SteveSmall WarrenSmallThe concept of Worst Summer Ever was originally meant to be a video game project many years ago, kind of a cross between Zombies Ate My Neighbors and the Grand Theft Auto series, or at least the later mission-based ones.  I had a lead programmer and another programmer on board, I was doing all the concept art, story, level design and scripting, and there were a couple other people whose duties (heh, doody) I don’t recall anymore.  We had about 3 meetings but ran into 2 issues; my lead programmer wanted to make a first-person game and I very much did not and once it got to be more than 4-5 guys sitting around with notepads and beer no one wanted to do work.  I did a lot of character sketches, scripted out the first draft for every cut scene in chapter 1, and make a tentative list of the first 25 levels/missions.

WSEPreviewIt quickly fell apart, as you might suspect from above.  With myself and the programmers in a stalemate and no one having a lot of time or desire to actually do the work they’d promised, there wasn’t much choice.  It began collecting dust until I was thinking of how to spin it into a web comic.  By that time Kyle and Josh had already been on hiatus for a couple years and I was itching to get back into it so I spent some time reworking the first chapter cut scene scripts into a comic book page and panel breakdown.  I did find someone initially interested in drawing it but the style didn’t quite mesh and it was very difficult to clean up the artwork to add the coloring.  Again it sat collecting dust for a while.

ComingSoonAs my cousin Dan got older we began to talk more about him trying to flex his artistic muscles on a project so I pitched WSE to him and we tried it out.  He was into it for quite a while, though we had a couple of short hiatuses initially.  We got through the first 50 pages and then things just kind of stopped for a while as we each dealt with our own things going on in our personal lives.  But as we fast forward a couple years later, Dan is still interested in getting back into full swing with the project as he gains a little more footing with where he’s at in life.  More pages will be coming, but the update schedule will likely just be whenever I get them until such a time that he’s ready to actually establish a schedule and get it all going again.