#i think her story is a better use of the (give character name) mechanic that wasn’t really needed in scara’s arc imo | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mishacakes · 6 months

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how do you connect to your character? like how do get to know them so well? how do you pick out their likes, dislikes, habits and those itty bitty bits about them? I've been struggling to do that for sooo many of my ocs, and i'm also at a lost of how to design them. like i once had a clear idea of what kind of character they are, but i wanted to change them a bit, make them a little better, and i feel like I've lost that character and that character i'm working on doesn't exists, no matter how much i loved them and enjoyed writing an drawing them. this has happened with every single character i made and it just makes me think that i may not be cut out for drawing or writing characters. i look up to you so i thought of asking you for help

sry for the long rant idk wat im doing

HELLO HELLO THANK YOU FOR ASKING!! So basically I took this question and turned it into a 1.6k word essay on writing characters and how I like to do it, so, uh, hope you enjoy!! and hope it helps!

OK!! character writing. How do you do it? or, well, how do I do it. I’ve got a few methods that help me out the most and are the most fun for me to think about. Here’s my big secret, if it’s not fun I don’t do it. I’m not here to do homework I’m waaayyyy out of school. I’m a legal adult. I pay my taxes. I’m not gonna do something that doesn’t give my brain the good fun juice. Anyways. My methods are: symbols, archetypes, and character inspiration. I use all these to figure out the CORE of a character, their very beating heart, and most importantly, what haunts them. Everything about a character, in my opinion, comes from this core and their ghost. Their habits, their fears, their joys, their coping mechanisms. So long as you have a clear grasp on their heart, you won’t go astray. Let’s dive into it! The characters I’m going to be using to describe how I use these methods are Alice and others characters from my webcomic—namely Edith, Hatter, and Rougina—and Tomiko (you know her you love her, catgirl supreme).

Symbols! I love using symbols, they’re something that can describe a character through metaphor, even without going into detail about their whole backstory and habits. Tomiko’s symbols are lanterns (specifically light), cats, ghosts/yokai, shapeshifting, and gold. They all work to further her character as a rough around the edges monster cat with a heart of gold, who uses shapeshifting as a method (both literally and metaphorically) to mold herself into what others need her to be. Alice’s symbols are hearts, eyes, and flesh in general. Try picking one general symbol (the ocean, the forest, the city), and see how specific you can get from there. Or pick a god or goddess that resonates with your character and see what symbols are used for them. Rougina (the antagonist in my webcomic) is a war goddess fallen from grace, and is symbolized with land and volcanoes, so I’ve used volcanic plants to evoke her. Personally I also love going through the tarot for symbols, assigning a tarot card to characters (of the major arcana) is a fun exercise. Which leads us nicely into our next method:

Archetypes! The tarot deck’s Major Arcana is pretty much only archetypes. The Empress as the Mother. The Magician as the Wise Mentor. The Tower as The Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen Oh Jesus Shit. These can help a lot with who your character is. I’m extremely storytelling oriented, so it helps me knowing What Role a character serves in the story they inhabit. Another thing I love in archetypes in the Zodiac. Yes, I am an astrology bitch. The whole reason I love talking about my methods is my Sag rising, I love giving my wisdoms. But astrology can be used for writing, and not just for excusing and not reflecting on shit behavior (can’t help being a gemini!). The zodiac is FILLED WITH ARCHETYPES!!! From elements to how they function! The four elements (you A:TLA bitches know this), and three modalities. If you’re interested please watch Eugene’s Rank King video, it’s very informative on the signs. Also many symbols! For example, Alice is a Taurus—May 4, Alice Liddell’s birthday—so she’s pretty stubborn while also loving creature comforts. Tomiko’s birthday is August 23, making her a Virgo, so she likes being precise in her work. More archetypes you can look for are DnD classes! I love using that to design costumes. One of Edith’s recent costumes is very wizard inspired, since that’s the class I see her having as she’s very studious and driven. Heck, all of Alice and the Nightmare is derived from the character archetypes of the Alice in Wonderland characters! Rougina is specifically the Red Queen, NOT the Queen of Hearts!! The confusion started with the 1951 Disney animated movie when the two characters were merged!! Lewis Carroll himself said the two were different! The Queen of Hearts is an “embodiment of ungovernable passion” and the Red Queen is “the concentrated essence of all governesses”!! GOD!!! Tim Burton meet me in the fucking pit you’ll pay for your alice crimes. anyways.

Archetypes help a lot in costumes too, figuring out what kind of fashion they’d like to wear. You can start broad and get more specific with it (like going from a wizard type character to a wizard character with steampunk themes). Fashion is just an extent of character. What are they comfy in? Are they confident in their body? What colors do they like? Bright high fashion or simple dark sweaters? Ryoko Kui is a master of character design I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend checking out her work.

Another method I like using, specifically for Alice and the Nightmare characters, is what I call the “three trait method”. When I was in middle school we did a production of Alice in Wonderland (I was the White Knight), and too many girls auditioned for Alice. So the director’s solution was to split the character into three parts, and assigning each part to an actor. Her temper, her intelligence, and her innocence, all used in different scenes. Now I use that to think about my own Alice character, except with “polite, temper, and curious”. Edith’s keywords are “nervous, tactical, and intelligent”. Hatter’s are “kind, enthusiastic, and intuitive”. Using keywords can help figure out how they’d react in a situation, what side of them would shine the brightest. Hatter’s want to help everyone is his kindness, but overstepping his bounds can be attributed to his enthusiasm. Edith can know what path to take in a pinch, but her nervousness can freeze her in place. Reading the source material helps a lot with Alice characters too, which brings us to our final point:

Character inspiration!! The art of taking things you like and shoving them into your own characters and stories. DISCLAIMER THO!!! If you take things without really EXAMINING what about them you like, WHY you like them, and how you’d like to evoke that same love in the things you make, the interpretations can come off as shallow. (for more on this subject, watch HBomberguy’s RWBY video essay, specifically the section on “anime homework”)

Tomiko’s biggest inspirations are Izutsumi from Dungeon Meshi, April Ludgate from Parks and Rec, Power and from Chainsawman, San from Princess Mononoke, and Mei from LMK. It’s a good cocktail of aloof, biting, vicious, weird, fierce, loving, and bright. Figuring out what I love about the characters and what I want to write in a character like that helps a lot in writing Tomiko. It’s also really fun in a sense for screenshot redraws and memes.

Music is also a HUUUUUUGE source of inspiration for me, I love making playlists. And even as playlists can change as characters grow and change, having a couple of core songs still helps me ground to that character’s center. For Tomiko it’s “Make Them Gold” by CHVRCHES, and “Nice Girl” by Ashnikko. Alice’s is “Headlock” by Imogen Heap and “Demons” by Hayley Kiyoko, Edith’s is “Warrior” by Kimbra, and Hatter’s is “Dementia” by Owl City.

Ok, we’ve gotten though symbols, archetypes, and made a couple of banger playlists. Next is something that can help write your character, the Big Lie. The thing that keeps them up at night. Their biggest fear, their ghost, what haunts them. What’s holding them back from their goals? What do they need to overcome? That can be as central to their theme as any symbolism. For Tomiko it’s the lie that her emotions don’t matter, only what she can do to be of service to her mother. Her arc is about overcoming her dismissing her own emotions and learning to not run away from the people who she truly cares for. Alice dismisses the literal ghost that is haunting her believing that that will let her have a normal life. Edith pushes down abilities that come naturally to her for fear that she’ll be exiled, not just from society, but the world. Rougina believes she must burden the world’s problems on her own shoulders with no one’s help. The outer character and the inner ghost can reflect, mirror, and inform each other.

Now, listen, sometimes characters are hard to get to know! Tomiko was lol. Quinn was for a looong time. And in times like this, I just, let them be. I listen to some music to get inspired, and let them tell me about themselves when they feel like it. And they will, it just take a little while. And a few dozen quick exploration drawings. But they come through. Also, try not to get bogged down with habits and little details of their character, keep their core in mind, what their heart is. Start broad and get specific. That way, if you feel like you’ve lost your way or the character feels different to you, recenter yourself at their heart and go from there. Or, if you find that their center no longer fits, don’t be afraid to change it! Characters are meant to be fun! First and foremost!! I make characters cause I like writing and storytelling, and drawing little comic for fun and me time. Sometimes characters stick around, sometimes they fall by the wayside. You really have to find what sparks joy, and chase your bliss!

So as long as you have your character’s essence in your hands, and you WANT to keep working on them and drawing them, there’s really no wrong way to go. This whole essay I’ve given is just a set of tools that works for ME, and I HIGHLY encourage you to find stuff that works for you! I really really hope that all this has made sense and isn’t just the ramblings of a madman. Good luck and happy charactering!!

#meesh blabs #misha writings #character writing #happy reading and happy writing!#THANKS FOR ASKING <3

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cerastes · 6 months

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Was thinking about the hypothetical Arknights action game stuff from awhile back again, what enemies/story characters do you think would make for some sick boss fights?

Oh, I like this one. Just to name a few:

Patriot: The first that comes to mind is Patriot, as an enemy that would push the game systems of an action game to its limit. In concept, I like to imagine it in the way the true final boss of Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon goes: You have your playable character, which I would like to say is Amiya for this case, and your big damage opportunities come from interference ran by Rosmontis clashing with Patriot and Rhodes Island Snipers and Casters barraging him by Elysium's instruction. Patriot is also perfect to load a ton of mix-ups onto by virtue of him being able to do both gigantic, slower attacks and barrages of quick lunges. He could be a setpiece boss and a straight up skill check boss in equal measures.

Bishop Quintus: Yeah, man's Yamcha as far as bosses go, BUT in the context of a character action game with tight movesets and mechanics, a gigantic tentacled boss that can spawn more and more tentacles from everywhere in the arena, has laser attacks, and was explicitly Devil May Cried for a while by Specter when she was literally air comboing it by leaping from falling rock to falling rock as she unleashed a Sexy Smokin' Style kinda beatdown on him? Yeah I would very much love to control an Abyssal Hunter in a fight against this thing.

Faust: Hear me out. In the context of a full on high impact high speed action game, Faust would be heaven to fight. Between the ability to shoot a hugely powerful bolt, the ability to turn invisible, the turrets, and imagining him hoping around for a stylish mix of melee and ranged combat, yeah, I'm a believer. I like to imagine a scripted part of the fight where he hides and starts charging a truly massive shot, with the Arts humming from the sheer power. In the arena, there's also a lot of his snipers to run diversion and make it harder to find him. Normal people will find him and hit him out of the charge. COOL people will find him, taunt to trigger a MUCH faster charge, and then use a counter to catch the supercharged shot and return it to him a la Nero Buster counters in DMC4.

Full Power Big Ugly Thing & Eunectes: Remember Full Power Big Ugly Thing? No, not the one running on emergency fumes and jury rigged power sources, the actual fully geared version, powered by the airplane engine? The one that sent Gavial flying into the sky Team Rocket style? That one, that one should be some sort of secret fight. An actual brickhouse of immense, unfair power, only for the gamerest of gamers to cut their teeth with, punctuated with a final, high impact duel with Eunectes herself as the burning wreck and the originium fires make for a makeshift ring.

FrostNova: Legitimately, I think FrostNova would make That Moment in an action game. That Moment, That Boss, the one everyone remembers. Her skill set and aesthetic is supreme, the way ice can be used for both style and gameplay, alongside the actual emotional beat of throwing down with FrostNova as her life literally evaporates. Creating ice weapons that break with each attack just to have another one ready for the next swing, diverse moveset, dangerous at all ranges, highly mobile due to sliding on ice, giving the player high mobility as well (I love when boss gimmicks also can be used by the player in some way), there's just SO much one could do with a FrostNova fight, it'd probably my dream fight if done with love.

Endspeaker/Amaia: The concept of an ever-evolving boss with multiple forms has so much potential, TOO much potential, it's hard to fill those shoes, but if you do, imagine. In my dream of dreams, each phase/form of Endspeaker would grow resilient and even develop specific counters to your habits, in the shape of better dodge maneuvering against specific, high usage moves, and even counterattacks if you use some too much. The best way to go about this boss is to actually use your whole moveset, and even then, you want to ration specific parts of it depending on the phase. Plus, the latter forms of Endspeaker/Amaia are legitimately wicked looking and I think would look eerie and breathtaking in motion, with all those flowing parts constrasting with its sharp, long claws.

#kc5rings #arknights

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druidshollow · 7 months

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Am I allowed to ask who Dune is? Or is that a secret for later, love your art and your storys are super cool!

DUNE POST TIME DUNE POST TIME

im the "hahaha yes.... yes" sicko guy rn

dune is a character for a self indulgent iterators but the puppets can leave their bodies au and is entirely irrelevant to the actual corners group story, so shes not at all a secret and ill post everything about her lmao. ive actually only had her for *checks watch* three days so anything i say here is subject to possible change

as per usual, first its fast fact time

"The Gift" was a heavily encrypted data file that was sent en masse across the world to some iterators, almost entirely group seniors. it included two things; how to make mobile puppets, and how to create micro rarefaction cells (necessary to power these puppets). the information on building the puppets is widely understood and the only real requirements (besides raw material) are the iterator receiving the new body's blueprints (getting these can sometimes serve a real problem depending on the iterator's past relationship with the ancients), and a functional iterator can capable of powerful purposing and processing. (the host's body can work for this so long as the iterator with the Gift is there to help).

creating the micro rarefaction cells is a much better kept secret. the information is encrypted in a way so that the iterators who received the Gift cant speak about it (this functions similarly to taboo buffers), presumably because they could easily be used to make devastating weapons. but these cells are necessary for a mobile puppet to live, so the first piece of information is nearly useless without the second.

dune received a single cell for freeing herself with as well as the blueprints for mobile puppets from an iterator from a different group that she knew well. after freeing herself she stole cells from wandering iterators and freed some members of her group. this is her group when rivers and phrases run by them;

meet space, whimsy, forks and compass! space is the only one with real relevance i think

anyhow, there are still quite a few nearby iterators from dune's local group who need rescuing in her eyes, so her and her group intercept strangers and steal their cells and neuron flies, hoping to one day catch a developer (devs are the ones who received the Gift). unfortunately for phrases and rivers, phrases iiiiiis a developer!

dune had to have killded atleast four guys before she met phrases . thats some bad karma man arent you like an iterator or

she has fun with violence, part as a genuine cruel part of her personality, but i think mostly (at least at first) as a coping mechanism for the horrid things she was doing. her bloodlust was a front, and she adopted this violent personality she forged for herself the more time went by, until she had mostly lost herself and become encompassed by it.

(( thanks @nickeeree and @zarithial for letting me kill your kids!!! you guys submitted yr refs at like the exact same time so i was like eh fuck it dune can axe them both LMAO ))

dune's little group lives in an old city complex near a still in-tact iterator named vibrant sound. (sound is uninterested in being freed; instead he helps dune track down mobile iterators travelling through their territory)

thats basically all ive got, dune still has some development to go through but for a quick tldr she's an old group senior whos kidnapping and stealing people's hearts so she can give her family legs. amidst the heart stealing she began to enjoy the heart stealing and now violence is kind of her thing. if you support womens wrongs then you have to support adamant dune. sorry

#rain world oc #iterator oc #rw downpour #druid draw #oc posting #off string au #os dune #heheheheheheheh. hahahAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA #i fucking adore making these posts btw its so fun #sequential #guy post #edit december: this guy post is decently outdated now lol

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hamliet · 2 months

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Hello and good day, do you still make analysis of rwby? I think I asked this from someone already but I would like to hear your thoughts as well, what do you think are the parallels/foils/similarities of Yang and Adam, not including their dynamics with Blake? I've seen most metas regarding the differences of Bumbleby and Tauradonna (Blake and Adam's ship name) but I don't think I've seen one between Adam and Yang specifically. Thank you and hope this wasn't much.

Hi! I will always make analyses of RWBY. I miss it and need Volume 10 like yesterday!

I think the problem is that Blake does exist and is their connection. That said, of course Yang's arc is her own, and Blake's her own. Adam also has his own arc, but he is a supporting character as opposed to Yang and Blake (main characters), and he's primarily in the story to serve Blake's and to a lesser extent Yang's arcs. That's what supporting characters do. You can't vacuum Blake out of the comparison, because she's key there, and how they interact with her is indeed key to understanding their individual arcs.

I mean, you could say that Blake has a type. Lol.

Yang and Adam are both hot-headed, rush into action and think later types. Both channel anger towards power--Yang uses her anger to power her semblance and fight monsters, while Adam uses his anger to fight the injustice in the world.

Their anger isn't wrong, and in theory, channeling it towards helping is a good coping mechanism. The problem is that Adam loses sight of reality, wherein he is the world and what he thinks and feels is what he fights for, not merely for justice, because justice for Adam is what he's really about far more than what other faunus want, much less what humans want. Yang keeps her perspective as an individual in a worldwide battle, while also as an individual looking for the one person who has done her wrong (Raven) without making others suffer for it. Yet this comparison works better when you analyze with Blake, because Blake's view of justice takes into account competing needs and the reality of all human beings, faunus included.

You could also say that Adam works as a darker version of Yang, a version without restraint where she gives in to all her worst instincts and lets them run her life. Hence, while her semblance itself absorbs her pain, it is ultimately damaging her body; Adam actually does damage Yang's body by physically taking her arm.

Yet this analysis also becomes deeper when you factor Blake into it (and to a degree Sun and Ilia and Raven as well): Yang's response to being maimed is to shrink and run via staying put, like Blake's response is to run. They both try to bow out of the fight post-Beacon. Adam's response to losing something (or in this case, someone, aka Blake, whom he does see as an extension of himself rather than as her own person) is to obsessively fight and fight long past the point of sanity.

#ask hamliet #yang xiao long #adam taurus #blake belladonna #bumbleby

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mostlikelymortal · 26 days

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I’m generally pretty apathetic towards shows/books/etc that draw heavily on flashbacks to tell their story. There are so many novels that flip between the past and present, sometimes for chapters at a time; it provokes such a disjointed and frustrating tone because authors want to effectively write two stories at once, all for things to suddenly “make sense” at the very end. It’s a writing mechanic that I really wish people used less, or at very least, better. Which is why I was so taken aback by how much I adored it while watching Frieren.

I honestly thought a lot about the reasoning for why it worked in this instance - I could name a dozen IPs that used flashbacks in a similar manner to lesser effect. Whether it’s to try and evoke an emotion, without so much as informing ANYTHING new about the characters (ex that damned swing in Naruto), or telling a side-by-side story that informs plot points and character motivations, like uncovering a mystery one clue at a time. It strikes a delicate balance, because while you want to inform your audience about all this backstory and emotional baggage your characters have, it can VERY easily be overused to the point where the audience experiences a type of flashback vertigo. The last thing you want to do is make your watchers yawn and skip forward to see your protagonist perform their big attack without all the emotional buildup you were trying to set up. But with Frieren, nearly every flashback is done in a way that is succinct, to the point, and tries to get back to the story at hand as soon as possible. Sometimes it’s to set up a joke (mimics), sometimes it’s to foreshadow a detail to be drawn on that episode, or even an episode in the future (sour grapes), but they all have only so much narrative/emotional purpose to give us context and then move on. Sure, there are some longer looks back to explain more critical aspects of Frieren’s history/power levels/etc, but they reward the watcher either with new lore or character dynamics or whatever, and those ALL pay off in interesting ways.

And then there’s Himmel. We all know IPs that try and pull the dead lover card for a cheap emotional gut punch, but this story approaches it in such a refreshing way. Because, due to the fact that your titular character is actively trying to learn more about humans and be more present in their lives, you’re actively joining her in recalling memories that accomplishes that very thing, and the payoff of showing you just how Frieren now responds to situations informed by those memories feels naturally cathartic. You’re discovering right by her side that these people (Himmel especially) DID change her for the better, and that discovery evokes in the audience the same catharsis she feels whenever she quotes her old party’s wisdom, or smiles with the realization of how much they cared for her. And that’s a really refreshing feeling that you just don’t get in a lot of media.

This story is a wonderful thing for a lot of reasons, which a ton of people are all raving at better than I can honestly put to words. But I think it’s worth noting how it utilized flashbacks so often, but also so effectively. Maybe a lesson for writers who are hoping to convey a similar effect.

#sousou no frieren #frieren at the funeral #frieren: beyond journey's end #frieren #frieren spoilers

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ishcliff · 28 days

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If its ok whats your biggest peeve with modern persona

this is going to sound so unbearable, i think, but Hear Me Out

to sum it up, i just think the writing is extremely careless and sloppy, and the formula is lazy.

i think i can safely say the only modern persona game i consider myself a fan of is persona 3. haven't played reload, but i love what i have seen and also love FES and portable basically equally. but i think the existence of persona 3 as a good game thoroughly debunks the merit of "auteur theory" because it's only in spite of the misogynistic-tinted ineptitude of the two celebrated/recognizable directors that the experience is so memorable. imagine admitting in a book with your name on it that you could never be friends with a woman without getting romance or sex out of it, and saying this is why you made your protagonist a serial cheater. LOL

this type of careless attitude lacking self-awareness kind of permeates every modern entry. a controversial take of mine that i will live and die by is that the ending of persona 3 is sad because a depressed child with the power of the entire universe uses it to kill his/herself because it would make the lives of everyone around him/her better. i understand the intention of messianic imagery and mythology to it, but it is again just sort of a symptom of that carelessness that i associate the modern entries with.

then, persona 4 takes the narratively focused mechanics of persona 3 and makes it a series staple, thus weakening the entire point of why the calendar/daily life sim exists for persona 3 on a narrative level. i understand this was mostly done for crunch related reasons, but i would argue that makes this happening even worse.

but, at the very least, persona 4 does more with the calendar system tangibly than persona 5 vanilla does, where you essentially clear the main story in a single day and then get messages from everyone saying "yeah we gotta wait for (date) huh." having a major character be potentially in, essentially, a pointless coma for a month is egregiously stupid, among other narrative choices. i cannot speak for p5r because i have not played it, but persona 5 was so middling that i think i would have to lose a bet to go through the main game again just for a few hours of good content.

persona 3's messaging is at least cohesive enough to present a thesis: life is worth living even throughout the pain, so seize every day because one day it will end. but even then, that carelessness is still present with the point i raised above as well as the entirety of 10/4. the aftermath of shinjiro dying actively weakens the narrative because he specifically gave up on his own life – which, again, i understand is a gesture of gifting a future to someone in spite of the fact that even children will one day inevitably die, but shinjiro also just wanted to die himself, which is... exactly why nyx and erebus exist. yet his death is said to be "how it should be", and akihiko evolves his persona by developing even more maladaptive coping mechanisms than he already had. this isn't to say that shinjiro should have lived per se (though i do like p3p's act of quite literally giving him more time in the form of the pocket watch), but rather that the aftermath of his death should have been written from a different angle. his death is sad precisely because it was unnecessary.

persona 4 has absolutely fucking nothing to say. it makes no sense. messages about facing the parts of yourself you deny and overcoming the ideas others project onto you just mean absolutely fucking nothing when accepting their social conditioning as their "true self" is the conclusion of just about everyone. the only exception is fucking teddie, who is the only party member who has an arc that doesn't completely contradict the messages the game is allegedly trying to send out. you can also probably guess my opinion on the bigotry. the symbology makes no cohesive sense mythologically speaking, and the build up to the main antagonist... also doesn't make much sense. not as in it's difficult to understand, but because it's not fleshed out very well and the tie-ins to japanese mythology and folklore may as well be intangible because of how distant they are. it's just bad writing. idk what else to even say about it that isn't "this is a badly written game" over and over again.

persona 5's writing isn't exactly bad as much as it is overwhelmingly lazy. for example, what better way to rebel against "the establishment" by... recruiting a "good billionaire" into your party. it wants the aesthetics of punk without any of the work in the framing of the conflict. it turns real-world political debates into yet another war against god. worst of all, it's just boring (to me). i got nothing out of it. like, i don't even hate the game enough to go into even more detail, because that would imply some kind of passion. which is probably the worst thing i can say about anything, tbh.

so yeah. just laziness and shallowness that permeates every aspect of the presentation tbh.

(general disclaimer that i don't have any interest in debating at all LMAO i'm just yelling at clouds)

#i really am a fan of persona though i promise #atlus critical #persona critical #persona 3 spoilers #persona 4 spoilers #persona 5 spoilers #asks

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floareadeaur · 2 months

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I'm the anon who wanted to know about Avdotia. I forgot what it was called, but the story between her and Ferid (in bed iykyk) made me interested in her, and also your general analysis of OnS and Ferid. I was just wondering what her 'role' is in the OnS universe and the story between her and Ferid. I would like to know her story, but you can also choose any other way to introduce her to us. I am just curious about her in general.

Oh, that story.

I keep re-reading it because I, too, love how I portrayed their dynamic in that erotic writing. In fact, I have so many erotic writings with the two of them, or simply interaction, narratives.

I am glad that little scene got you interested in her character. It is something I consider, that in a well-written erotic moment, many real nuances of the characters involved are revealed. That is why in the erotic scenes between the two, we can have access to a "real Avdotia" and a "real Ferid".

That is why these erotic scenes are deeply centered on a certain philosophy. Because they are both troubled by deep, philosophical thoughts, which they consume in their moments of love.

If you are interested, I have many more writings with them. I just need a request, an interest, for me to translate them into English. I wrote them in Romanian, my mother tongue.

As for her role in the story, yes, I think it is interesting to portray. You know, my interest in OnS is not limited to Ferid, but in general to the whole philosophy of the world in which Ferid lives. That is why Avdotia's role in the story I created based on OnS, does not only revolve around the idea of her being Ferid's romantic interest, but the romantic feeling between her and Ferid is integrated into the philosophy of the universe.

I can say that her role is bigger, much bigger than what appears at first sight. But in general, as I thought about her, through her character I mostly express my question: what does it mean to be human in OnS, to believe in God, to love? How can you relate to the meaning of life in a world like OnS?

You see, the OnS world is created by a broken god, humans are born of vengeance and darkness. Thus, you cannot realistically look at this god and call him your moral guarantor, your ideal.

In the end, what can truly guide people in the OnS universe remains the genuine love they find in others and in themselves.

That is why love is a central point in Avdotia's character. And not just the romantic dimension.

The Greeks have a classification of love into four types: filia (friendship), sorginte (famillie), eros (romantic), and agape (unconditional love for God).

In the canon OnS story, very little is about eros. The story is about family love, and agape, the love for God. Or hate, because hate is the other facet of love.

The character of Avdotia brings together the human desire for all four of these types of love, from eros to agape, and how can all four coexist in one soul, or what tensions arise when the soul is asked to devote itself more to one type of love.

The ideal is that all four types of love must complement each other, that at least Avdotia needs them all, no matter how unforgiving her universe is.

Quite a lot of philosophy, right?

Could I say now anything concrete about her?

As a little fact, she is Russian ( eastern girl for our conqueror in the Far East ) and has three siblings, each with a different distinct role in the OnS universe. And she is a very dedicated Orthodox Christian in her faith.

Also, as a fun fact, her nickname for Ferid is a Russian adaptation of his name, "Feridushka" and she usually addresses him as "my dear Feridushka".

Also, since it is an universe where souls reincarnate, I can give a small hint that her real story spans many millennia. But I do not want to give all the information so mechanically now.

The idea with her and Ferid is this: how the presence of the other awakens in each the desire to look for themselves better. And with time, almost imperceptibly, even if both are caught up in deep questions about humanity, the world, they discover a genuine happiness in the love of the other, something contrary to the destroyed universe that both are painfully aware of.

How do you like it so far?

Forgive me if this is a chaotic presentation. I want to post a representative scene for Avdotia in the coming days. If you want I will also post more scenes between her and Ferid.

Of course, Avdotia is not the good fairy, the glass girl who sinks into the love of a " miserable wretch " like Ferid. Neither did his victim.

She is as human as he is, both with their own flaws in that flawed world. And both, two idealists, learn this.

I hope that was at least a little interesting! You can come back with questions, requests for headcanons, scenarios about Ferid in general!

Thank you very much for the appreciation shown to Ferid and the interest in my ideas!

I wish everyone a good day!

Finally, I leave here two aesthetics for Avdotia.

#ferid bathory #ferid bathory x original character #owari no seraph #seraph of the end #ons #sote #ferid bathory scenario #ferid bathory imagines

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coffeeandjournaling · 1 year

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Waffles for Esther

A solo journaling game by Pandion Games

Materials

game manual

a journal or other recording method

standard deck of cards, minus jokers

a set of polyhedral dice (or digital ones)

a coin

Premise

As the waitress of a small-town diner, your mission is to make every customer who sits down for a drink and a meal as happy as can be while trying to balance familiarity and professionalism juuust right. Among the regulars is Esther, who always comes in at the same time each day to order the same items from the menu: a coffee (one sugar and a splash of milk), the diner’s signature waffles (with two sliced strawberries and apple jam syrup on the side) and some hashbrowns (with extra ketchup). However, as you turn to deliver Esther’s waffles, she has gone missing – and as the pinnacle of customer service, you cannot have that! Embark on a mission to solve the mystery of Esther’s disappearance and ensure that she gets her waffles, preferably in one piece.

Mechanics

Waffles for Esther is based on a set of randomized prompts working together to help tell you a story, aided by a simple but effective skill check system.

You begin by setting up the game, giving your character a name and a bit of a background. It is also recommended that you create a personal connection to the town by drawing a map of the provided locations (or make up your own to change it up). Each round begins with you choosing a location to investigate and rolling on a random complication you encounter there. A skill check (Waitress and Detective, respectively a d12 and d10 at the beginning) determines your success – will you find a clue or will your inquiries into the mystery result in hilarious chaos? Clues are provided as a list of random items you draw from a standard deck of cards. The more clues you can gather during your hijinks, the better your chances of getting the conclusion right and solving the mystery, as the number of clues raises the value of the die you can roll in a final check at the end of your game.

While succeeding might seem easy at first, every time you fail a skill check reduces the value of the skill die you used – and you can only replenish your skills once! So, make sure to roll well…it’s for Esther, after all.

Thoughts and Examples from my Playthrough

What makes this premise work so well is the figure of Esther, our mystery woman, an almost blank canvas except for her meticulous order, and the backdrop of a small town – the perfect recipe for a cozy mystery adventure! Combined with some hilarious, charming and outrageous prompts, a set of clues that fit well together no matter their combination and a skill check system that had me on (a comfortable) edge at all times, this is an enjoyable ride for a night in or a few relaxing minutes each day. Clearly, some inspiration has been taken from your well-known mystery shows and books, think Nancy Drew and Miss Marple, with an emphasis on a light-hearted tone. I appreciate that safety advice has been added nevertheless – it’s good to remind players that they’re in charge of their game, even if it veers off into an unintended direction.

I’m honestly a little awkward still in roping prompts together, but should they not add up in the end, you are free to leave out clues you cannot link to the mystery (albeit you’ll miss out on raising the die value further for your final check). Even so, some of my fails were much funnier than my successes – a game that makes failing something you almost look forward to truly celebrates hijinks the right way. Some of my favourite results were:

being run over by the ancient mailman and taking an unintended bath in the town lake,

almost hitting the president of the book club over the head and promptly being excluded from the same,

vomiting into an urn at the funeral home…one that was already filled with some poor man’s ashes, and

ending up in a LARP, where my arrival prompted the story to turn into a time travel adventure.

The hints and hijinks system is, in my opinion, what makes this unique and entertaining. It’s not often that games find a way to utilize failed rolls in a way that makes sense for the premise of the game and gives the player more than a “whelp, that was nothing” to work with.

Although my Esther was a courageous woman who fought for the town’s well-being, your Esther might be a more nefarious one – who can say? The game leaves ample room for interpretation, handing you the tools to tell your own story without dumping all the hard work of finding ideas on you. Of course, the usual challenges of journaling games are present: ultimately, it depends on you how much fun you’ll have with the narrative. If you’re like me and have trouble coming up with connections, there’s always the option to play with someone else and bounce ideas off each other. Another fun variety might be to replace the default locations with some from your own town or simply make them more outrageous (an abandoned theme park, perhaps, or an animal shelter, a gay bar…).

Let’s not forget to mention the delicious little graphics included in the manual as well as the simple but effective layout. Can we appreciate the colour choices made? Everything serves the retro small-town vibe and I’m here for it. The versatility of the system has already spawned a game jam, which is always a good sign for if a system works or not. I think Pandion Games managed to make both a perfectly executed journaling game as well as an incredibly useful SRD and I hope to see and play more games in the same vein as Waffles for Esther for some time to come!

This might be your cup of coffee if...

you like to read and/or watch cozy mysteries.

you are not afraid of being proven wrong – and can revel in the funny consequences!

you long for something more casual and light-hearted to brighten up your day.

you appreciate a game with lower stakes, where you won’t have to save the world for once (but…you could, if you wanted to).

you want something with almost zero prep- and maximum hijinks-time.

You can get Pandion Game’s Waffles for Esther HERE on itch.io! Make sure to check out The Jester King’s Dance as well, a darker game based on the same mechanics, and the still running game jam to create your own contribution in the same vein!

#solo rpg #review #journal #cards #dice #mystery #slice-of-life #mid #beginner friendly #indie ttrpg #waffles for esther

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nerevar-quote-and-star · 4 months

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For the story ideas folder "You Drew Stars Around My Scars" have definitely caught my eye!

Also hope you are doing good, Elm!

First of all, Crys, hiiiiiii! I'm doing okay! I hope you're well! ✨ Second, I just want to thank you for asking about "You Drew Stars Around My Scars" and to apologize for the person I'm about to become.

Are you ready for it?

"You Drew Stars Around My Scars" is a The Elder Scrolls V/Baldur's Gate 3 crossover that will likely never see the light of day for several factors, such as the number of WIPs I have, my original novel, school, and, oh, the fact that I've never played BG3 My MacBook Air cannot handle those demands. DESPITE THE EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES!, I just think the game is neat and have been sucked into it in part by Astarion. Mostly Astarion . . . okay, entirely.

Background information: Ever since I started writing Keeping Count, I knew Bishop was lifted from Neverwinter Nights and that it was a D&D-based game. And I guess that's why someone mentioned Astarion as a palette cleanser to me a few months ago, shared universe and all. And my initial perception of the character was so cool that I vaguely entertained an alternative Keeping Count where Astarion shows up, seduces Leara from Bishop, and probably sexy stabs Bishop or something. And then I didn't really think about it again. For months.

Then my brain went back to it and Astarion and BG3 and I cried a bit when I realized that my laptop couldn't play the game. I'm fine. And you know what? @cosmermaid is right: Leara deserves a better companion than freaking Bishop. Also please forgive my minimal BG3/D&D knowledge, 95% of which I've absorbed since like last Monday ish.

SO! "You Drew Stars Around My Scars" features Leara getting picked up by the Mind Flayer ship post-Sovngarde and taken via dimensional travel to Faerûn where, following the crash, she joins the usual party on a quest to get rid of the parasites. This Leara is very specifically taken after the planned Chapter 15 of Keeping Count for Reasons. Can Leara use magic in Faerûn since she's not able to draw it from Aetherius? No idea. Can she Dragon Shout? Also no idea. Transdimensional magic mechanics are weird. Regardless, Leara probably mentions something about being Dragonborn and gets weird and confused looks because her definition of Dragonborn is totally different from that in the Forgotten Realms. Linearly, I have no idea what would happen, but overall, Leara and Astarion both suffer trauma from following people who hurt them and they have complicated relationships with sex. They could have what could be a very cathartic relationship. Or I think so, anyway. Also, I kinda want to know if vampires react differently to the Dragonblood.

Symbolism in the story could heavily involve stars and light. Leara means "Light of the Sea" while Astarion means "Little Star". Leara is dependent on the stars for her magic but she's lost them, while Astarion wants to walk in the light even after the parasite is gone. There's no balance and it has to be found. They're both so cold and have lived in the shadows for a long time. There are dark versions of themselves they don't want to be anymore.

There's the possibility that, given her background in the Blades and Dominion, Leara might see through Astarion's mask in Act I. But she'd end up helping Astarion (and probably not giving on that she's on to him until later) because she's a bleeding heart. Two other very important things about this underwhelming but brain-rotting story: First, Astarion wouldn't ascend. We would need a Leara Disapproves sticker because she would not be for Astarion doing that. The second thing is, well, since motherhood is an extremely important part of Leara's character, I did pick out a name for a possible child. If Leara and Astarion had a daughter, her name would be Ilmarien, derived from Quenya, Ilmarë, meaning “starlight”.

Because after all this time, Tolkien elves still make the most sense to me.

#i am not tagging his character in this because I am too embarrassed #it is taking all my willpower to tell myself that sharing this is okay and that I'm not being too much or annoying #it's okay i felt the same way when I was fixated on legolas and loki as a teen I just figured i'd have outgrown it oh well #oc: leara roseblade #azura's ask box

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justanotherwildfangirlsstuff · 4 months

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Percy Jackson Disney+ series Ep. 1 & 2 Review (SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT)

This is WAY better than the movies and thank god for that. Now this is not entirely book accurate, and while I do like in general what they have altered, there were some things that made me go

I am very glad that they did a 2 episode release because that first episode would’ve probably turned folks away from it, second episode was much better in pacing.

Spoilers below

Ep. 1

First off, I love how they named the episodes after chapters in the books, such a fun reference, but it doesn’t make all that much sense given a little those titles actually have to do with the episode. This was such an exposition dump that it kind of made it clear that the show is for the book fans and not kids. They were clearly trying to get the main world building out of the way so they could get to the action parts of the story.

I really disliked how they handle the Dodds scene. Compared to the Dodds in the movies, I think that actually looked better than what this was in terms of character design- The fury in the TV series looked goofy and not scary at all. Aside from character design, the mist only does so much, and I disliked how Dodds attacked Percy out in the open like that since even with the Mist, it would’ve still look like someone attacking or some kind of fight happening. In the books, Grover and Chiron clearly knew Dodds was some kind of monster, but didn’t know for certain what kind. In the show when they say that the Mist was covering up Dodds too well that made no sense since both Grover and Chiron are monsters so the mist wouldn’t affect them. The Mist only affects mortals, which is why demigods are susceptible to the mist, but can kind of force themselves to see through it. On that note, I love the sequence of young Percy seeing things, and the mist then making it look like some thing else. That part was well done, and it made sense as to what it was being changed to such as that mechanical golden rhino being changed into a yellow dump truck. The Dodds scene took away from that unfortunately.

Also, Gabe was really docile in this. in the books, Gabe was a piece of shit who no one felt bad for once he was turned into a statue. Here this man says please and even tries to connect with Percy and it’s really weird. Yeah he’s obviously a deadbeat, but I don’t think this dude deserves to die right now. I hope they remedy this later because I don’t see the necessary hostility we need for later on.

Ep. 2

This was way better. Still some exposition dumping, but it was better paced and more natural. Dionysus is hilarious, great choice of actor and great attitude. Not giving the “I hate children” vibe but still sassy and fun. In my opinion, Grover being the one to figure out that Sally’s mom is still alive takes away from Percy‘s character. In the books, Percy used his knowledge of the Greek myths to figure out what he was going to do in the underworld and why he needed to go there. Here I do like that he was doing so much to figure out who his father was and how he needed more motivation to go on the quest because it makes sense. Also, seeing so much resentment against his dad shows how easy it could’ve been for Percy to turn out the same way, Luke would. on that note, the introduction of Luke, Annabeth, and Clarisse was really what I enjoyed about this episode the most. In the books, Luke is labeled as a friend, but we really don’t see too much genuine friendship there, except for the giftgiving and a few small talks. I like that they have Luke showing Percy around and helping him try to find out his talent instead of Annabeth, because it would really make it seem like they were actual friends, making the betrayal hurt all the more. This works especially well because right now, Luke is one of Percy‘s first and only friends at camp since he is still struggling with Grovers earlier betrayal. Annabeth stalking him was weird, but does kind of make sense for her to observe before making a move. I like that Percy doesn’t go into the water with the fight at the creek with Clarisse and instead it is Annabeth who pushes him in to confirm her suspicions. It makes more sense since the average person will try to stay out of the water in a fight. However, the fact that Percy is able to fight these people off without ever touching the water is weird since right now he doesn’t have any current training, except for his one lucky encounter with the Minotaur. Having said all this, this episode was way better than the first, but there is STILL NO ORACLE? AGAIN? what the heck guys??? the Oracle is technically the most important side character because it is what gives out quests, prophecies, and what Rachel Elizabeth Dare turns into. Right now, just being like “well Percy off to the underworld you go!” makes no sense to me. I hope the oracle makes an appearance in the next episode, otherwise I will be pissed that the Oracle got snubbed AGAIN.

Also, who tf was that dryad with Grover? Was that supposed to be Juniper? Or his mom 💀. If Juniper, shouldn’t she be looking around Grover’s age cuz trees also age slower? Really not sure who this is supposed to be

Overall acting

I am so sorry, but I don’t know if it’s because it’s the first couple of episodes, but there is not good synergy between Sally and Percy 😭 Obviously, each person can have their own opinion so if you like them, that’s great but I felt like I was watching actors read lines and not actually…act? This did not feel like a mother and son duo, same thing with Grover and Percy. the actors got a little better by the end of episode two, but they still don’t have a lot of facial or realistic reactions, especially whenever Percy is being introduced to something that would theoretically completely destroy his worldview. he looks like a blank slate 😭 I’m sure it will get better later on, but sometimes it really took me out of it with how stale the acting was. On that note, so many of the actors did such a good job!

in terms of my favorite to least favorite ones (so far in terms of character portrayal), it is as follows:

Clarisse, Dionysus, Annabeth, Luke, Chiron, Grover, Percy

I really want to emphasize how much I LOVE the actor who plays Clarisse. They did SUCH A GOOD JOB. I was originally a lil hesitant cuz book Clarisse is supposed to be super buff but this was truly 😚👌. Could really feel the scorn and meanness. That scream when her spear is broken? Look of rage to letting Percy go when the game ended? HOLY SHIT, that was some DAMN GOOD ACTING

Obviously, I am being quite harsh here, but I do have high hopes for this series and I’m sure as the actors work more together, they will end up having better chemistry with one another. This is just first impressions so far.

#tv shows #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #percy pjo #pjo fandom #pjo series #percy series #pjo disney+#pjo tv show #grover pjo #pjo #annabeth pjo

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bikwin5 · 6 months

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"ELLY'S ADVENTURE" notes and retrospective

It's been almost a month since I released "ELLY'S ADVENTURE," my first finished game in quite a while. I kind of dropped it without any context so I want to talk about it a bit. This is going to be a long post.

If you haven't played it then GO DO THAT CLICK ON THIS NOW!!!!! Just now I uploaded a recent 1.2 version that fixes a couple more bugs. I highly recommend you read this after at least beating the main game.

THE ORIGINAL

The first thing I want to reveal about Elly's is that the characters and setting did not begin with this project. How scandalous!!! They were actually conceived for a different project that I started thinking of as early as the end of 2015. This was also a game maker project, but it was much larger in scope than what Elly's Adventure became. It was going to be a "METROID MANIA" type game that many indie devs love to make.

The characters themselves didn't change that much in terms of roles. Elly was still the protagonist with Natalie as a supporting role, and I even had the idea of a hard mode where you play as Natalie back then. The plot was that there was like a magical item that got stolen and Elly and Natalie accidentally end up in a situation where they get recruited by the military and sent to take it back from a factory being used as a front for a base of very evil operations. The tone was still kind of funny but a little more serious than Elly's Adventure.

These are the earliest digital drawings of Elly and Natalie from 2015 and they look like FUCKING DOGSHIT!!!!!! SOmehow worse than I remember. I'm glad I learned to draw a bit better if nothing else.

Chandra was also a part of this project but she was not the main villain, rather she would have been the main henchman you fight multiple times throughout the course of the game, getting new attacks each time. She was to work under a character who I called MINERVA, THE CYBER-QUEEN who was to be the main antagonist. Chandra was more of a funny character who displayed moments of incompetence while the Cyber-Queen was more serious. I never really settled on a finalized design for the queen and I didn't even really like her that much in retrospect so Chandra ended up being the main antagonist of Elly's Adventure due to its more lighthearted nature. The enemies were also always meant to be weird round robots with green eyes, and I reused some designs for Elly's Adventure.

Old sprite sheets of Elly and the enemies. Was never really satisfied with Elly's animations.

Yulie was also part of the original project but she was to not make any physical appearances. Rather she was to give hints and bits of lore from pieces of her writing you would find around the factory, from a time when she worked there and slowly discovered that something sinister was going on. Surprisingly Yulie was never actually intended to be Elly's mom from the start until I started thinking of her being a support character in Elly's Adventure and I was like wait why should she be helping these kids... well her and elly both have blonde hair so she's her mom now LOL

This project never had a proper name, I think I also considered calling it Elly's Adventure but I didn't want to exclude Natalie from it so I was thinking of names like "Sky Diamonds" but it doesn't take place in the sky so that's stupid. I got as far as laying out the whole game and getting basic controls and some of the opening area down but that was about it. Truthfully I was never really satisfied with how it controlled or the art direction I was going with and making a metroid type game that lasted several hours felt so daunting I didn't really want to work on it anymore after a point.

Here are some old gifs of what it looked like. The main gameplay idea was that Elly was going to have a propulsion as a double jump that could be upgraded, sort of like the booster 2.0 from Cave Story. That idea ended up working its way into Adventure as a powerup. There was to be other mechanics like shot upgrades and secondary items that would do fun things but I never got around to that.

THE INSPIRATIONS

Now that I've spent long enough talking about Elly origins I can get to the actual game that, if you are reading this, most likely played. While it uses the same characters and setting as the last project, Elly's Adventure has a much smaller scope and style of gameplay. I am not a huge fan of the word "inspiration" something about it pisses me off. But with everything there was stuff that Elly's was inspired by.

First off only the most keen of observers may have realized that Elly's Adventure very much emulates the look and feel of titles played on a certain handheld system. It is the GAME BOY and it's one of the greatest things ever made. It has TI-84 ass graphics and sold a hundred million. I think the Game Boy might be the most rudimentary electronic game device to ever be so popular and I love it for that.

What's really ironic is that I actually did not have a Game Boy growing up YES that's right my first system was the Game Boy Advance. I know it's backwards compatible but I didn't know that as a kid and the only way I knew about games was either seeing them directly in the store or the sears catalog. And I loved Yoshi so much that I wanted a GBA specifically for the Super Mario Advance games with Yoshi in them. I enjoyed my Yoshi's Island port very much. So any original Game Boy title I've played I was either a teen or older since that was when I discovered the magic of emulation.

Anyway this is getting too anecdotal so I should start talking about the specific games that actually did inspire Elly's: Mole Mania and Link's Awakening.

MOLE MANIA is a puzzle game released by Nintendo in 1996. No one bought it because the Game Boy was dying and Pokemon had yet to breathe life into it again. People like to call it "Miyamoto's forgotten masterpiece" and then not say anything else about it. But it is legitimately a very good puzzle game that manages to do so much with so little and it's surprisingly difficult too. Each level is a series of one screen puzzles where the mole has to get the big ball into the goal, like this:

I got this from a youtude video so it has the cool Super Game Boy border. Anyway Muddy Mole can go underground to get to places and push and pull the ball around and all sorts of stuff. It's all designed in a very competent and concise way and I love everything about it except for the bonus stages and final boss. It feels unique among Nintendo games because it feels like they almost never do pure puzzle games that aren't some sort of falling block variant.

Of course Elly's is not a puzzle game so you might be wondering why I'm even bringing this one up. I felt compelled enough by the concise puzzle design that I wanted to make a Game Boy styled thing myself, something that I was considering for a while. I thought the idea of moving from screen to screen and clearing everything out would be fun. So I ended up digging up the handful of characters I had hardly thought about in years and set out to make a game with them.

Funny enough, even back in the day I was considering making a Game Boy styled game with Elly as a sidescroller. The idea was that it would have been a primer before jumping into a big game. It would have been something really short, like only 20 minutes, and the only characters would have been Elly and the Queen. But I didn't really get into it, not even writing down any ideas. So I suppose I was itching to do something with the GB style all along.

LINK'S AWAKENING is a much less obscure Game Boy game, and is probably the most well cherished GB title ever that isn't Pokemon. I went and played it shortly after Mole Mania because I wanted ideas for Elly, which was to be a small funny game of action. It wasn't purely for research, I just realized it was one of the few Zelda titles I hadn't played yet and I figured now would be a good time.

Of course it's a very good game. It uses the Game Boy's capabilities to its fullest and the color version enhances it even more. The overworld is made to feel bigger than it really is and the dungeons are honestly a lot more elegant that what Link to the Past had to offer. But mainly the thing I took away from this was level design stuff that could translate to Elly's well. I think STAGE 10 with the waterfalls was a good example of stuff I took away from this. A lot of the background graphics were also inspired by Zelda, such as the cliffs and castle walls.

did you know between DX and the remake its impossible to find any good screenshots of the original GB link's awakening... anyway just imagine this screenshot in monochrome and that's pretty much everything the desert stages were referenced from.

The Kirby series ended up being another source of inspiration, despite not taking many gameplay influences but rather style influences. Kirby is a funny little guy with awesome power and Elly could be considered similar, maybe even a ripoff if you think about it. I took a lot of ideas from the GB games in particular but moreso the spinoffs than anything. I think Kirby's Block Ball is a neat little title that's probably the best you can get with Game Boy breakout. Stuff like the structure of the game and the concept of an Extra Game were also taken from Kirby.

There are a couple of other minor GB titles that served as inspiration. Painter Momopie is a Japan-exclusive game about a little witch that has to paint floors. It's not an amazing game but it's cute and small. Elly's sprite, which was the first thing I drew for the game, was in fact based off of Momopie, and that's how I set the graphical style in motion.

There's also a game called Out of Gas which has these full screen cutscenes with fucked up looking people in it, which I tweeted about once.

I don't remember how I found out about it. This pic stands out to me a lot because there is not a single other game on the Game Boy that looks like this. This was dated May 10th and the notepad file where I started writing ideas for Elly's Adventure was also May 10th. So it's very much possible that this somehow ended up pushing me to make the entire game LOL

Moving on to Elly's Adventure

As implied by the last section Elly's Adventure started development around May of last year. This was probably my fastest turnaround from concept to development ever for a game idea. Somehow I still have the first things I wrote in the notepad file here unchanged:

There is a LOT more to the file than this but also I want to show that my process of making big projects is stupid as shit. Just take a big notepad file and start putting things in it until it gets so big I have to make a separate one. It's not the best but it works for a one person team.

You might also notice I intended the game to be about 30 minutes long, which did not happen as now it's more than twice that length. This is something called "scope creep" and it happens with every video game ever made by an ambitious indie dev. Honestly not sure how I intended "20-25 stages" to only take 30 minutes. Regardless scoping as small as I did I expected this project to take maybe a year and it ended up only taking a year and five months!!!!! I probably could have done it sooner if other projects and real life things like moving didn't get in the way.

Regardless it was relatively smooth to get Elly's Adventure off the ground. Since earlier last year I was already playing around with making a prototype of a different top down game that was puzzle based (don't count on me picking it up again) it wasn't too hard to do something similar on a smaller screen size, with already existing characters. I had some ideas that I scrapped early on like a score counter and a timer and decided to make Elly's a simple action game where you are simply focused on destroying everything you see.

This video is the earliest footage of Elly's after only a couple of weeks. The music was added by me, it wasn't in the game yet.

There's only one other bit of gameplay that's different than usual and that's the bonus stages, those were added fairly late in devlopment. I had the idea because I realized that a handful of Yulie locations was a pretty slow way of gaining 1ups by itself. I kind of forget they're in the game until I play it myself.

Truthfully I made Elly's as small as I did because I really did want to have a whole game out there that felt complete and polished. My Kirby games of the past might be funny but they're derivative works and VERY unpolished. With Elly's I wanted to give myself as much time as possible to refine a smaller game and I think based on reception it turned out alright.

THE DEVELOPMENT

Elly's Adventure was made in Game Maker Studio 2, a platform that I used because I had prior experience. Is it the best platform for making games? Honestly not sure. It's ok but it's obviously built off of an old codebase, much to its detriment. But I think Game Maker is very good at making 2D games that you can compartmentalize into a series of rooms, and Elly's was perfect for that. So I ended up doing that instead of learning GB studio or something because I didn't want to deal with actual GB limitations.

The development timeline of Elly's Adventure I ended up splitting into three phases. The first phase was to send the game to a couple of friends in secret and see what they think, purely as a proof of concept. The only feedback I was looking for was confirmation it was a good idea for a game. This was about three months in development and it had stages 1-10 without the stage 10 boss or the bonus stages, something I hadn't even conceived of yet. I got enough feedback that I knew I wanted to continue with the project.

The second phase was the longest, spanning like nine more months. This was the bulk of creating the game's content, as well as stuff like me moving that got in the way. I was more open about the game at the end of this phase and I sent it to a number of friends who are listed as "Generous Playtesters" in the credits. Special thanks to them, again, for doing this. I had more people than I expected willing to give me feedback for free. It took them a while, I think because I ended up sending it out the same time that fucking Zelda came out.

The "demo" I sent out was in fact the full game in a less polished state. All 20 stages, the intro and ending, and even a less refined options menu was all in. I did this because I really wanted the whole game to be polished as much as possible, especially since the last big game I put out (PEKSCTG2) was a hellscape tested only by me. Most reception was actually pretty positive and I think the thing I ended up changing the most apart from bug fixes were the bosses. I think all of them had a bit of rework to adjust their difficulty. This build actually did not include the Extra Game you get from finishing the main story, so all those stages actually are an untested hellscape. Have fun!

The third phase went from May to now, taking longer than I expected. Pikmin 4 coming out in that time didn't help either. When making the extra game it turns out making 20 harder versions of the existing stages takes a while!!! It was that + refining pretty much everything else and getting it ready for release. Speaking of level design here is a little snippet of the MS Paint type stuff I did for that:

Later I would put the actual sprites in instead of these shitty placeholders. Note that some rooms are not the same as they are in the finished game, I made some changes on the fly. That's kind of a fun thing of working by yourself, you don't have to like tell a separate design person to do something if you want changes.

Sometimes I see sentiment that making a project is easiest at the start and really hard in the middle but for me it's the opposite, at least with game dev. Getting something off the ground beyond just an idea is hard but making the content is honestly pretty smooth sailing. Then you have the end where the last bit of the game is most of the work. It's a bit painful having to comb through such a big project multiple times to make sure everything is there and running. Despite this project taking way longer than expected I'm still glad to finally get something done and out there.

THE GWAPHICS

If there is something between 2015 and now I have done a lot it's drawing. I'm not exactly an accomplished artist but I think a lot of my stuff has improved in past years. Or at least that's what they say. Taste is subjective after all.

However I didn't do very much pixel art for a while. Especially not anything with a palette as limited as the Game Boy. So making all the graphics for Elly's was something of an exercise in trying to figure out how this pixle art shit works all over again.

Almost everything in Elly's is drawn by me. A few images are actual things shrunken and convered to 4 colors but otherwise it's all me. And as it turns out drawing all the assets for you own game takes a long freakin time even when they're this simple!!!! While no one sprite took very long apart from bigger ones like bosses it all adds up to a lot of hours.

Not all of those hours are on Elly's but still. I think doing the tilesets took up a lot of time, in particular the playroom area because I was insistent on including a bunch of funny easter eggs and references. I can't explain all of them here because it would take much too long, but let it be known that this thing before the third boss is called "The Fumpship" and has like 3 layers of inside joke to it.

As for the character designs they were simple enough that transcribing them into Game Boy sprite form was actually pretty simple. Elly and Natalie in particular I had to remove the symbols on their clothes since it wouldn't translate in sprites.

You already saw this at the start of the post. These are character sketches I did around the start of development. Note that Natalie's outfit color is different, later I made it lighter to make her more distinguishable from Elly in-game. There are very few "concept art" things for Elly's, most of it I started with doing the sprites.

As for the enemy sprites since the ones I already had (see sprite sheet 10 pages above) already worked pretty well in this setting so I used that as a base for other enemies. The "Big Boy" enemies in particular took a while to figure out their sprites but I do like how they turned out. My favourite enemies are the exploding dolls, so much that I even used them as the game's icon.

THE COADS

This section is very technical and vague so you can skip it if you want. I'm something of a programmer... I think. I don't talk about it that much. A lot of what I know is not exactly suited for game dev BUT I did have a lot of residual Game Maker Language knowledge from my past projects. And there was a lot to learn too, since this was my first time using GMS2 in particular.

Truthfully since Elly's is kind of simple there wasn't THAT much that was that difficult programming-wise... I think the hardest shit for me is doing collisions and stuff. Collisions for Elly weren't too bad but for certain enemies like the grinders it was a pain in the ASS!!!!! That's why getting any game off the ground is hard for me, trying to make the groundwork for everything is daunting because I'll worry if it's good enough to accomodate the rest of development.

I think a lot of the challenge was not from getting things to work but rather having everything neat and organized. When you're making a game there is a lot of stuff to keep track of and even sometimes with the way I organized things I get lost in the game maker asset browser. I also made sure to comment things a lot... If you ever decompile the game i'm sorry if my comments are weird and embarassing.

The reason why I'm even bringing this aspect up is because in my past projects, particularly Pik's Epic Kirby Sprite Comics 2 I didn't know SHIT about programming nicely or efficiently and a lot of it was brute force via if statements. I did not want that!!! So with Elly's I made it so that adding new things like powerups and enemies was as easy as possible and I think that ended up making the project bearable.

This was also my first time making certain things like an options menu which was kind of strange and daunting as Game Maker does not have anything build in for menus. You just kind of have to do it from scratch. I was really insistent on having remappable controls in particular because I feel like that's essential for PC games these days. Also I enjoyed making the map system a lot, which was something I only added late in development. It uses a very hacky method of finding hard-coded arrays for each stage and drawing boxes for them but it works.

THE BOSSES

I think bosses in video games are a very novel thing on how inefficient they are for such a capital-driven industry. You have these things that take up a lot of effort and development time and are usually a small part of gameplay but they get made anyway because they look cool and also maybe you can use them as marketing or something. Maybe "boss fights" can be viewed as a disruption of power making its way into the hands of the workers? Ok I'm just talking out of my ass here.

There are not a lot of bosses in Elly's and they don't last very long but I wanted to discuss them anyway because there are some fun things to say about them. The first thing is that I wasn't even sure if Elly's was going to have more than one boss at first. Then I came up with the idea for the first boss (Death Orb) and started getting ideas from there. Fun fact, the Death Orb is named and modeled after the enemy (obstacle?) from Warframe:

I honestly thought it was really obvious but no one, not even my Warframe-playing friends seemed to notice. Anyway I just wanted a very simple boss that doesn't move with one attack. For a long time it didn't have the beeping sounds that telegraph its moves and therefore was very difficult to avoid the second phase without getting hit at least once! It was a bit bulb shit once I realized so I did that.

The second boss is a fish and funny enough, the only surviving boss idea from the original project. The major bosses were planned to be massive weapons named "______ Guardian" and the fish is loosely based off of an underwater boss idea I had back then. Of course the current day Water Guardian fight is not anything like that, and instead likes to flop around. Fun fact, the boss was a lighter grey color for most of development until I decided to make it dark so the weak point was more visible. I also changed the second phase movement late in development so it would flop less, making the grenade powerup feel more useful against it. The way it acts in Extra Game is a lot closer to how it originally was.

The third boss is a hat and is largely based off of "WIZ" from Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. Wiz is just a clone of Paint Roller from Kirby's Adventure but I thought the design was neat enough I even based the intro animation off of it. I also really wanted to tie into the toy theme and the doll enemies so I figured why not a funny magician doll? This boss used to always spawn in the middle after a cycle but then people would spawncamp it so I made it appear in multiple spots instead.

^^^WIZ

The Pillar Knight boss is honestly not that hard for how late it is in the game but I made it to just be a surprise at the end of a boss rush. I don't have that much to say about it really, I based the name and greatshield off of the Tower Knight from Demon's Souls. The big stomp it does in the second phase used to summon a single bouncy and nothing else but that was kind of pathetic so I changed it to falling rubble instead.

The "Antlion" final boss was actually a boss idea I had early on, possibly for the second or third worlds. It's kind of similar to the "head and hands" type bosses you see in so many Nintendo games. It was moreso going to be based off of the "Giant Enemy Spider" from Jerma's car game video. Then I figured that having the biggest boss for last would be a good idea. Funny enough this was the boss I received the least feedback on, most people seemed to like it. It was also a bit of a pain to test because I had to ensure that all 5 powerups would be viable, but I'm pretty satisfied with the end result. The second phase where Chandra shows up in a pod is very much based off of Eggman fights from Sonic, I'm sure you can tell. Something about seeing a little round flying thing is very satisfying.

THE SOUNDS

The sounds and music in Elly's are not mine. It's why I released it for free on itch instead of bothing to publish it on Steam or anything. Why am I even writing about this? I think that there is some fun to be had from digging through existing sound or music libraries and picking the best ones.

The style of Elly's is very upbeat happy scrimblo type game as you can tell, so I went out of my way to pick songs that fit that. The first levels having Mole Mania's first world music is pretty emblematic of what I wanted. I wanted to pick songs that were not necessarily obscure but not too well known so I made an effort specifically to avoid Mario, Zelda, Pokemon. Then I broke the rule because I liked the Link's Awakening nightmare battle enough and that's not exactly a super recognizable iconic song. I think the style of the music is not always consistent, as you can tell with the Belmont's Revenge music in later levels, but I tried to keep to songs that I felt fit the game well enough.

The sounds were taken from various Kirby games mostly because those are the easiest to rip, as those games have individual sound tests. With everything being kind of Kirby inspired I also thought it was the best decision. I think if maybe I were to ever do a Steam release I would hire some bastard to do a GB soundtrack and play around with making sounds myself but I DIDNT FEEL LIKE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THE LAST PART

There is so much more I could say about the old project and the finer details of development but I think this post is already long enough.

Elly's is not something that I think is ever going to go viral. It did get more attention than I expected for the first few days but it's petered out by now. Elly's is not meant to be anything groundbreaking or revolutionary. It's not going to turn heads all over the world. It's not going to make me the new Tony Box and that's OK. I wanted Elly's to evoke the sort of feeling of finding a weird cartridge in a Gamestop bargain bin of the past or maybe a thrift store of the present. The feeling of digging through an archive of every Game Boy ROM ever and finding something refreshingly decent after playing 10 crunchy janky sidescrollers in a row.

QUICK LAST MINUTE EDIT: Apparently Elly's Adventure was featured on a Hungarian news site??? Not what I expected but I'm still honored to be mentioned by a publication.

I don't really know what's next for game dev from me. I am not interested in breaking into the industry, I just do this for fun. I've considered doing more things with Elly, which may or may not be in the same style. I've also considered ideas with other characters, and even using things that aren't Game Maker. Maybe in another 8 years there will be something. Keep an eye out!

Overall I am satisfied with Elly's Adventure. I mostly enjoyed making it. I don't know if I would call it my magnum opus. It doesn't have the same sort of unfiltered eccentricity of my Kirby things and it's hardly character or story driven enough to leave much of a lasting discussion. To be honest I liked making a game with no dialogue because in the cases where I do have a more character driven game idea I think about the funny dialogue more than I do the actual game. Regardless I think we can all agree that Elly's Adventure is, and always will be, a small funny game of action.

if you bothered to scroll to the end of this post here is a FUN GAME TIP: on stage 1 from the starting position go one screen right and investigate the rightmost flower on that screen. this can be helpful for those wishing to see the 1CC screen.

#gamedev #elly's adventure

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purpletyrant · 1 year

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re: kittys imaginary sburb session

or, "this mspfa has been tagged as 'nonsburb' for years, these are all the scraps youre getting so let me just overexplain them now in a post that would be better suited for patreon if a KITTYQUEST patreon was something i was remotely interested in maintaining"

now, i know what youre thinking: didnt KITTYQUEST just get its climactic upd8 featuring major character death and a huge mood shift? shouldnt you be talking about that??

well, sure, maybe ill do that someday in the hypothetical KITTYQUEST retrospective video i have floating around in my head. it took long enough to finish - two and a half months, that is. but this panel alone required me to take a ton of personality quizzes while roleplaying as each one of kittys friends, so god damn it im going to analyze all of this right now. read below the cut to learn all about how kitty and her friends (and cousin) would disastrously fail in a doomed sburb session that was never meant to happen

in the most recent upd8, kitty explores the shell of a dream bubble that hasnt been taken in by the black hole yet. this black hole is the one caused by the collapse of the green sun, with lord english at its center. the black hole is devouring everything, as ramona? explains, including the furthest ring, every universe created by sburbs many sessions, and the entirety of paradox space. its an awfully long process, and kittys earth c that we know and love isnt in any imminent danger, but ramona? indicates that many alternative timelines are meeting their end as we speak. in the epilogues, the black hole deposits its garbage onto earth c. in KITTYQUEST, we know as much about where the black hole ends as we do in real life. personally, i view it more as like a Big Crunch. the opposite of the Big Bang, where quadrillions of years from now the last atom of the last molecule will be erased. take from that what you will - KITTYQUEST has never been a story that is interested in grand cosmic abstract ideas. its priorities are much more pedestrian and intimate. who cares about the ultimate fate of the universe when these middle schoolers over here are feeling kinda sad?

ramona? is the vergil to kittys dante, taking her on a journey through hell as kitty processes the traumatic deaths of her parents. a dream bubhell, if you will, the contents of this dream bubble merge the familiar with the imaginary. we see pieces of scenes we recognize from homestuck, but new scenes are introduced as well. most notably is the land kitty wakes up in - the Land of Unicorns and Fractals, a vaporwave dreamscape torn straight from her sburban account. someone once asked why kittys planet isnt a land of Frogs since shes a self-assigned Space player. well, sburban is an mmo. thousands of players cooperate in a massive medium, so not every Space player needs a Forge. but really, this was foreshadowing that kitty is pretending to be a Space player. she wants to be a Rogue of Space because it makes her feel more equal to her parents. but she isnt one, and the name of her land gives it away very early. in addition to LOUAF, we see illusions of ramonas planet, the Land of Wax and Altars, and the lands and god tier forms of her ghostly friends. neither kitty nor ramona? react to these illusions, suggesting that only we the viewer can see them. like ramona?, the reality of them is nebulous. its more likely that they are not real ghosts, but illusions created by the somehow still-functioning mechanics of the dream bubble. like memories of lusii and loving parents, these projections are not real. or perhaps they used to be real - and they are remnants of an alternative timeline doomed from the start

kitty will never play sburb, and she isnt meant to. sburb will only be played on earth c once, by caliborn a billion years from now. anything else goes against the continuity established by homestuck. as such, a session played by these kids will never succeed. but what if the cult of the witch planned better? what if they werent all bark and no bite? what if kitty was thrust into sburb properly, and what if the cult cared enough about her friends and family to ensure she had other players? this is the result we would get. lets take a closer look

Nat Eglish | Sylph of Space | Prospit Land of Dust and Frogs Denizen: Echidna

yeah you heard me right, nat stole kanayas classpect right out from under her. what gives, isnt her family historically tied to the heir of breath? well, take it up with the quizzes that diagnosed her with kanaya disease. i dont know how to classpect, you want me to do it MYSELF? get real. besides, it figures that someone linked to june through her ancestor would be a space player

nat is a go-getter, her mix of interest in both STEM and the arts makes her a formidable student and an excellent sburb player. shes the perfect candidate for the frog breeding task, because even though its a little more organic than the science shes used to, shes great at planning things out and being organized about it. LODAF is a planet originally covered in desert. its frogs are in a fossilized/mummified state. the LODAF we see in this upd8 has been overtaken with ocean and lilypads, indicating that she was successful in terraforming her planet and initiating the frog breeding process. great job nat, we never doubted you for a second. i wonder what her interaction with echidna was like? nat is a pretty easy going individual who steers clear of drama, so maybe she and her denizen were able to strike a deal. why kill a giant snake when you can work together?

nat spends a lot of her early session trying to spur her friends into action. as we will come to find out, the welfare of the other planets is directly tied to her own. so nat is tasked with being the one in the group project who reminds everyone to do their own parts of the assignment. this is hard for nat because she is so laidback by nature. being pushy isnt her thing - she likes to be perceived as cool headed. if her friends dont get it together, nat will risk having to crack her knuckles and start laying down the law

as a space player, her helper is the knight in the session, who loves to be helpful more than anything else. you know him, you love him, its....

Nornsa Moirai | Knight of Life | Prospit Land of Bleach and Coral Denizen: Charybdis

have you ever met a girl more suited to be a knight than nornsa? as the knight of life, nornsa is the unofficial/official sidekick of nat as she runs around turning frogs into slime. he may not be a time player, but he tries his best

much of nornsas performance in sburb is going to depend on whether his family comes with him. hes fiercely protective of his twin sisters, and raises them perhaps more than their perpetually busy father does. if all three come with him, nornsa will likely be too distracted with ensuring their welfare to properly undertake the duties required of him. keeping them safe competes with killing underlings, completing his planets quest, and helping out nat. he would no doubt be stretched to his breaking point. on the other hand, being separated from them isnt much better. though he isnt being held back by the needs of his family, nornsa centers his identify around his ability to help other people, especially his family. the crushing guilt of leaving them behind - perhaps to certain doom - prevents him from performing at 100%. he may fail to live up to his friends expectations, prompting a similar nervous breakdown. there arent many sunny sburb outcomes for nornsa as someone who doesnt live for himself, and this is reflected by his planet

LOBAC is a dead planet covered in bleached coral. nornsas task is to revitalize it for the consorts, who will surely die if the reefs are not restored. moreover, the water from this rejuvenated planet will be necessary in terraforming LODAF, so nat relies on nornsa to complete his quest to complete her own. nornsas planet in this upd8 is restored to full color, which is natural since nats planet is also in full health. the process of revitalizing LOBAC likely involves themes of making sacrifices and being selfish. in other words, nornsa has to make some tough choices to make himself happy. he has to learn how to prioritize what he needs instead of conflating his sense of worth with what he can do for others. ironically, though, once he makes this breakthrough and finishes his quest, his success immediately benefits nat rather than just himself

Capable Greenhorn | Rogue of Light | Derse (you heard me) Land of Chess and Towers Denizen: n/a, later revealed to be Cetus

cg is a slippery creature who defies me whenever i try to get a good idea of who they are. first a hope player (buzzer error noise) and then a mind player, cg finally settled on being a light guy, which i think suits them. cg keeps their cards close to their chest. as a resident of a chessling dormitory, they know how to live communally. they certainly enjoy their alone time, but they are more familiar with being part of a unit rather than an individual. this is all to say that cg is a great sburb hopeful, studious, team-oriented, observant, and slow to act if they arent certain what path to take. theyre very deliberate, and in a sburb session i think theyre easily the brains of the operation. the problem is that theyre... well, a carapacian!

how does sburb deal with a player whos a member of its designated npc species? is it capable of treating that carapacian as an autonomous being? it appears as though it cannot, because LOCAT is a mishmash of skaia, prospit, and derse. little of cgs actual personality shines through, which im sure is frustrating for them. cg is not a person who often experiences the spotlight or special recognition, and being shunted to the side by sburb is demoralizing to them. the only pro to this situation is that LOCAT is able to serve as a teleportation/save point for cg and their fellow players. from the towers rising from its chessboard, players can easily move around without needing to go to sleep or use sburbs other portals. this is perhaps how the water from LOBAC was able to be transferred to LODAF

cgs sburb journey involves finding out who they are as an individual. being cut off from their dormitory siblings is like losing a limb or one of their senses. not only that, but theyre also a derse dreamer - despite being a prospitian. dreaming is dangerous and scary for them, and they have trouble coping with the old carapacian culture that rules the dreaming moons. they dont belong anywhere - prospit will not accept them, derse even less so, and their friends just dont understand. often sleep deprived from the danger of sleeping (i think its also highly likely their dream self would be assassinated), cg struggles to complete their planets quest. at the end though, cg will be delighted to receive the quests reward. LOCATs chessboard will overturn to reveal its true form - a planet that actually reflects who cg understands themself to be. just as carapacians will change their name to signify a new stage of their life, LOCAT will bear a new name as well - the Land of Cathedrals and Turrets

Malibu Tempra | Thief of Heart | Derse Land of Tech and Smog Denizen: Lamia

even before malibu got diagnosed with thief disorder, i knew it was coming. just as nornsa is a knight through and through, malibu cannot beat the thief allegations. she also cant escape being a heart player. trust me, i tried to make someone in this cast be a time player. she just wasnt having it, so i let her be whatever she wants

malibus land is riddled with neon segmented lines reminiscent of a motherboard. its bisected by a neon seam that keeps it together, and at its south pole is a giant mechanism coughing up smog in the colors of malibus psiionics, giving it the appearance of a giant spherical spaceship. its a cyberpunk nightmare, dystopian and colorful and loud. being held back by something loud and colorful is nothing new to malibu, as someone who has a strained relationship with her high-maintenance lusus. malibu is a lot of things. shes edgy and brash and quick to anger, but shes also quite sensitive. she hates feeling forgetten or useless, leading her to put too many eggs in her basket sometimes. this is the same girl who wants to go to both fashion school and a batterization academy - lets pick our battles, malibu. though shes whip-smart and fearless, shes easily discouraged. accomplishing her planets quest will be difficult for her, should she choose to see it through at all. 50/50 on whether she attempts it just because everybody else is doing theirs and she wants to fit in, or ignores it in favor of leveling up and getting that tiger (do the kids in the fandom these days know about 'got tiger'?)

her quest, should she choose to accept it, is clearing the pollution from the pipes in the planets center. like the bleached coral threatening nornsas land, the smog that gives LOTAS its name is a potential killer. previously, i suggested that LOCAT is the planet that helps water flow from LOBAC to LODAF. i think its just as likely that the mechanisms running through LOTAS allow for the same action. the planet itself may have to move across the medium to deliver water to LODAF, and a smog-coughing pollution-riddled land is no good at this task. if this is the case, malibu will have no choice but to put aside her own rash desires and put some serious thought into solving her quest. if not, nornsa and nat can always pass the ocean between their planets bucket by bucket through the towers on LOCAT

our next two players need no introduction. lets start with:

Ramona Flamel | Seer of Hope | Derse Land of Wax and Altars Denizen: Medusa

engulfing ramonas planet is a sea of hot, red wax. it would be more evocative of blood if ramona were human, but nonetheless it evokes a gloom all the same. from pockets in the wax, great columns of smoke rise in a haze that covers the planet. the experience of being on LOWAA is like walking into a church that has been burning too much incense. its consorts are in perpetual mourning - when ramona arrives in the medium, the flame at the heart of her land has been extinguished. the rising smoke from the sea tells us much the same, and LOWAA is at risk of hardening over if ramona cannot reignite the flame. the sea will solidify, and the consorts way of life will be forever altered. you could say this planet is experiencing a flame-L. anyway,

even if ramona didnt have enough mommy issues to level a city block, there is still the looming problem of her chronic illness. TPP is the specter that haunts every aspect of her daily life, and ramona is well aware that on alternia, she would meet a swift and early death because of it. remaining in a state of physiological stagnation is her reality for many years, a neverending nightmare of being trapped in a body that she cannot use to communicate her needs or defend herself. her majority human family cannot understand her, merely chalking up her many medically-excused absences from events as unfortunate but expected. her quest on LOWAA will force ramona to grapple with the trauma she has endured throughout her life due to TPP. living on borrowed time is a major theme of her session. the idea of achieving god tier and potentially curing herself intrigues her, especially since she has a limited amount of her medication left. but this goal competes with the time-sensitive task of reigniting the flame at LOWAAs center. save herself, or save the consorts? or could she save both? her abilities as a seer of hope will certainly aid her, but ultimately ramona will have to do the unthinkable to complete both of these tasks at once: she will have to ask for help. what the fuck, am i right? is that allowed?

i quite like the idea of all the lands in this session interacting with one another. if ramona succeeds in lighting the flame and saving her planet, perhaps the heat will be key to clearing the smog from LOTAS. what do i know? maybe thats how pollution works in sburb. perhaps the cause of the smog is the smoky breath of malibus denizen, lamia, who is curled up inside the center of the planet. the flame would be a great way to scare her off and clear out the pipes

and finally, the girl of the hour,

Kitty Harley-Leider | Mage of Rage | Prospit Land of Unicorns and Fractals Denizen: Chimera

many old homestuck analyses will point out that the lands of the beta kids are seemingly opposite to how the kids outwardly present themselves. im not sure if i 100% buy this, but kittys land definitely breaks this rule. LOUAF is a perfect depiction of how kitty presents herself in the beginning of KITTYQUEST. cutesy and loveable and pastel, this planet is covered in cotton candy clouds (literally, i used cotton candy as an overlay for this lands clouds) and is populated by starry unicorns and alicorns. these creatures play a similar role to the angels on eridans land - they are not consorts, but something else entirely

i dont have to tell you that kitty is... kind of a mean girl. how aware she is of this fact is up for debate, but kittys saccharine facade that she puts on for her doting family is just that - a facade. kitty is not a bad person by any stretch of the imagination, but she has lived a very privileged life. she is denied nothing, doted upon by all who know her, and has been fed the narrative that she is special and precious. i am not entirely sure the extent to which kitty uses her latent rage powers to her advantage when it comes to manipulating her loved ones - or if shes even aware shes doing it - but regardless, kitty is a girl who knows how to keep an act going. whether its pretending to her school friends that shes a normal kid like them, or pretending to her family (sans ramona) that she is a perfectly innocent "CINNAMON ROLL," shes no stranger to the idea that looks can be deceiving. the same is true for LOUAF

kitty will find out the hard way that the uni/alicorns of LOUAF are plaguing it. theyre mean to the bone - they bite, they buck, they kick, and theyve chased the consorts out to sea. she doesnt want to consider that something so pretty could be so dangerous, shes got a unicorn on her shirt for godssake. but despite how bright and colorful LOUAF is, its arid and desolate. the unicorns have eaten all the vegetation, and the land has become a desert. the remaining life is below the sea, where the consorts have grudgingly adapted. the activity underwater produces fractals across the waters surface, giving the land its crystalline appearance. even so, the unicorns are getting antsy with a dwindling food supply, and may take to plucking the consorts out of the sea to eat. kittys quest (heehaw) will be to accept the nature of the darling creatures she loves so much, reclaiming LOUAF for the consorts and earning the approval of the denizen. the consorts, once they repopulate their old home, will thank kitty by giving her the solution to ramonas quest: the remains of the unicorns can be used to stoke the flame in her planet. something something magic something something miracles. the consorts of LOUAF are satisfied knowing theyre helping the consorts of LOWAA, whose lives are also being threatened in a different way

so we can see that all the lands are tied together:

unicorn infestation on LOUAF is exterminated > flame on LOWAA is rekindled > smog on LOTAS is cleared > LOTAS can be used as vessel to carry water from LOBAC to LODAF > LODAF is restored and frog breeding can begin. and LOCAT is the save point and backup to LOTAS

why cant this session work out? well, we have already established that it goes against canon. sburb cannot be played on earth c, not yet at least. though everything fits together decently well here, this session is missing a crucial component. it does not have a time player. there is no equivalent to the beat mesa, no way to initiate a scratch, and no time player to fix fatal errors. not that a scratch would help anyway, because none of these kids were made with ectobiology save for cg. it is simply a nice hypothetical to think about, and a compromise for the folks out there who really, really wanted KITTYQUEST to be a sburb mspfa. sorry! hope this is enough for you

this was an awful lot of words and took a few hours to type. thanks if you read it! i hope the most recent upd8 wasnt too confusing. if it was, just read it a couple more times? our psychopomp ramona? is trying really hard to make the dream bubhell make sense to you

#kittyquest #mad artz #homestuck

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