SIGNUP: introduce your character and why they have what it takes to be recruited, and provide some additional information outside of the comic.

RESTRICTION: exactly 4 panels of equal size, at least one detailed full body image of the character, and place a small black square somewhere on the second panel.

name: pusher
pronouns: she/her, it/its
least favourite thing ever: straight paths

PLACEMENT: 2nd out of 40

i’m really proud of pusher's concept, both in format and goal. i rushed the signup even though there was a lot of time to sign up because i was worried someone else would use my idea for panels “of equal size” (nobody did), so the fourth panel was unintentionally really easy.

CHALLENGE 1: clean the sergeant’s incredibly dirty quarters with only a toothbrush. don’t damage the shelves, make sure to unclog the bathroom sink, and don’t open his desk drawers.

RESTRICTION: 2 panels of any size.

PLACEMENT: 21st out of 39

this was my first chance to reinterpret challenge instructions as sokoban mechanics, and i think a simple one like this to start worked well. i included the second paragraph to either preemptively prevent or encourage penalization.

CHALLENGE 2: defeat another cadet (pusher faces the periwinkle king).

RESTRICTION: 3 rectangular panels of equal shape and size.

PLACEMENT: 15th out of 34

the periwinkle king is an excellent counterpart to pusher - when fuzzy saw my idea, she worried that tpk might be treading on pusher’s area, but i’m glad she went with her because the two can interact on the grid so interestingly. i’m glad the sarge paired the two together for this challenge, it naturally set up their rivalry for the rest of the camp, and they were the enemy duo that lasted the longest by a wide margin.
i came up with the idea for this entry super quickly, but it was a struggle creating a situation that a) was possible to happen, and b) didn’t make the king seem stupid for letting it happen. unfortunately, i didn’t succeed at b).

CHALLENGE 3: complete an obstacle course with 5 legs - 1) mud pit crawl, 2) rock climbing wall, 3) rope swing, 4) hurdles, 5) tightrope walk

RESTRICTION: 5-6 panels of any size. each leg must occupy at least one unique panel each.

PLACEMENT: 10th out of 30

this entry makes pusher’s desire to make things as hard as possible explicit, in a way which happens to help someone else. it also introduces several new mechanics which were reused in future entries; my favourite is the climbing walls!
amelia bedelia was one of my favourite children’s books and i had wanted to put her in an object camp or show for a while, so i was really happy when scar signed up as her (meaning i could use her in entries without having to play her). i wanted to make sure that even though pusher was the one pushing around and helping her, amelia bedelia was still helping with most of the legs. i could have set up a pattern using a climbing wall to make her presence 100% necessary for pusher, but she at least got to make the puzzle solvable through reinterpreting the instructions.

CHALLENGE 4: bury the sergeant’s grandma, honouring her memory, in at least a 6 ft hole.

RESTRICTION: 1 panel with no words (but a brief caption is allowed).

PLACEMENT: 5th out of 25

the sarge said my last entry was “A LOT”, so i made this one more a lot out of spite. this is probably my favourite joke i did in a pusher entry, and it’s partially because every mini-joke and little detail is adding to the actual joke. i had a lot of fun showing off every still-in competitor, and i tried to give everyone an interesting mechanic or fitting scenario (although i specifically avoided anything which might take explaining.)

CHALLENGE 5: revive the sergeant after he falls unconscious.

RESTRICTION: however many panels it takes!

PLACEMENT: 2nd out of 20

this joke is also good, although the entry/comic itself is just ok. last entry, i put bad egg next to pusher because i couldn’t think of a mechanic for her and i imagined that she was pusher’s companion for the entry, so i wanted to do that but for real here.
the rush hour puzzles were taken from the official website.

for making it to the final 15, pusher has upgraded from a cadet to a private!
she gets a lovely portrait to commemorate.

CHALLENGE 6: using a bolt-action rifle, hit the bullseye on your target, standing 100 ft away.

RESTRICTION: 4 square panels of equal size.

PLACEMENT: 9th out of 16

introducing puller! she’s one of my favourite camp characters, but i feel like a lot of her character is in my head. she’s apparently aware of pusher’s exploits, which makes it seem like she’s been watching it for a while, and she wants to defeat pusher, but pusher wants to be defeated, so there’s the question of how much puller dislikes pusher and how much she’s trying to give pusher what she wants. this was also my chance to explain why pusher doesn’t consider an impossible problem a defeat, and it slots in nicely with puller - after the explanation, she never makes a puzzle impossible, because it wouldn’t be a satisfying conclusion.
i really wanted to have puller make the puzzle impossible and then move next to pusher to gloat. however, she actually can’t make a puzzle impossible in a way that doesn’t also cut her off from pusher (assuming no extra mechanics), which is good metaphor. see if you can figure out why!
pusher was called out during results for the entry having two solutions, but wasn’t penalized for it. i did want there to be two solutions, but it was more obvious/easier than intended.
i wanted to include jl leafy properly at least once, even though she was eliminated two rounds ago, but she rejoined this round. foreshadowing???

CHALLENGE 7: "DROP AND GIVE ME 20!"

RESTRICTION: 20 panels of any size, no repeat panels.

PLACEMENT: 4th out of 13

the sarge never specifically said “pushups”, but i thought the pun was too good to pass up. this is my favourite entry in terms of puzzle design - 20 individual puzzles where one of your movement options is a resource shared across all of them is sooo good, and there’s a lot of little jokes i like. the idea of shadow variants of puzzles is good and i’m glad i got to use it at least once.
the fact that puller has speech balloons implies that the reason pusher doesn’t have speech balloons is because she doesn’t have a mouth?

CHALLENGE 8: face and overcome your worst enemy, the thing you listed as your least favourite thing - for pusher, only walk through straight paths.

RESTRICTION: 4-8 panels of any size.

this entry was posted one image at a time, in between the other entries, using them as pacing/scene setting. i’m putting big spaces here to replicate that.

this mechanic sucks.

these mechanics also suck. pusher is really grasping at straws!

the final 10 was really strong. it was fun giving the contestants specific foods.

this was posted just after the periwinkle king’s entry, where she divorced her husband, so it works well that she’s pissy here. i like that pusher is annoying and unreasonable but we haven’t really seen how other people react to it, and this challenge was great for me to show that other people do in fact find it unreasonable and annoying.

PLACEMENT: 1st out of 10

pusher’s grid perspective is recontextualized as its perspective on the world. the king being the one to snap her out of it is great - they’re rivals, but tpk’s entries are almost entirely regular comic panels, so she's literally forcing pusher to see things her way without reinterpreting everything to be as difficult as possible. i felt like i was taking a big risk with the final panel, and i’m glad people liked it, since it was probably my favourite entry overall.
i was supposed to get second, but the first placer was penalized for submitting late.

CHALLENGE 9: capture the flag. the flag is on top of a 3 story watchtower. pusher is on the defenders’ team, who must prevent the attackers from getting to the flag by immobilizing them.

RESTRICTION: 6 rectangular panels of equal size and orientation. additional penalty for pusher: no pushing.

PLACEMENT: 8th out of 8

last challenge, pusher annoyed the sarge when she got first, so she got a penalty for this challenge.
i made the defending team yellow because it was the only colour not already a part of any contestant’s design, and made the attacking team purple because it’s opposite... forgetting that the defenders and attackers were already assigned blue and orange. whoops!
this was my first time being up for elimination, and i definitely deserved it - the entry was overly complicated, relied on multiple assumptions to be solvable, and required you to keep three moving parts in mind at the same time for each puzzle. still, i liked the four character-specific matchups.
i think the fogbank section was a really good puzzle, and it’s a good example of how many extra events you can insert into a single panel - there are times tooway and pusher have to go face to face with fogbank to block him, or just barely cut him off. i’m also happy that pusher got to use her new perspective switch skill to capture jl leafy, who’s been ignoring the grid this whole time.

CHALLENGE 10: it’s war! defend the camp from the cult of pigs.

RESTRICTION: maximum 8 panels of any size.

PLACEMENT: 3rd out of 7

the cult of pigs (eliminated first) coming back was so awesome. their whole bit was that they hated rules and wanted to break them at all cost, which was a good dichotomy to the camp and pusher. i liked her lying.

CHALLENGE 11: it’s a stealth mission! infiltrate the cult of pigs’ base without making a sound and retrieve their secret plans (which should be stored in the desk drawer of the general’s private quarters). grab some food if possible.

RESTRICTION: 6 or less panels.

PLACEMENT: 1st out of 6

this entry is funny. i like that the pigs don’t actually get caught in a loop - at worst, they’d go two puzzles in before seeing the remains of the explosion at the safe.

CHALLENGE 12: the cult of pigs are about to flank us on either side. develop a plan to defeat them, once and for all.

RESTRICTION: 4-8 panels of any size.

PLACEMENT: unknown (but not 1st) out of 5.

i really struggled with this challenge and this entry was born out of that frustration(?). it was intended to be a look into my thought process when making an entry, and it wasn’t perfect at that but it worked well. i also think it’s fun that pusher flounders when getting the opportunity to custom-make a puzzle. after all, if she makes it, she can solve it, and if she knows she can solve it, it can’t be that interesting to her.

CHALLENGE 13 (FINAL): in order to defeat the cult of pigs, follow the winning plan from last round: do absolutely nothing.

RESTRICTION: 4 panels of equal squares.

PLACEMENT: tied with everyone!

almost nobody knew what to do with the final challenge, so i suggested working together. we agreed to all recreate the webcomic april fools joke (with everyone helping with the final idea), creating a chain of our contestants pranking each other. it ended up working, impressing the sarge so much that there were no eliminations for two rounds, and the finale had 5 people instead of the planned 3!

FINALE

no entry required, but i wanted to make something before the winner was revealed.

this was rushed in the couple of hours before the final results, and was posted just before the winner was revealed. i’m really glad i got to use the five in one last puzzle, and it’s a pretty good last puzzle - there are a couple of ambiguous points but none that break the puzzle, and even though it wasn’t tested, it’s perfectly possible!
i’m also happy about all the mechanics i got to have that i didn’t use: tooway’s puzzle mechanic (which he introduced in one of my favourite entries), the periwinkle king’s rapier and having chess pieces on climbing walls, and i finally gave something unique to satomi-c3 (well, satomi helped). it’s funny that it’s the defenderman cracked tiles. maybe in challenge 5, they were never actually defenderman tiles, and we were supposed to use c3…
you also have to assume that puller will be benevolent here, and either not block off the outside or be convinced into undoing the block... and i think, after challenge 7, she could be convinced in that way, which is cute.

PLACEMENT: with 5 out of 15 of the votes from the other privates and the sarge, and 9 votes after she tied for first with tooway... 1st out of the final 5!!!!

for winning cheesy’s comic camp and becoming the commander, pusher is given a new portrait.

UNUSED ENTRY STUFF:

i made this image after challenge 6 to wrap things up in case i got eliminated (and updated it slightly over time). i thought i was going to be eliminated almost every round, which made this very necessary in my head, but i guess it wasn’t!
i thought it would be really funny to imply some awful force was about to arrive, with no input from the sarge. that ended up happening during the cult of pigs arc, where contestants weren’t allowed to speak before or after being eliminated, so this only could’ve been used before then... which makes me a bit sad i didn’t get eliminated, because i think pusher’s big moment was done challenge 8. at the same time, every challenge past 8 let pusher apply the lesson she learned there, so maybe it was important that she wasn’t eliminated instantly.

alternate entry for challenge 10 that i submitted in case i didn’t come up with anything else. i didn’t get to use/characterize the pigs much in my actual entries, so i’m glad this exists.

alternate plan for challenge 13 that i disliked, which i was going to use if i couldn’t think of anything else.

if we ever had a second challenge with unlimited panels, i wanted to tryhard a huge 30 page (or something) entry with a lot of ideas. here’s everything that was drawn as a test:

OTHER ASSORTED ART

the periwinkle king is so cool to me; she and pusher make really good rivals. this is also where i realized i could put pusher in different outfits. i didn’t end up doing that very much, which i’m sad about.

puller’s conception, before challenge 5

puller is an inversion of pusher, which is why she has a mouth (but no eyes) and speaks in allcaps.

pusher + puller combination

a few people drew their “version” of other competitors. some of the connections here are kinda weak.

while i was having trouble thinking of an idea for challenge 13

final 5 outfits

what i imagine pusher is wearing

after her win. this camp lasted so short that all the art i did for it had the same colour background.

this doc doesn’t have my full thoughts on the camp - i really liked so many of the other competitor’s entries and characters, and i wish i got to do more with basically everyone. oh well! i’m happy about what i was able to do.