Hackberry Hollow

While writing the outline for Hackberry Hollow we’ve been thinking a lot about how the magic system will look. You’ve probably heard the saying, “Show, don’t tell.” We’ve been very careful to make sure we show what happens in the story instead of having characters (or a narrator, which we don’t have) telling you what’s going on. We wanted to do the same for our magic system as well. Instead of explaining how it works we hope that the visual design of the magic system will show it, so the audience can figure it out on their own and have enjoyment in discovering what everything means.

Glen and I made a wager over who would get to post their stuff to the blog this week. I’ll leave the outcome as a thought experiment for our readers.

When Glen and I talked this morning about what we wanted to post on the blog we thought it would be fun to show an update of what the pirate ship looks like so far.

As mentioned last week there is a lot of work still to be done inside, but it is over 90% complete. Since we’re going to hold off on the tour, we thought we’d share the next best thing. The following are some sketches that Glen sent me of various components of the ship, in this case the lights.

Blarg (that’s zombie for “good afternoon“). Unghh nuuuuuh arroughn (“as part of our double post for today”) braiiins, (“comma”) groooahh uunngh hugnff (“here’s some more vehicle concept art”).

I’m no expert but I think there may be a discrepancy between the firing rate of those two weapons.

We’ve shown Preston’s truck twice on the blog so far, and we haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out exactly what his truck looks like until recently. So here’s the current design for Preston’s truck in its full redneck glory.

Well, I don’t know about you guys but I figure I’ve let Glen and Adam have all the fun for long enough. So, here it is! What we have here is a nice bit of concept work of what we think that a limestone cave that is located near Preston’s cabin will look like.

Here’s some more concept art from where Preston lives. Earlier we spent some time talking about the first chapter of the comic and trying to solve some of the minor issues regarding how we introduced Derek the raccoon. We found a solution, and because of that we had to change the location and time of day that Derek and Preston will be introduced. So here’s a quick piece of environmental concept art for this significantly revised scene.

Here’s a couple of really quick concept art paintings. We’ve been working on what the landscapes will look like where Preston lives. We’ve decided to have the climate and topographical features be similar to the coastal areas of Northern Washington and Canada (with the requirement that the coastline has limestone rock formations).

We have most of the set pieces in the works for Chapter 1 of the comic, but the other big task—and by big I mean huge, gargantuan, colossal, and monumental—is the character design. Part of what makes this part of the process such a big deal for us is that 1) we’ve never had to create so many character designs in one project before, 2) they’re all animals, which is another first for us, and 3) about half of all the characters that are in the comic will be shown in the first chapter, so at the very least we need to have all of those designs finalized by then, and we’d also like to have the rest of the character designs figured out by then as well.

Given that, you are going to be seeing a lot of critters and characters in the future. The rest of this post will include a couple of pages full of sketches showing the very beginnings of my design process for Derek: Preston’s pet undead raccoon that he taxidermied up to look less undead.