a 3D model hidden beneath most of the concept art we’ve done so far? Using 3D tools has helped us out a lot in creating concept art, and our plan is to use it extensively in the comic.

With the advent of the new Hackberry Hollow site I created a logo and illustration that can be used for the website and other marketing materials like our impromptu business cards. And of course I had to turn it into a desktop background so I could ogle it all day. So to kick off the site launch here’s the first batch of Hackberry Hollow desktop backgrounds—for those of you who really want it.

Hackberry Hollow is an upcoming comic being produced by the guys at Lumaglyph. We strongly believe that story is king and that anything serialized like shows and comics with a continuous story should be written in advance from beginning to end: thoroughly researched, well thought out, and absolutely no filler.

Hackberry Hollow is nearing completion of the writing phase and we are starting to develop the art direction for the comic. We launched the site to share concept art, to hear what people think, and to stay in contact with those who are already interested in the work we are doing.

Be sure to add us to your RSS reader for instant updates.