We interrupt this period of apparent inactivity for a brief news flash. Due to a freak set of circumstances lining up in exactly the right kind of way, I’m on board for the annual NaNoRenO event. Over the month of March, myself and a good few other equally deluded hopefuls will be working to finish our short game projects from inception to completion before April makes fools of us all.
The goal of this exercise is to create something new from scratch, so I dug around in the to-do pile to find an idea that could be realised fairly quickly and had the potential for a lot of fairly flat-colour backgrounds. And when it’s sink or swim time, the answer kind of speaks for itself.
So we’re left with the adventures of alternative fin-swisher Vella and her laconic pufferfish buddy, Bub. The exact fashion of their adventures are yet to be determined (it’s a pretty recent entry to the to-do pile) but rest assured they’ll involve the usual japery and flim-flammery we like around these parts. There may even be an actual joke in there (deadline permitting). It’ll be using the latest version of the CHLOE Engine I’d been developing for HellBounders, so will be playable in your browser alongside the usual downloadable versions.
As this kind of thing was exactly the reason this place was started up to begin with, I’ll be keeping a development diary of sorts on the blog between regular updates, to give some idea of how things are progressing and to serve as a fun reminder for the future when I look back fondly and think to myself “Jesus Halibut Christ, how did I think finishing this inside a month was a thing that was ever going to happen”.
Here’s the first piece of art for the project so far. Production proper isn’t allowed to start until tomorrow, but rough sketches and the like are fair game, so I knocked up a couple to get some idea of the protagonists and try out a colour scheme. Everything’s subject to change, but here’s how they stand at the moment, in the dog-rough initial pencils stage.
Things should start moving along properly tomorrow, I’ll try to keep you posted as and when there’s something worth showing. There may be a work-in-progress demo somewhere along the way, too.
Apologies for the delays in updating the rest of this place lately, normal review services will resume shortly. Art duties will be fairly heavily weighted towards Go Fish for the moment, but I’ll try to get a new strip up in some free time. Free time, heh, that’s gonna happen.
