We’re also doing a fun little project on the side: a short promotional companion comic with EvilKris, the artist for Rebuild 2. It’s a day-in-the-life story of a trade deal gone wrong, using characters from Rebuild 3 and Kris’s grungy horror art style (best known from his Insanity series – he’s working on a third one!).

The comic will be posted online, and I may give out printed copies if I show the game at PAX Prime this year. I’m happy to be working with Kris again; his corrupt environments and gruesome corpses delight me… in a stomach-turning kind of way.

Panels from EvilKris’s in-progress comic:

Writing this game has been more stressful than I’d expected, so I’m super grateful to all the fans, Kickstarter backers, and to the alpha testers on the forums for your help and support. You guys are the greatest! I’m making this game for you. :)

I’ll leave you with an alpha teaser from Espen of No Studio, featuring the Rebuild 3 music:

A couple weeks ago I posted looking-for-artist requests on Newgrounds, DeviantArt, TIGSource and FlashGameLicense, and got a couple dozen responses. I was kind of expecting more, seeing as it was a paid contract to work on the sequel to a popular game, and I was surprised at how many of the responders hadn’t even looked at the original game. I did however get a few very exciting responses from people who had played the game and were – bonus – great artists.

I chose EvilKris, creator of the Insanity and Insanity 2 point and click horror games. He works with 3D models and layers of texture to produce some truly dark, creepy images, far more realistic and disturbing than my clean and cutesy vector art from the first game.

To start with he’s been working on characters and equipment to replace the old faceless stick figures, so you can really see the fear in your scavenger’s eyes as you equip her with a pistol and send her off alone to desperately scrounge for food at an Allmart teeming with the living dead.

Next will be the gory stuff for the zombie attack sequence, which I’ve decided is not going to be a minigame after all. I’m going to spend more time instead expanding the strategic game, adding plot and NPCs, equipment resources, new buildings and new endings. I hope the sequel will have more replayability, but one thing is for certain: it’s going to have a more a darker more engrossing (and also more gross) visual style, which will fit better with the storyline.

In other news, I recently did an email interview with Ethan Moses of HorribleNight.com where I talked a little about my inspiration for the game and the relative merits of zombies vs hive-minded insect aliens.