Week 291! (Page 428 Finished) (Patreon)

THIS MARKS PAYMENT FOR THE WEEK OF 3/1-3/7.

Phew, okay, well, this sucks that it's a month late again, but it's not exactly the most... ideal and relaxing of times in general, I guess. Regardless, here's page 428 finally finished. I waffled on whether to put it up for the public today or next week, and ultimately I decided to just do it next week so you all can have it to yourselves for a few days.

I'm not sure when I wrote this page way back when if I was just dismissive about the fact I put another comic page outside the school, forcing myself to draw all those bricks and windows and everything again, like it was a future-me problem, but at least it was an environment I had a 3D map for already from the prior Bruce arc. I also hope I can avoid needing to show people exiting the school building for a long time, as I've had to do it enough times now that I'm not entirely sure I could do so in a way that would be unique anymore.

I guess the most prominent thing in the page is the video game I kind of had to invent on the fly, since I had apparently never actually come up with anything between writing the script and needing to do this page. Had to also simultaneously decide on what kind of games Campy would like to play, and decided on old-school first-person shooter type stuff. It's a genre I've been focusing on a lot in the past half-year or so, having gone back to stuff like Doom 1 and 2 and Blood, as well as having played Doom 2016 last year and Dusk this year. Think it makes sense Campy would be into those types of games since he also inherited my taste for metal music. 

So there's a fair amount of references here with the game Connor bought for Campy. The cover art is a reference to the famous original Doom cover art with Doomguy standing on top of a hill and shooting demons below him. The main character is inspired by both Caleb from Blood and Duskdude from, uh, Dusk. The creatures are just generic moldy-green-looking bloody zombie creatures I created, moreso to avoid needing to invent a bunch of different looking enemies just for box art, although they're slightly inspired by Fox Kale's inky demon fox look he gets sometimes. The little logo in the corner is a parody of the id Software logo, replaced with a company called 'ego' instead.

 The other company on the back of the box in the last panel says "Carmero Design", combining John Carmack's and John Romero's last names together. And finally, the name of the game itself, "Evenfall", is a bit of a weird and person reference to a Pathfinder campaign I've been a part of for a very long time. One group of characters founded a town at the end of their story called Evenfall, because you'd get there when evening fell coming from either of two big cities it was between. When evening falls, it's also called dusk, which amused me after realizing it at the time that we missed the opportunity to call the town Dusk and have it be the cursed town from the game of the same name. So it's 50% a reference to the game Dusk and 50% a reference to my own dumb little in-joke.