doodlemancy

one of the biggest challenges of my whole project has been learning to draw this guy. he's so fuckin specific, and he's made up of so many things that were difficult for me for a long time. i always lacked confidence drawing more masculine characters. pretty girls and bishounen are my comfort zone, and i'm better at drawing big fun goofy expressions than serious or subtle ones. so. Sykes is this very serious little guy, who is certainly not 100% manbeef but definitely way further to the masculine end of the scale. and he has short hair. which was a challenge for me for a looooong time bc i could never figure out the shape of the head with short hair, i wasn't good at placing the hairline correctly, etc. thank you 3D models for my fucking LIFE learning to get better at this over the past few years lol. and also the habit i've developed of taking 50234908302 screenshots a week of whatever anime i'm watching and setting aside anything that makes me go "oh THAT'S how the pros would handle that kind of shape at that angle" etc.

if you dig in his Toyhouse Gallery, you can see some struggle in how i've learned to depict him (and all of them, lol). drawing your own characters is so hard because there's no reference material of them!! you have to forge the reference material yourself, and you have to keep melting it down and re-forging it until you're happy with it. a lot of the work with Sykes in particular has just been finding other characters in media that remind me of him somehow and staring really hard at them.

some major design influences:

(i swear Scar and Zuko aren't both on there for the most obvious fucking reason i promise)

• Superman-- that little stray hair in the front is something i've been putting on Sykes forever because. it's cute and fun. i imprinted on the Fleischer Superman cartoons as a child and when i think of a Heroic Man he's gotta have a little Superman curl ok!! his recent cute anime depiction in My Adventures With Superman also happens to have a similar hairline and i watched the show half because it was cute and half to take screenshots and see how they draw him at weirder angles.
• Guts from Berserk, in all forms, but especially when he is a Young Lad. those eyebrows taught me so much about... eyebrows. the ones i draw don't do as many fun tricks as his do, they're more simplified, but i did like. mainline a bunch of '97 Berserk right before i drew the sprite. just to watch his beautiful eyebrows.
• Scar from Fullmetal Alchemist, both his Brotherhood beef-form and his 2003 bishounen form. his expressions and his general vibe are close to what i wanted to channel into Sykes. Scar is actually consistently glare-ier though LMAO. he's more energetic and less burnt-out.
• Zuko (Avatar: The Last Airbender) is also just. very similar vibes in a lot of ways and had a big influence on how i wrote Sykes as a character when i was just starting out on things in like 2015-16. things have come a long way since then, but Zuko was still like, a strong example of a Little Guy Who's Mad and Doing His Best.
• Touya (Cardcaptor Sakura)'s cool and reserved manner and more toned-down comedy expressions gave me a lot of ideas.

i dreaded making this sprite and it is some of the most fun i have had

it's very important to me that Iron Company has very expressive, flexible sprites. i'm always impressed with VNs that get a lot done with relatively few character expressions, but i can't live like that on my own time; this is my personal brainworms talking and this is what i am probably going to allow myself to be the most bonkers about.

i've tried to make sprites a few times in the past, as i've been through different phases of working on this project. what making Potion Stand Story inadvertently taught me was to find a character's emotional baseline and build the sprites off that, rather than just start with what seems "neutral" in general. Elly is a vroid, and her default resting face is this:

so whenever i made a new expression for her, i was starting from there.

Sykes is very reserved. when i think about how he emotes, i think about how i emote when i've hit that neurodivergent post-social-activity-or-busy-grocery-store burnout. his baseline emotion is exhaustion layered over smoldering rage, and we just kinda work from there. the direction he's looking, eyebrows, and Squint Level do most of the work.

he has two angles so far-- i might make a third head angle, more tilted forward, for scenes with combat/where he needs to be Angry and Snarly, because both of these angles are a little too relaxed for that.

his jacket is removable and so is his scar, so i can use his face for pre-scar-having flashbacks. he's uh, still missing a few parts though--

Watch on YouTube

i would also like to yell briefly about a tool i found last night. Feniksdev makes all sorts of indispensible tutorials and tools for Ren'py, most of them free! i bought one of the paid ones, though, and holy fucking shit this is a literal game-changer. it live-updates all these sprites as you pick parts. this will make it SO much easier for me to use layered images (which i'm gonna have to do... a lot). last night i put together a fresh separate ren'py project for sprite-building so i can have it open on a separate monitor while i add expressions to lines of dialogue. i can't believe i changed my whole damn life for five dollars.

god this part of making a VN is fun. i knew i was doomed(positive) when i started working on those emoji a while ago. i'm still quietly really anxious about it-- i tend to get embarrassed about my drawings once they reach a certain age, they like. expire on me. but the feedback on these has been really good, people really seem to like them, and since they're layered it'll be easy(ish) (relative to static sprites) for me to make any changes i want/need to in the future for my own sanity.

Current Mood: productive

so i was following this excellent tutorial on how to use layeredimages in ren'py and working on my first real sprite for Iron Company.

all was well, up to a point: most of Erika's eyes go under her hair. she has some silly expressions where her eyes go on top of her hair, though. so i needed to have two groups of eyes: one below the layer the lines of the hair are drawn on, and one above it.

basically the way i had the erika sprite groups structured was like this:
1. base
2. mouth
3. eyes
4. hair lines
5. eyes2 since there's no way two groups within a layeredimage could have the same name, ren'py would yell at me, this is foreshadowing btw
6. extras (little anime sweatdrops, sparkles, etc.)
7. hands

ren'py assembles the layers of a layeredimage in that order. like, you know, layers in a digital art program. or animation cels with different layers. or a lasagna. same concept.

eyes and eyes2 were SUPPOSED to be mutually exclusive.

except.

as i started to add expressions to her lines in chapter 1, things started to go very wrong.

above you can see she's displaying 2 sets of eyes at the same time and it's, not, good.

this was happening whenever her expression switched from one set of eyes to the other.

i was trying to use if_any the way the tutorial linked above presents them. some of the relevant passage:

at the top of the layeredimage statement, i had things set up like this...

(you may notice the if_not section from the tutorial is missing here, that's bc at this point i had removed it to see if maybe it was superfluous or screwing things up)

it seemed like it should have been so simple. this is some basic if-then shit! it's simply boolean! if any of the eyes group are showing, the eyes2 group should default to erika_e2_blank.png (a single-pixel transparent image), and vice-versa. right? RIGHT? THAT'S WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IT SHOULD BE DOING? RIGHT?

it was not working. i went through almost every stage of grief, although i did furiously avoid Acceptance (going to the ren'py subreddit, or to bed). what you don't see here is how many times i re-structured my filenames (filenames are important to layeredimages too), checked to make sure the blank.pngs were actually blank, picked up my rubber duck and read the code to him. even a hot shower didn't solve the problem. i'm proud of my investigative work even though ultimately i didn't figure it out on my own; i sandboxed this fucker, i tested things a less experienced me never would have thought to test (is it a problem with LayeredImageProxy? is it my file structure? my naming scheme? does it matter if there's an if_not block or not? etc.). this is your reminder that i am still in my infancy as a coder, and i am maybe at best 80-75% certain of what i am doing at any given time. i've sharpened up a lot this year, but i'm still a novice.

but i was getting toward 90% certain that the computer was wrong for real this time, and i was starting to get a little tilted

i was telling my very cool and smart friend Kayin about this and they asked to see the code, thinking maybe they could spot something. i sandboxed the problem for them in a new ren'py project, sent it over, and, as usual, could not stop trying to solve it myself. my stubbornness is a trait that is both helpful and destructive and often both at the same time. i made no progress, though. i just kept staring at the problem and coming up with the same solution every time. like this is the point i was at; i had been extremely thorough trying to get this to work and my brain was going "but thing should simply work as intended, shouldn't it?" and providing the same solution

here is what Kayin ultimately discovered, about 40-ish minutes after i sent them the sandbox game, and after i had finally dragged myself away to bed, trying to accept that perhaps the problem would be solved in the morning. you might wanna sit down for this,

you can just have two groups in a layeredimage that are named the same thing.

pictured: my reaction to learning this. please note the timestamp

i had not once considered this. i'm used to Ren'py yelling at me if there are any situations where there are Two Of The Same Thing In A Thing. very often, i run the game and Ren'py whacks me over the head with a rolled-up newspaper and tells me "you can't have two instances of this, DINGUS" and i'm like "lmfao oops sorry". you can't just have multiple instances of a thing within the same thing! that's not how things work! except when it is. the entire if_any excursion was a total distraction. a farce. a fool's errand. i was looking for clothes. but i was at the soup store.

the final code, if you're curious, looks like this. (pastebin link)

Lessons learned:
• only trust your fists. the police (documentation) will never help you
• always ask yourself: am i solving the correct problem? am i sure the code i'm staring at is meant to solve the problem i'm trying to solve? am i perhaps trying to buy clothes at the soup store????
• if you wish something worked a simpler way, try it the way you wish it worked and see if it does.
• it's always the thing that never works otherwise. or it's never the thing that always works. basically if something looks like it really should work that's why it doesn't, and if something doesn't look like it should work, that's why it does,
• i am blessed to have lovely friendships with smart and kind people
• i knew this already, but it is a miracle that even the simplest video game exists

addendum: the final hilarious punch:

this was in the documentation. (under "groups.") i just didn't see it because it wasn't what i was looking for. i was all mired in the if_any bullshit. i rarely actually look at the documentation (i tend to search the subreddit or the forum or the discord) because it tends to be written in a way i just... can't process, especially when i'm already frustrated and confused lmao. and it never has the specific kind of example i need, because i am forever Problems Georg. so i missed it. but it was there. what an incredible comedy of errors

Current Mood: silly

some clear patterns are starting to emerge in how i write VNs; all the best stuff happens in the edit. i write something that i feel like has some good bones but is frustrating and lackluster in ways i can't quite figure out, and then i get to the point where i'm styling all the text and seeing how it flows onscreen and suddenly the ideas firehose comes on and i get blasted into the stratosphere. this is how it happened with Potion Stand Story, and Iron Company Chapter 1, and i think it's probably a pretty typical pattern. but as someone who is now 33 and didn't get medicated for ADHD until 26, finishing stuff is still a little new to me. there's always a bit of panic before the edit where i'm like WHAT IF IT'S BAD WHAT IF IT ISN'T AS GOOD AS THE LAST THING AAAAAAAA WHAT IF THE GOOD THING WAS A FLUKE

i am MOST OF THE WAY through editing chapter 2. i've reached the final conflict. but it's a real frog-in-well situation. "at this rate i'll be done in a few days," i say, and then more ideas pop up and i write more. i kept reaching the halfway point and then writing something new so the halfway point was just where i was at for several days LMAO

editing is where the text styling happens, where i put in all the little pauses and decide which letters should wiggle and which ones should stay still and which ones should be big or red or italic.

i need you to do something for me: when you play a video game that has more than just bold and italicized text, when it has little pauses and wiggles and things i need you to psychically beam appreciation at whoever did that, because that is SO MUCH WORK AND TESTING OH MY GOD I HAD NO IDEA UNTIL I WAS DOING IT MYSELF. even though i have some pretty standardized practices at this point (0.4s pause after long sentence, 0.3s pause after short sentence, 0.2 pause after a comma, 0.1 pause when someone st-{w=0.1}stutters, various shake intensities for different moods, specific size increases and decreases depending on the volume i want to imply they're speaking at) every single line has to be tested and scrutinized for flow. and it takes. a long time. it's a lot of copy-paste. i've set up some code snippets in VSCode now (finally made the switch from Atom, which got abandoned last year RIP in peas) but i haven't actually finished doing that (tedious; somehow more tedious to me than what i'm doing-- i never claimed that i make any sense as a person). so a lot of times i'm just copy and pasting in all this shit:

shoutout to VSCode for pansexual syntax highlighting. i have an Obsidian document set up with click-to-copy code snippets which has been saving me some time but it's still... it's a lot. you know. 5000+ lines of code and most of them need text styling.

currently the chapter is 5886 lines of code. by comparison, chapter 1 is 5511... and i'm definitely Not Done so that gap is going to keep widening. i don't think it'll be significantly longer playtime-- some of the branches in this one represent pretty big chunks and it's hard to actually tell. we'll see! it'll be pure text for the time being (text comes first, everything else is second to text and i don't think i'm gonna let myself do art for any other chapters until i get chapter 1 into a state i consider pretty finished) so i hope you're ready for some questionable descriptions of images i haven't drawn again.

i did put in one sound though, because i couldn't stop myself. you'll see. or hear i guess

also: there's another possible bad end. i think i'll probably be sneaking at least one into each chapter. this one's a lot easier to blunder into, because i am evil, and i want to make you anxious when you make choices. my previous philosophy was "messy success > littering the game with game overs" but Slay The Princess has made me into sickos.jpg and i can have a little game overs as a treat.

when i start to feel burned out on copy-paste and testing i switch over to working on these discord emoji lol

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: MAISONDes - Love Trap Muchuu

everything in the world is stupid and my brain is bad and so i have done silly actions.

incredibly satisfying to hold. i think i'll use the box to store backups on a USB stick or a SD card or something

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: loop of Castlevania music stuck in my head from Vampire Survivors

i didn't really get to finish OC-tober because Things Kept Happening and my drawing hand kept hurting in between those things. but i did get this started during it and it was a really fun composition! i've always wanted to do one of these anime/game box style illustrations with the Iron Company cast.. i re-drew ALMOST everyone here several times (Petra (cigarette), Erika (outstretched arms ghost) and Naomi (bird corner) behaved well and i only had to draw them each once) and re-arranged the composition... countless times.

i would also like to thank the color purple today; this illustration is brought to you by the color purple because it ended up being the color i used to get everything else to play nice. i don't have a screenshot of it because i was TOO BEWILDERED at the time, but there was a first color draft of this that was just awful, and not in the fun 90s Sailor Moon poster way where the colors are kind of awful but in a way that rules, like this:

i looked at a lot of sailor moon group illustrations while i was planning this lmao

here are some progress shots: the initial sketch, an early draft, and a mostly-monochrome draft from before i started coloring (and i continued changing my mind about things). Carson (big) and Maddie (glasses) gave me the most trouble-- i don't have their proportions nailed down yet as much as i do the other characters and they kept coming out kind of Not Quite Themselves. you can also see the way i use 3D models to compose stuff! thank you Clip Studio Paint 3D models for my life. my goal with this one was basically not to settle for "good enough" and to keep going until every character drawing made me go "yeah! THAT'S THEM!" (i cheated with Ryfka because i had already drawn her lil' Carmen Sandiego Outfit Hat Tip sketch and ended up pasting it in from another canvas after i realized i already had a usable drawing of her i liked lol). you can see all these characters' profiles and stuff on my toyhouse btw.

i also made this version when i was stuck on coloring. it's one that's more appropriate for just chapter 1 (WHICH YOU COULD PLAY RIGHT NOW. YOU COULD DO THAT. YOU COULD PLAY CHAPTER 1 OF IRON COMPANY FOR FREE.)

this illustration was a really fun puzzle. putting together something like this a few years ago probably would have just made me cry, but now i already want to do more of them, haha. it's really difficult, but once the pieces start to fall into place it's like HELL YEAH HELL YEAH HELL YEAH all the way to the finish line.. i should really get back to work on the visuals for the novel now, but i wanted to have some like... "key art" kinda stuff to promote it with instead of just the old sloppy placeholder sketches.

please hold for the inevitable PS2/Gamecube box versions i wanna do as a joke. all the elements are pretty scoochable and i have a printer, so... there's really nothing stopping me except my willingness to put time and effort into bullshit.

speaking of putting time and effort into bullshit, i also drew this Sonic Adventure Box Art Pose Petra as a goof and i like it so much i might make it into another sticker LMAO

Current Mood: accomplished

some things that have happened this last week-ish:

• my mom got a new job! so we are in less financial peril. for now. the car almost decided to ruin that by having a tire pressure issue the day before her first day but it was super fixable so it's fine. it's fine. it's fine. IT'S FINE

• i started cleaning up 7 months' worth of "i'm scared and depressed and i never get enough time to myself so i have no energy literally ever" mess. got through the first layer of kitchen gunk. pulled some things out of the back of the fridge that were, frankly, unidentifiable and trending toward sentience. i haven't done this much laundry and cleaning in one day since literally last year. it's a race now to get things deep-cleaned (or at least better-than-surface-cleaned) before the seasonal depression comes crashing through my brain like the kool-aid man lol

• i submitted my first round of Faire listings for review and they got approved, so i'm officially open for business there. highly specific call to action: do you own a brick-and-mortar business in the united states, or do you work at one where you have some sway over what products are stocked? do you need cute stickers? well just click this here handy dandy hyperlink: https://faire.com/direct/doodlemancy

• wrote down my out-of-control to-do list now that i finally have more brain again. i have so much to do before mid-november. a taste of not even all of it:

☐ schedule November/December shop social media posts
☐ fill Pink/Shiny Envelopes for ko-fi
☐ hard drive & phone storage cleanup
☐ more merch photos
☐ process vograce/acornpress charm orders
☐ clean all the things
☐ replace computer chair (seriously) (you've been putting this off all year) (why do you love back pain)
☐ shop restocks
☐ use up the 60 eggs you accidentally purchased

• no but for real. due to the Car Incident, we could not go grocery shopping that day as planned. so i had to doordash our groceries (sigh) and i was stressed out and tired and i didn't look hard enough. the price didn't tip me off because shit's always stupid expensive on doordash, so over a dollar more than usual for what i thought was going to be 18 eggs rang no alarm bells. and that's how i ended up with sixty eggs. sixty of them. SIXTY!!! i guess i'm going to be making quiche. (and a lot of other things. people on bluesky had many suggestions.)

• my carpal tunnel syndrome has been trying to ruin OC-tober for me but i'm back at it... this one's gonna take me a few days though ;D (poor Carson is still bald here because i keep re-drawing him and Maddie dsflkghfds)

• i'm working on a Fun Secret Entry. it's Sailor Moon related. you'll see it eventually.

• i finally updated the main graphic on doodlemancy.com to a fun slideshow.

• oh also: here's the packaging/display design i did for the Mystery Sticker Bags (Retail Version). very pleased with how these came out. i'm really learning as i go with this stuff, always, but my 7 years in retail helped with a lot of Considerations.

sorry i haven't been very good about responding to comments here IT IS THE CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME LMAOOOOOO

Current Mood: accomplished

third anniversary shop update
okay, we'll get the blatant advertising out of the way first. it is my shop's third anniversary! i've added some new stuff: lots of prints! a few stickers! a notepad! plus there's tons more stuff there that was there already. notably, there is Potion Stand Story and Iron Company merch now. my first official merch for my visual novels!!! it's only a hop, skip, and a jump from here to nendoroids, right?!

it's OC-tober, NERDS
i say, nerdily. OC-tober is one of those 30 day drawing challenges like inktober and swordtember and mermay and whatnot. you draw your OCs (original characters. like your characters from your projects or your RPs or whatever) every day. i do it real loose and wiggly. i don't bother with sticking to a prompt list, and i don't even actually draw every day. sometimes i just repost or touch up old stuff. I DO WHAT I WANT. LOOK AT MY CHARACTERS. I LOVE THEM. HERE IS SOME OC-TOBER ART.

Day 1: a Petra sticker design (available in my shop above, as you can see) + a silly edit

Day 2: i described Erika as "the Navi to Sykes' Link" in the group chat and then had to draw it. love drawing my very serious little man in cosplay.

Day 3 & 4 (sketched one day, colored the next): a suggestion by

kayin from the request post. and i mean yes obviously Utena Petra. obviously. i'm not sure why i hadn't already done this. princely women...

i can't promise i'll draw of them, but if you have any OC-tober ideas you wanna drop in the request post comments, please do so. ;D i enjoy playing to the audience.

my very important anime opinions from this week's Anime Day

Dead Dead Demons DeDeDeDe Destruction (completed) - a companion for the manga imo, this adaptation clearly had to make some impossible choices between quality and length, and some of the choices they made were... baffling. "episode zero" covers some of the END of the manga?? but i still liked it overall. finish the manga, then watch the anime lol. content warning for this one if you end up checking it out: a teacher/student relationship is in there; no laws are broken and it's certainly not framed as ideal. Inio Asano is not here to make you comfortable all the time ok

Uzumaki (episode 1) - one of my fav manga and another "that's gonna be hard to adapt" situation, the pacing feels WACK but idk how else you could have done it-- other than maybe splitting it up into 2 chapters at the commercial break, which i think maybe would have felt less confused? the choice to keep it greyscale is A+, and the surreal never-quite-still animation style is working for it.

Dan Da Dan (episode 1) - since this is new... content warning for Relatively Silly Alien Rape Threats in the first episode if you pick this one up this season, which i expect won't be the last time because this is not my first rodeo with Science Saru lol. that aside-- the animation is wild, it's very funny and charming, i like the premise and our two weirdo main characters, hope this one turns out to be a banger

Monster (episodes 13 & 14): Monster is good. i have nothing insightful to say about Monster. it's good as hell. i love Kenzo Tenma with my whole heart and soul

Hellsing Ultimate (episode 2) - high-grade schlock. Alucard is my husband and Integra is my wife; so it has been since my teens. kind of impressed by how well it cleans up the manga's storyline, which i barely remember but which i do remember being A Nonsense Mess a lot of the time lol. content warning for Hellsing is pretty much everything, and you're not allowed to be mad at me if you go watch it because i said i liked it. actually that last part applies to every anime i post about. i'm tired of feeling like i can't mention my favs in public without some people assuming i endorse every sin committed, i already had to put up with that when i was a child trying to enjoy things during the tail end of the Satanic Panic okay. oops sorry this turned into a rant sorta oops i've been thinking about this a lot lately sorry

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (episodes 14 & 15) - i love The Batou Show. i don't have anything insightful to say about GITS that hasn't already been said, at least not yet. i just think Batou is a Type of Guy and i like him. i wish the future still had discs and things that go click. i think i maybe said this all before

No Guns Life (episodes 7 & 8) - i think it has a cool premise and some cool aesthetics/worldbuilding, but i also haven't really been wowed by it yet. i'm hoping it'll show me some teeth. i like when gun man become funny scribble like Alphonse Elric though

Hare + Guu (episodes 17 & 18) - this is a 2000s comedy anime that i don't think most western anime fans have heard of, and it can be pretty hit-or-miss (with the expected Discomforts you'd get from... like i said, 2000s comedy anime) but when it hits it fucking hits, episode 18 was a riot. this would have been the LOLZ TEH RANDOM!!11 anime of my teens had i known of it back then lol

other things that are happening

i'm attempting to read Hellboy. this is surprisingly difficult because i'm used to shoving manga into my face constantly and i keep reading the pages in the wrong order. i want to absorb the minimalist backgrounds and learn how to incorporate that energy into my own work!!

Tia jumped from the windowsill onto my boob at 5:45 AM today and it hurt really bad/startled the shit out of me but it also woke me up right in the right part of my sleep cycle to actually feel refreshed upon waking (which simply has not happened the last... 9 months) so i can't even be mad. i will definitely get sore boob tomorrow and be convinced i have cancer (i can't tell you how many times this has happened it's ridiculous)

it's cold enough to wear sweatshirts again! i'm sad about cohost though. i bought my current crop of big pullover sweatshirts the first winter i was on cohost and i ended up associating them with cozy cohost-and-cat-and-chill-and-draw time BWAAGGHGHGHG COHOST AAAAAAAGHBBHGH BUHUHUHUH HHUHhhh sniff snorf wehhhhhhhh

in cohost's wake i am posting in All The Places, truly. i've dusted off pillowfort and made a new mastodon account. i had weird times on mastodon.social (people yelling at me for not cwing things like literally mentioning a very small injury... c'mon) and mastodon.art pretty much just ignored me when i was last trying to post there, but i don't want to write off the whole concept because cohost taught me that smaller, quieter spaces are worth something too, and pursuing the Biggest Possible Audience is not only not always great for your mental health, it's not even actually better for your sales if you're like me and you have to hustle online all the time lol. i'm hoping i can find a good balance-- i can't possibly keep up with the feed of every website and discord i have some presence in, but i also don't want to be the person who posts and runs and never interacts.

...and why not also an excerpt from chapter2.rpy

chapter2.rpy
`erika "Honestly, I don't see why you don't just ignore him. You're leaving in the morning anyway." sykes "(Good chance we'll keep running into him if we come through here regularly... I want to know what he's up to.)" erika "Eh, that's a good point, I guess." erika "Keep your friends close..." sykes "(...and your enemies within strangling range.)"`

sometimes they're on the same page (about guys they hate that you, the readers, don't know anything about yet). go play my visual novel demo if you wanna meet these characters!

Current Mood: productive

i rambled earlier this week about Research. here is a scene where i ignored my research. for context, if you haven't played the demo yet (and you should wait until later because i'm just about to upload a new version hopefully by the end of today... check the timestamps before you download ;D)

excerpt from chapter1.rpy
"It's quiet down here. I can hear Raskoph grousing in the kitchen, in Armian. Something about a smell." petra "❰Good fucking God In Heaven. It smells like a pig's ass, I've never seen a nest this disgusting...❱" sykes "Raskoph?" petra "Yes, I am in the kitchen." petra "Nothing here. Except... probably... all germs and molding known to humans-kind." sykes "Roger that." "I step over a couple of tipped chairs to check the bodies near the fireplace." erika "Ew." sykes "(Yeah, they're not getting up anytime soon.)" "Bernard sure saved me a lot of trouble." erika "Time to leave, then." erika "I don't like it here. Something's bothering me." (Petra can be seen sneaking up behind Sykes looking suspicious, shotgun at the ready.) sykes "(Seems homey enough to me.)" petra "...Who's Roger?" sykes "Gah!" "I didn't know she was capable of moving that quietly."

i'm not sure it comes across yet without the visuals and stuff, but the implication here is that when Sykes says "Roger that," Petra, not being a native speaker of Jastrian* or particularly familiar with what would be Jastrian radio lingo, misinterprets it as "there's another person here (Roger?) (does Sykes know a Roger in town?) (did Roger join the cultists?!) (WHO THE FUCK IS ROGER?!)," so she decides to go with her most cautious interpretation of whatever the fuck he just said, moves in quietly in case Sykes needs backup, gets confused, and finally, when it seems like the coast is clear, she startles the shit out of him.

WW1 is the barometer i use for a lot of technology stuff for Iron Company, but also i do what i want and fuck it. radio communication was definitely in use during WW1, but it wasn't until WW2 that we had anything close to proper "walkie-talkies" and radio lingo was really starting to standardize/solidify into what we're probably all currently familiar with from movies. "Roger that" is a phrase that, as far as i can tell, wasn't really used in radio lingo until WW2, as well. that said... spelling alphabets were a thing with radio and telephone communication from pretty much the beginning. so this could conceivably be a universe where "Roger" had already become shorthand for an affirmative statement/acknowledgement.

anyway mostly i just wanted to share this because i think the scene is funny

* England doesn't exist in this universe so i had to give English a different name from a different fictional country lmao

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Ada Rook's amazing OST for Fallow

i've finally started work on putting some visuals into my alleged visual novel. for now, everything you see here is placeholders, not anywhere near final art-- i'm trying to work fast, just slap down sketches, and suppress the urge to refine things, because i'm going to have to redraw it all anyway. my personal goal is to not spend more than 20 minutes on any one placeholder image. i'm basically like. storyboarding or thumbnailing here. i dunno what they call it for VNs.

please note none of these are actually in the available demo yet-- i want to get some more stuff done and squash some bugs before i pack it all up for another update. gimme a couple of weeks.

here's the first minute-ish, where we meet our protagonists:

Watch on Vimeo

and here's something from farther toward the end of the chapter. kinda spoilery i guess but out of context, it shouldn't matter much. content warning though, this one's got the Horror Themes in it (but they are nerfed by the fact that this is Scribbly Hasty Placeholder Sketch Art)

Watch on Vimeo

i'm so excited to be making this. i've had all this rolling around in my head for so long

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Puella Magi Madoka Magica OST

Style Credit

Style: Starflower for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Rounded Star 005

Page generated Jun. 20th, 2025 09:33 pm

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Entries tagged with oc: erika

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