<\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nI’m sometimes hard on Garry’s Mod and occasionally express frustration at its capricious tools, but it really is indispensable for making a comic with the Source engine. Most of the work I do is is set in stone before I even conceive of the joke. I can only snatch moments from the game and try to bend them into a shape that will serve my purposes. The characters, the sets, the props, the expressions, and the lighting are all handed to me by the game. This is not a complaint. It’s a unique sort of challenge and I seem to have carved out some kind of niche in in doing it. <\/p>\n
But Garry’s Mod lets you take art assets from Portal, Team Fortress, Counter Strike, or any of the Half-Life 2 libraries and put them into a scene together. It lets me make jokes that simply would not be possible when working with the in-game scenery. There was a special on Steam a few weeks ago where you could get Team Fortress for $25 and they threw in Garry’s Mod for free, although I viewed the transaction the other way around. <\/p>\n
98% of the stuff made with Garry’s Mod is screenshots of Alyx having sex (through her clothes) with various implausible partners offered by the ragdoll library. But in capable hands Garry’s Mod is a potent tool that can generate weapons-grade funny. Christopher Livingston used it to create Concerned<\/a>, a webcomic that would be in a position of dominance on my reading list if it was still ongoing. It starts off<\/a> as a “oh isn’t that nice” sort of gag strip, but a few strips in Livingston strikes gold and then spends 200+ strips mining the concept for hilarity. Like DMotR<\/a>, it ended when it needed to, and was likely better for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These Left 4 Dead comics are fun to make. I’m sometimes hard on Garry’s Mod and occasionally express frustration at its capricious tools, but it really is indispensable for making a comic with the Source engine. Most of the work I do is is set in stone before I even conceive of the joke. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[525,166],"class_list":["post-2873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column","tag-stolen-pixels","tag-left-4-dead"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}