Staying true to our behind the scenes roots, we have decided to start a little blog to go over all the ins and outs of what’s happening at the burrow! Recently we have launched our first indie comic book! This was a very exciting project for us. There was lots to learn but we are quite pleased with how it turned out. 

While our game “The Lost Gardens” is currently on hold, we thought of producing an indie comic that begins to tell the story of how the events of the game came to be. By building out the world’s characters, locations, and themes would be a fun way to keep the project and story alive. Making this comic was a really fun experience, and has given us a chance to really dig our heels into the lore of the world. This is something I have wanted to do since we first broke ground on the game, but never really had a chance. There are many aspects of the world I wanted to explain but never really had the time to do. Now that we have the talented James Babineau on the team, we have a great opportunity to flesh out our universe in a way simply not possible in the past, both cannoticly, and visually. Bringing the project closer to our original vision. I simply cannot wait for issue two’s release in the next few weeks, where we explore the more sinister side of the world, and the fate of Shawn (read issue one to see what happened to Shawn).

As it currently stands, our story arc is at about 20 issues, however James informs me this simply is not enough for what he has in mind for the story and characters. So fear not, there is to be lots of content coming your way in months to come! Our plan for this comic series is to release as close to monthly as possible, but with the current global crisis hiccups, speed bumps are bound to occur. We truly hope you enjoy the story of The Lost Gardens, and can’t wait to bring you more issues! 

  Moving forward with the blog posts, I plan to go over a number of topics involving indie comic production, things I wish I knew, things to avoid, sneak peaks for the next issue, etc. I hope this will prove useful to any indie comic creators to avoid the mistakes and pitfalls I found along the way, or anyone just curious about what goes into comic creation. I can say that it is a totally different world than what I expected from the art we created for our game development. I am confident I will find many MANY more things to avoid along the way! Also if there are specific questions you might have never hesitate to reach out we’re always kicking around somewhere!

Some additional exciting news: we are planning on getting back to development of “The Lost Gardens” game in the new year. I have a new direction and I want the game to go in a way that captures my original intent for it, and accounts for everything we learned from our early access version. There’s lots of things I want to change to create a better experience in the battle against, Fear. We will of course, continue to fill you in on the development updates! I have some really fun plans and ideas for a new direction for the project: full 3D, advanced AI, deep story arcs, all that good stuff. We have even started a small prototype for it testing out how some of the 2D shader effects will work in a 3D environment (They do hazah!), as well as the beginning of player controller mechanics, simple animation states, navigation, shooting stuff, and the beginnings of ledge grabbing / wall jumping. 

That’s about all I got for this week, Thanks for reading and stay safe!

 

-Scott Humes