Hackberry Hollow

I have several images to show you today. A while back Shane put together a great mockup of what Preston’s cabin should look like inside and out, and a few weeks ago we approved the final design. Since then I’ve been chugging away at creating a final detailed version, with the same level of finesse as the pirate ship. This is still in much earlier stages, so I don’t have a nice lighting rig on it yet, but the preview render still clearly shows the direction this is going:

More after the jump…

We’ve shown a few of the vehicles that are featured in Chapter 1 of the comic: a boat, a crappy truck and a van. Next to the pirate ship this one is my favorite. It’s a sport utility vehicle with a little bit more emphasis on the word utility.

It’s amphibious.

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.

We are trying to unify the designs for all the characters in Hackberry Hollow, including character designs that come much later. So here’s a painting of one of the robots in the world of Hackberry Hollow—oh, and also one adorable little critter.

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).

One of the key design elements of the pirate ship, or rather pirate-themed day cruise, is that employees-only areas on the boat do not maintain the theme. The company serves lunches and dinners on their midday and evening runs respectively, and a third run at night where it’s transformed into a party boat (anticipating more mature patronage) where refreshments are served.

For this purpose the boat is equipped with a modern commercial kitchen, fully prepared to accommodate a pirate ship filled with hungry paying tourists.