Other Projects

HAGIOGRAPHY

I tried to avoid focusing too much on the godlike universe creating saints in Spacefixer, given that they're basically just fan characters that stuck around longer than expected. They seemed more interesting to write about distantly, as sort of forces in the universe that are also totally normal people, than as main attractions for a story. Still, given that I had a bunch of these characters lying around, I wanted to try and do something with them. The first thing born out of this was the idea for Hagiography, which is about- you guessed it- a hagiography. Or more specifically, the process of writing one. It seemed like a fun way to structure a story around someone going out and researching a sort of mythological figure, and getting themselves into trouble as a result. Hagiography was conceived of as a linear platformer, a genre which I think there is a criminal lack of nowadays, but that was just too much effort to undergo in my spare time. So, here's what was outlined.

The story was essentially about two sisters, who happen to be the anthropomorphic frogs seen above, going out into the universe. The older one was slightly gruff and was concerned with looking after their younger sister, who was a bit more head in the clouds and deeply academic. The older would have had the sort of classic feeling of being stifled by their small town/planet, while the younger would have taken an interest in the High Priestess, and her drive would sort of give the older sister an impetus to actually get off the planet in the first place. Presumably, the older sister would have been the central character, being a little more active. I have no idea what sort of gameplay would fit with this, though.

The beginning was going to have the two sisters at their home on some rural, highlands-like planet, going to town to find out that there's a transport ship passing through, deciding they shouldn't go, and then changing their mind and making it at the last moment. I would go into more detail, but this later got borrowed basically beat for beat for the beginning of Shapetalk. The main differences are obviously the dual main characters, as well as that their passage off the planet would not be someone's personal craft, but a spaceship more akin to a medium sized passenger ship. I sort of imagined this ship being the central hub of the game, stopping on various planets/levels and picking up and dropping off passengers who could be interacted with on the ship before levels, and perhaps even give information on specific planets or appear on them when they got off as characters in the story. I also thought it might be fun to have a room for the sisters which filled up with objects as the game went on, and could have a readable version of the younger sister's hagiography which would update with new information found on each planet.

I only worked out a few potential stops on their journey. Obviously they would have to start off sort of going at it blind, trying to find any good lead. I figured a good way to structure the story would be around them seeking out and meeting three saints of increasing closeness to the High Priestess, the last of which being the saint herself. It seems like primary sources would be the best here.

The first of these was The Hermit. The main character's first real source of information, someone who had been there for the High Priestess' early days. Being a hermit, I had cast them as someone who had long ago left to live alone, spending hundreds of years asleep on a desolate snowy planet. They're the one on the left of the above image, with the zinc symbol. I imagined them as a massive aged man, covered in enough snow to be obscured. The gameplay in this section would involve somehow waking them up.

The next saint would be someone who is actually friends with the High Priestess, and perhaps owns a cafe or somewhere people frequent in a safe way. Of course, the sisters would spout off some incorrect information and get sent to the dungeons, and would have to clear up the misunderstanding before finally getting sent off to the location of the High Priestess.

Then, there's the High Priestess herself. Honestly, despite the fact that I've referenced this character a number of times as the patron saint of space travel, I've kinda kept them close to the chest, as she's as close to a self insert as I've made. This character is supposed to be the saintly future of Amias from all the way back in Lonesoul, except now she's had a bit of a gender discovery. That was actually at the center of my ideas for the mystery of the story, with her transition having happened after the Hermit last talked to her. The players would be getting wrong information for basically that whole first part of the story, and the repeating of these wrong facts would be the reason their friend sends them to the dungeons. I'm not sure I could've handled this kind of subject matter with any tact, but I think the idea of the false conceptions of you in the minds of people you once knew is certainly something worth talking about, and something I've thought about.

SAINT ACADEMY

Again with the focus on saints. This time though it was in the much more accommodating visual novel format. The impetus for this was the few loose lines I threw in Spacefixer with Noe and Ana talking about meeting at "The Academy," and listening to the shrieking shack podcast talk about the problems with harry potter and wondering how I would do a school setting. I came up with the idea of having an outsider scholarship student attend a prestigious academy headed by The Magician and with a variety of other saints teaching. This student would stumble into some sort of conspiracy against the school or to take it over, which would in turn lead them to pursue a well-to-do student in their class, who they would eventually fall in love with. Now that I write it out like that, it sounds like weird shipping bait, which is probably part of why I ended up thinking this wasn't particularly interesting as a story.

Above you can see the rough ideas I had for the main cast. I envisioned the protagonist as someone who is not very good with people, and sort of systematically pursues the love interest as a ploy to get information and ends up accidentally coming to like him. The love interest I was less solid on. I'm not sure whether it would have been better to have his family or himself to actually be involved in the villainous plot and choose to do the right thing for the protagonist at the climax, or if it should've just been a red herring that revealed a deeper foe.

Some other loose characters I wanted to include were The Magician, obviously, as sort of a hands off headmaster that delegated all their duties, as well as Rudie showing up in some capacity running like a steampunk cruise ship or something. I also wanted to include several real people teaching as clones of themselves, such as Todd Rundgren and Thomas Aquinas, just because it seemed funny.

This story got a little bit further into development (I even made a demo of a theme song for it!), but I struggled with figuring out where everything should go. I started adding a bunch of other distractions, like intermissions between chapters where the author insert talks about the history of the academy or something a la the explanatory chapters of Moby Dick, but the actual writing never got much further than the first couple of scenes. Everything I figured out from this got folded into Shapetalk, but perhaps a little more simplified.

YILANTAREI

Two girls, Tarei, raised in a mystery cult and exiled after tapping into forbidden magic, and Yilan, a rogue trader with a heart of gold, team up to solve scooby-doo style mysteries in space. They get around in a really clunky spaceship which has a big airbrushed mural on it, piloted by whatever the space equivalent of a stoner is. They have a silly pet or robot thing. Perhaps they crashland on a desert planet and get involved with a tribal dispute. Perhaps they have to catch a rogue clone at a space fashion show.

This one's seen a lot of different forms. At one point I wrote several thousands words off the cuff of this story, which turned out pretty wild and not very good. To be honest, this started life with me idly wondering how I would approach a star wars sequel. Tarei was a failed jedi and Yilan was a lovable smuggler. I managed to jam it into my universe, but it still feels pretty derivative.

I would've had some drawings for this, but I've had a lot of trouble trying to pin them down. Tarie I have a solid idea of lots of cool grays and blues, with a sort of slanted lain-esque bowl cut and formal clothing, but with Yilan I've repeatedly failed to pull together a sort of big eared goblin/yoda look with a military style cargo jacket and locs in a way that looks cute and mischievous.

Development History

There isn't really much to say early on about Lonesoul. I started it with absolutely no plan, and just sort of kept making it up as I went. The result was a lot of dropped threads and things I didn't really give enough service to. Like what was up with everyone's parents, or what the kids were doing at all. However, there were a couple of things interesting enough to get carried through into later works. Alchemy, and particularly alchemy symbols became very important in Spacefixer as a way technology worked, which got expanded on with sigils and the like.

And of course, the aliens. Though they went through a fair bit of variation before finally showing up in Spacefixer. I actually planned for many planets with at least three groups of aliens to show up, and possibly other humans as well. The space exploration concept found its way elsewhere as well. If you're interested, I wrote up a short postmortem here.

Spacefixer is where things start to get more interesting. It actually started life at least a year before I even wrote Lonesoul, when I was really half assedly messing around with a 4 panel comic idea. When I was trying to think of what to do after Lonesoul, I was feeling particularly inclined towards adventure time, and wanted something that would allow for those types of short, episodic adventures, and I happened across this concept. In the early episodes of Spacefixer, that influence can be really felt in the types of stories I feel. I even tried to structure each episode as if it were a ten minute cartoon episode.

Before I actually got around to that though, I started out with the idea of Spacefixer being a series of short RPG Maker stories. This is something I'd like to revisit at some point, at least in structure. However, I became interested in low poly 3d stuff, and realized that a combination of 2d sprites and 3d environments and camera work could be a reasonable middle ground between drawing thousands of panels for a comic and just doing a sprite comic. A lot of Spacefixer was me trying to figure out how to do a comic with less work and in a smaller form. I started out with a plan for doing 15 episodes over the course of a year, which I obviously ended up exceeding as it continued onwards. I'm still honestly surprised I actually managed to finish it at all.

I planned much of the story out beforehand, though the conclusion was something that plagued me until the very end. I still don't think the meta narrative quite makes sense if you think about it too long, but it was the best I came up with at the time. There was one episode which I scrapped entirely, intended to be episode 14. The idea was that the team was hired to help a reincarnated soul find their fated love after forty lifetimes apart, with Ana having to build something to track them down and prove her worth to the team. At the end the reincarnated person would realize they had it wrong and the person was actually their fated nemesis, and the group would have to escape. Aside from it being an odd fit for the universe, dealing with fate and predestination, I just could think of a way to make the plot fill a whole episode. So I scrapped it and made up something based on the corbomite maneuver episode of Star Trek instead. Now then, here's some concept art from Spacefixer.

Considering that Shapetalk isn't finished, I don't have much to say about it. The only thing really of note is that I originally intended for Lu, the main character, to be a boy. I still think it would fit the story better, too. The issue was that I couldn't think up a good male character design that captured the passivity and monastic healer characteristics. I just can't draw young men for some reason. So, it became a lesbian romance almost by accident. I suppose to fill this section out I'll put my design doc for this project.

Worldbuilding

One thing I often end up thinking about with regards to fictional universes is how pretty much all of them would suck to actually live in. Being a regular person in say, a world with superheroes would probably result in death by collateral damage or world ending cataclysms. If you lived in the universe of star wars, your odds of being sold into slavery are pretty high. To that end I wanted to create a world better than our own and see what kind of stories could be told in it. I modeled a lot on Star Trek in design. Some key things were it being generally post-scarcity and with transport across galaxies being easy and fast enough to allow information to move and regional conflicts to become unimportant.

Ultimately I think I failed at telling stories in this kind of world. The central conflict of Spacefixer and Shapetalk are built around jobs and the need to earn something. Once that gets resolved in Spacefixer the characters just start doing things aimlessly until it ends. Compelling character motivations in a world without scarcity at all are sort of hard to actually do considering we're so used to this type of struggle.

Another broad idea of this universe is that it's big and urban. You could keep traveling in one direction and stop at a number of densely populated, interconnected planets and stations without end. This is part of why I tried to avoid describing places as being part of some cohesive whole, like the core worlds and outer rim of Star Wars. I wanted it to be sort of anarchic in that there isn't any central authority tying together different planets, just a web of interconnections. This is also why I don't mention any wars happening in this universe.

SAINTS

The saints, essentially the living gods of this universe, are probably the best place to start this account. My way of including Lonesoul in this canon, given that it is so different, is that it details the creation of this universe and the process of the kids becoming gods. Essentially, Spacefixer is the equivalent of the post-canon Homestuck content. One thing I tried out with the saints early on that I focused on less, though I still think is interesting, is the idea that each of them represents two semi-opposed concepts that are dialectically realized in them. Like how the Chariot is the saint of history and progress, and combines both of these by viewing progress as part of a sort of Hegelian story approaching something. This doesn't really come across in the comic though.

The first basic principle is that there are 21 saints, corresponding to each card of the major arcana. The one exception is The Fool, reserved for the reader. From there they are split up by species, five being humans, seven being erebites/cervidans, and nine being cenobites/strixans. You may be able to see the animal allusions in their names, as well as reference to their relationship to others of their species (The erebites tend to live alone while the cenobites always live together). Then, in true Homestuck fashion, each was assigned a color and way of speech. The colors were all picked out from the default MSPaint selection, and the erebites were given variations on a quirk involving cyяillic chaяacтэяs while the cenobites used ﾌ卂P卂几乇丂乇 C卄卂尺卂CT乇尺丂. Each also tends to have a genre of music associated with them, though it is much more particular to the character. Most of them I left undeveloped until I needed them for a story.

Related to the saints is the timeline of the world as a whole. This is honestly more of a joke idea, but I ended up using it to pull together a bunch of disparate settings into one. The idea is that the year around the time of Spacefixer is 15693 BDU (Before Destruction of Universe). Nobody in-universe knows what is being counted down to. I don't know or wish to explain what happens during 0 BDU. But afterwards the saints all become people of legend, and space travel is destroyed and has to be rebuilt over a couple hundred years. This period without advanced technology would be where I would fit my Area project, and the period once it returns, but the universe is a little bit harsher, would be where Yilantarei would take place.