Hackberry Hollow

You heard me. *clackity clackity clack*

Alright. Now that I got that out of the way, here’s what we’ve been up to….

Unorthodox Dependencies

First off. Adam has been breaking servers, and he is very proud of this fact. (For those of you who are taking classes at The Animation Academy’s Online Program, don’t worry. Adam is breaking a new server that hasn’t starting serving up classes just yet.) If it has SSH, he can break it. If it has a more powerful CPU he can break it even faster.

It’s always fun when you discover that a program like CVLC (a command line version of VLC) won’t run on a headless server because it still needs X11 to run (yay bugs!). And of course the easiest way to install X11 is to install Gnome. Meaning that the dependencies for CVLC currently includes Gnome, Libre Office, The Ubuntu One Music Store, and Solitaire (among others). As soon as that bug is fixed all of those dependencies are gone.

Ah, the things Adam has to go through just to make awesome web apps.

Character Designs!

So yeah, about that character design up there. Both Adam and myself, in addition to developing software, are also currently taking the online classes as well. In order to make time to get our assignments done, we’ve been holding a draw-a-thon every day for 90 minutes. And of course the characters we are designing for our assignments are for Hackberry Hollow.

For those who have been keeping up with the history of this project, character design has historically been the hardest thing for me to do (animal characters anyway), and is why I started taking classes at The Animation Academy in the first place. Well, this past week I think I had a break through. For the first time I’ve created a design for Preston (the main character) that I actually like. And I like it quite a lot.

I present to you the first ever character to appear on the Hackberry Hollow Blog stoned (that we know of). Okay, the real reason why he’s smiling like that is because I needed to push the expression to see if the design would work. Preston never smiles like that in the story, and I’ll be posting some action/attitude poses later that gives a better idea about what the character is like.

We are all very excited about getting some headway in the character designs, and I’m starting to feel like we are a lot closer to getting this comic released than before.

Speaking of which….

Writing Progress

We are still working on writing the story (story first after all). We got another pair of fresh eyes with acting experience to read over the script to add characterization to the dialog (and to provide all manner of feedback on the story). Even though we are killing two birds with one stone by taking classes and designing characters for the comic, our primary focus is still on getting the script done. But for the next couple of months because of how our schedule is working out, you’ll probably be seeing more character designs being done than chapters.