Brandon Sheffield

• 1. Introduction

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  Brandon Sheffield directs video games, draws a webcomic, and hosts a podcast, and one of his own games was once described as "cyberpunk volleyball." That single phrase hints at a career built from small, specific projects. He co-hosts the Insert Credit Show with Frank Cifaldi and Alex Jaffe, and his comic strips began as a way of working through a breakup. What has Sheffield actually built at his studio, and how did a private heartbreak turn into strips that strangers recognized as their own?

• 2. Necrosoft Games

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  In February 2015, Sheffield created Gunsport for the PlayStation Vita. It was part of a run of games he made for Necrosoft on PlayStation Mobile, before that service was discontinued in September 2015.

  For the racing game Oh Deer!, Sheffield teamed up with composer Motohiro Kawashima, someone he met while visiting Yuzo Koshiro at Ancient Corp. Inspired by Outrun 2, the game's core mechanics were programmed by Decinoge rather than Sheffield himself.

  Sheffield also held editorial roles, serving as editor-in-chief of Game Developer Magazine and senior contributing editor at Gamasutra. Those bylines put Sheffield inside the same press that would later cover the games he was directing himself.

• 3. No Girlfriend Comics

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  In 2014, Sheffield broke up with his girlfriend and started jotting brief notes about his new solo routines. Two examples stuck out: the awkwardness of leaving the house without a girlfriend, and the depressing feeling of going to bed alone.

  Sheffield assumed these feelings were unique to him, but his reactions and routines closely matched what others experienced after a breakup. He reached out to illustrator Dami Lee, and the two turned his notes into comic strips. That collaboration became No Girlfriend Comics, which ran on Tapastic from August to December 2014.

  Sheffield believes Lee "added bits of herself here and there," which he says made the webcomic more relatable. The series ran to twenty individual strips, even though fans wanted it to keep going. Lee explained her reasoning this way: "it felt right to end it at 20 comics instead of continuing the series; it represented a passing phase that everyone goes through at some point. The comic came to its natural end, just like a lot of relationships."

  In 2016, Sheffield and Lee worked together again, syndicating a new strip called Hot Comics for Cool People in SF Weekly.