[TRENCHES] Tuesday, August 27, 2013 - Riches
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Riches
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/riches
Testing a non-game
AnonymousI was a linguistic QA tester for 2 years, testing localized versions of games from triple A to shovelware. Long hours, bad pay, but on the whole it was a blast.
There was this one project, though, that will take quite a lot of therapy to forget. Coming into the office in the morning, looking at the faces of the team, you’d know if it was back again and you’d be in for a long day.
It was one of those ‘take care of a cute small animal’ games, featuring a panda. It started out with a big logo of a nature organization, but that disappeared after a few builds. Probably someone at the organization saw the product and decided wisely to drop it like a brick.
Apparently, you could make the panda do tricks, but you were lucky if after an hour of coaxing it, it would simply fall over.
I remember one of the bugs I wrote:
1) Start game
2) Bring panda to main location
3) Wait for [random thing] to happen, this might take up to 30 minutes.
4) There is a spelling error in the message that gets triggered.When the developer asked for our feedback about the project, all we could say was: this is not a game.
I don’t think it ever got released.
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Edit: Also, story reminded me of this:
So, Cora's dad has a price. So much for that legacy I was talking about in the earlier strips.
You just love to be terrifyingly vague, don't you?
Aus14 Omeganaut - Nef
Do we know who? It doesn't look like any of the PA or PvP guys.
But the facial expressions are very very different. Noticed that immediately.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
Meanwhile, Cora goes to her dad all prepared to justify the company she's employed by making a mockery of his life's work after she convinced him over his best judgment to sell the rights...only to discover that all of his objections and outrage have been forgotten in a bout of check-induced amnesia. So much for the comic's only "likable" character, I guess.
Between the art and Anders' sudden reversal this feels more like a guest comic parody of Trenches.
Obviously this is Khoo's first foray into drawing webcomics.
Webkhoomics.
Good to see that the artist herself announced that she was leaving, but I don't want to have to follow everyone in the world in the off chance there will be a change to something I'm interested in.
Yes, no disrespect intended to the new artist, but the change is jarring and I don't feel its for the better currently. Maybe I'll warm up to it over the next few weeks but for right now, not digging it.
The style looks awfully familiar. Like, maybe someone who's done some television animation. Any chance of letting us know who it actually is?
The eyes, yes. However, Kate Beaton's mouths don't really move around the face like that. Still can't place who does that though.
It'll start a little shaky but in six months with be the most influential webcomic about playtesting ON THE PLANET!
Yeah, my first thought was that this was some kind of joke strip, either a guest comic or some kind of hazy dream Cora was having that explained the new art and the seemingly quickly shifted moral stance of her father.
And speaking of the art, Cora's depiction in this strip is bothering me to no end. Why is there a border on the bottom side of her hair but not the top? Why are her expressions suddenly more comical than any we've seen thus far on even the sillier characters in the story? Why is there no shading? Ahhhhhhhh!!!!!
Steam: adamjnet
Apparently the difference between a female and male torso is just a curved line across the sternum. Cora has always been drawn that way. Is this a trick which has been played on me in drawings before? It's not anything but a line!
Also, the last two pages don't have the copyright notice that has been on all the other pages. That seems strange but notable.
My initial thought was Gabe was drawing it; although it looks different than PA, he's pretty flexible in style, and he's made it very clear over the last couple of years on PA that he prefers drawing in an overly silly children's style, which is how I would describe today's page. The ultra simple background certainly reminds me of Gabe's current PA work.
I miss Cube already
Ah, I had probably read he drew from "August to September" but missed it was August 2011 to September 2012. He also started drawing good backgrounds on September 1st, 2011, but gave up after a few pages.
There's a possibility of it being Kurtz coming back to do it again, though if that were the case Khoo is just being weird for no reason. Possible, but I put it in the doubtful category.
Mike seems like a good suggestion. There's something really familiar about the facial expressions (especially in panel 2). I'm punching my ballot for Mike.
A artist change is certainly a thing that can happen but just a quiet swap with no announcement beforehand is kinda crazy, especially when the new art is sadly inferior
I don't agree with the assertion earlier that Trenches is the "comic nobody wants to do" but it's always seemed like the creators don't make it a priority to devote any time/attention to supporting it besides just making the comics and posting them (which is the main thing, of course). They never do timely news posts about it. The "season" comes to an end without warning and people get confused - in the case of season two, leading them to tack on extra comics to transition the plotlines less abruptly. The artist changes (twice) with no announcement. The New Readers page on the Trenches site had no content for...a year or more?...after launch, and now the info on it is kind of out of date.