Hackberry Hollow

This past Friday we had yet another exhilarating writing session for the comic. That’s right. Adam came up with a really neat idea. Previously the plan has been to only have glowing red or green eyes to differentiate between ghouls and undead. Now, what if these creatures had a visible but ghostly muscle structure as well? Not only would that look wicked sick, but it would help illustrate how the magic system works. But most importantly it worked like magical caulking to help us fix a potentially big plot hole in the story.

One of the design ghoals [sic] for our ghouls [hyuk hyuk] was to somehow show how the magic system works without having to explain it. The characters in the story do some very clever things within the restrictions of the magic system, and we want it to be believable and very rewarding for the audience to read as they share in the character’s cleverness. To do that, we believe that the audience should be able to figure out how the magic system works on their own without hearing scads of exposition by a secondary character explaining what the heck just happened—just like in anime. ^_^

Anyway. Enough pontification. Here’s a few images showing how the new undead and ghouls may look like in the dark. Spooky!

In the sunlight they’ll still look like the skeletons we’ve shown previously with the squirrel on the Hackberry Hollow sign and the ghoul fighters in the arena. The ghostly muscles will be very faint, and you’ll only be able to see it in extremely low lighting.

For kicks and giggles I also painted what a ghoul could look like in a pitch black environment. Spookier!

Huh. I totally used an emoticon in the second paragraph of this blog post, but somehow by writing this at 4 a.m. I don’t feel the least bit ashamed about it. Adam on the other hand may kill me when he wakes up.