#My art and dialogue scripts have had noticeable improvements since too...

[stepswowdsen]

【KagePro】 KuroEne AU: Kuroha uses Awakening Eyes to make Ene’s body 🖤💙

Summary:

Kuroha uses Awakening Eyes to make Ene's android body by temporarily turning into her, and keeps regenerating until he has all the parts he needs to make her body

KuroEne Route Setups: The nature of KuroEne's relationship (ie. Lovers -> Enemies, Enemies and Lovers) changes depending on Saeru's actions

KuroEne AU: Saeru tells Ene about his Awakening Eyes and mentions the legend of the Medusa to her (but without revealing too much)

Ene reacts to Saeru's hair down (without the ponytail)

Ene plays with Saeru's hair and his snakes

Intro

The idea I came up with Feila before back in September 2024 is that if Kuroha/Saeru can use Konoha's Eye Ability, Awakening Eyes, to rebuild the body molecule by molecule, according to the Novel Route, then he should be able to temporarily turn into Ene and get all the parts he needs to build Ene's android body that way.

If Awakening Eyes can remake the owner's body into ANYTHING, then he should be able to turn into Ene and shed off self-healing human skin.

I cherish this AU very much... It's so interesting to me.

I work hard for my rare pairs to create interesting AUs for them 🙏

I imagine that in the first KuroEne AU Route, Saeru made artificial self-healing human skin for Ene's android body. This is based on IRL scientists' advancements for robots with self-healing artificial skin that can react to temperature, pressure, and certain chemicals.

Feila and I based some of Saeru's advancements for Ene's body on some advancements that IRL scientists have made with robots (ie. robot fish that can work up to 36 hours for artificial blood).

I feel like hair cloning can be achieved in a lab.

I was curious to see if I could use anything for my KuroEne AU. I was inspired by the idea of a snake shedding its skin...

So he sheds off a few cells off himself that can multiply and then stores it for use in his lab. And then he sheds it off himself, and constantly keeps regenerating until he gets all the parts he needs.

Cuz of Awakening Eyes' extreme regenerative properties.

But in all Routes after the first few, he uses Awakening Eyes to create the outer parts of her body. It makes creating her body 100000x easier.

And then the mf throws his (originally Haruka/Konoha's body's) own skin cells into the mix when creating Ene's body.

The fact that he used apart of himself for her body is like the ultimate declaration of “love” (twisted obsession) and devotion in this guy’s twisted eyes.

The culmination/fruits of his efforts have finally paid off!

In the context of the KuroEne AU, Ene's body is his greatest creation.

Kuroha/Saeru having a twisted obsession for his S/O just seems the most fitting for his character.

So... no wonder this guy is obsessed. Dude's twisted obsession causes him to create a perfect replica of Ene.

I honestly love the Mad Scientist vibes going on here.

Quoting these old rambles.

Kuroha/Saeru is so fucked up but that makes him interesting so I say let him be. He's so fun to write for 👍

Awakening Eyes allows the owner of the body to make it into their "ideal body" and make it whatever they want. So he can do this, replicate it, and keep regenerating himself. And knowing this mf, he'd shed off his own skin from his body too to use as part of Ene's android body.

Feila and I came up with the idea that Kuroha could just use Konoha's Eye Ability Awakening Eyes to temporarily turn into Ene, then make it so that his body can shed off self healing skin (and any parts he needs). Then it makes making her android body infinitely easier cuz he'd have all the parts needed to make her body.

Kuroha: You were made from me, and the unison of our parts, therefore we are one ❤️

KuroEne Route Setups

Multiple outcomes that can happen in a KuroEne Route. I feel like they tend to have this common starting point or setup. Also there are some deviations depending on when Saeru decides to reveal certain information (his true name)

Kuroha possesses Konoha before he gets the chance to meet the MekaDan. Kuroha meets Ene and just decides to "play the game" alone with her (Kuroha can choose to reveal the name "Saeru" later as long as Ene doesn't meet the MekaDan until the final August 15th, since he can use the Medusa legend to justify his existence as a "snake-related human" to Ene)

Kuroha meets Ene and pretends to join the Mekakushi Dan (keeping his true name and identity hidden), and betrays everyone on August 15th. KuroEne's relationship is Lovers to Enemies due to Saeru's betrayal.

Kuroha lets Konoha and Ene meet and develop a friendship and/or relationship, but then he possesses Konoha at some point, and Ene perceives him as the "evil snake" that stole Konoha's body. KuroEne's relationship is Enemies and Lovers.

So, in most Routes in KagePro canon, Saeru possesses Kenjirou (Ayano’s dad) first to manipulate people to get access to funding and resources, and then he jumps to possess Konoha on August 15th

But in my KuroEne AU, I have Saeru drop Kenjirou's body much earlier so that he can meet with Ene as "Black Konoha" (Kuroha), so they spend anywhere from 1 - 2 years together.

And then there’s Kuroha/Saeru's uncanny resemblance to her loved one (Haruka) by possessing Konoha’s body.

In the first KuroEne AU Route, I imagine he introduces himself to her as “Black Konoha,” but Ene decides to shorten the name Black Konoha (Kuro Konoha) to “Kuroha” instead.

So every Route after that, he decides what information he wants to drop and at what time.

He also proceeds to use the nickname that Ene gave him in previous timelines, when he first introduces himself in new Routes when he meets her for the first time, in all subsequent Routes.

So, there’s the KuroEne Routes where Saeru possesses Konoha before he can meet Ene.

Saeru introduces himself as Kuroha and then reveals the name Saeru later once they’ve built more of a connection each other (which works just fine, as long as it’s a Route where they don’t meet with the rest of the MekaDan until August 15th)

Quoting from my notes

Ene: Snake... human? Such a thing like that exists!?

Kuroha: Well... Tales about the legend of the Medusa persist even to this day... But it's not very widely known among humans.

Ene: (I guess it's not completely out of the realm of possibility… I have these red eyes after all.)

Ene: Your red eyes allow you to change your body?

Ene: Even after you've shown me, I'm still shocked!!! That's some incredible power…!

Saeru reveals his true identity but Ene doesn't meet the rest of the MekaDan so it's ok for him to reveal.

Like I can imagine Saeru showing her something simple, like changing his tongue into a forked snake tongue, growing snake scales on his limbs, or changing his appearance into the MR2 form

I imagine that Saeru eventually tells Ene about him being related to snakes in some way and having an Eye Ability that allows him to change his body (but doesn’t mention Azami, his old Master, by name), an explanation that Ene accepts since she also has this mysterious Eye Ability too.

And Ene is wow'ed by Saeru's usage of Awakening Eyes since he can even change his body with it.

F: He would tell her about the snakes but would anon-ify (if that's even a word) Azami as best as he can.

Me: Yeahhh I agree with this too. He'd keep his master's identity a secret

Or there are Routes where he reveals his identity as Snake of Clearing Eyes (Me ga Saeru Hebi) right from the get go (which would make things much more hostile and tense between them, especially if it’s a situation where Ene was friends or in a relationship with Konoha, and Saeru just stole/possessed his body.)

So then Ene perceives him as the evil snake/monster that stole Konoha’s body.

Ene plays with Saeru's hair and his snakes

Me: OH I forgot to mention this but lately I've been tempted to draw Kuroha/Saeru with his hair down. Like his usual Black Konoha form, but without the ponytail.

Cuz I realize I haven't drawn that yet.

I feel like Saeru with his hair down would have messy hair, around shoulder length <3

And I'm also gonna doodle some JdAl stuff hopefully soon. I said I was gonna draw but I was just chilling these past few days. I'll get into a drawing mood sometime this week...

F: DO ITTTT. HE WOULD LOOK SO GOOD WITH THIS HAIR DOWN UGHHH

Me: Something inspired by this <3

I also want to draw Judar with his hair down at some point like JESUS my cat sons look so good with their hair down. It's in my drawing to-do list.

F: Ugh he's such a sexy man

Me: RIGHT he looks so good with his hair down... Augh...

Me: I thought of how cute it'd be if she plays with his hair and runs her hands through his hair while his hair is down and if she puts his hair into little twintails

I can imagine Ene going like ("Looks like he's just gotten up… He looks cute with bedhead……")

F: Kuroha probably lets his hair down then sleeping (he isn't obligated to sleep, but let me dream)

Me: Ene ties his hair into small twintails... And then his snakes that are curled around him go like 💖✨

The idea of Ene playing with his little snakes is cute honestly

F: > I thought of how cute it'd be if she plays with his hair

Braid it and suddenly he's Saeru 💥

Me: Technically both forms are Black Konoha / Saeru but I get what you mean.

The MR2 (Manga Route 2) version has the scorpion tail looking braids in the back

F: Wondering how many times they've bonded with each other to the point that Saeru's little snakes have registered Ene as a "2nd owner" because Kuroha's scent is all over her

Me: HWHDHSHDSHS. God that's so cute...

Ok, so snakes flick their tongues to collect chemicals in the air and pick up the scents of prey.

Reminds me of that KuroEne idea I had before where Saeru's snakes flick their tongues and wrap around and curl around Ene's sleeves out of curiosity.

They also do this to ground themselves around their owners for a sense of security (wrapping themselves around their owners)

And it's because Kuroha/Saeru's scent is all over her.

And Saeru goes like, "They're curious about you... It’s because my scent is all over you."

And Ene reacts like this.

Also he has a heightened sense of smell due to being a snake, and can also rebuild his body with Awakening Eyes to have improved senses (like a snake) for his human body, so he'd definitely be aware of it and be so smug about that fact

Yeah like I love imagining Saeru lying in bed next to Ene watching Ene "sleep" with having the android body go into sleep/hibernate mode...

Me: Observing how serene her face looks. I do imagine he watches her for a while

Eepy bunny gf going snork mimimimi 💤😴

F: I just imagine them cuddling. Big spoon Kuroha :3

[satoshi-mochida]

Tobyfox has provided a status update on the second chapter and beyond of Undertale sequel Deltarune in celebration of Undertale‘s fifth anniversary today.

First, here are the latest screenshots from Deltarune‘s second chapter:

Get the full update below.

Introduction

Hi everyone.

If you’re reading this, you must have been sticking around for about five years.*

I want to express my gratitude for everyone that has supported and encouraged me over this time.

Thank you.

I’ve said it many many times before, but I didn’t expect the simple game I made to receive so much attention. Because of that, many interesting things have happened, and now I can even spend my time making another game.

It seems both of us received a lot of happiness from this occurrence.

If it’s okay, I would like to keep striving to do things that make both of us happy.

Let me know what you think about that.

*Since the Undertale demo released in 2013, the game has really existed for 7 years. It’s already been more than 25% of my life…

Deltarune

I will make another.

I am making a game called “Deltarune.” It is the second game in the Undertale series.

The game will be released in many “Chapters,” the first of which I released two years ago on Halloween. Since that time, I’ve been working hard to figure out the rest of the game.

However, it’s a game that’s much harder to make than Undertale.

Graphics are more complicated and several times more involved.

Systems are more complicated.

Exposes the weak points of my creative and artistic ability.

Plot is much harder to tie together (more characters, more important locations).

Significantly more content than Undertale in one playthrough (especially cutscenes).

I have only made one game ever.

Unlike Undertale, this is the type of game that would normally have many designers working on each aspect of the game.

A story writer, a composer, an audio director, a map designer, a battle designer, a minigame designer, and an overall director. Instead, all of those roles end up handled by me.

The good news is that a few months ago, I completed a significant milestone regarding the game’s design. I completed readable outlines for every chapter in the game, including first-pass dialogue for almost all the cutscenes, examples of the music, etc.

Although certain details are still hazy, the flow of the game and all major events and battles that take place are now clear.

In summary, I largely spent the past two years writing, composing, designing, and drawing. However, that’s not the whole story.

We had actually attempted to develop the game since the time too. Development started around March 2019 and a 99% work was spent on investigating engines alternate to GameMaker, which I used for Chapter 1.

Without getting into the details, I decided a few months ago to go back to GameMaker after all. It still felt like the best fit for the project. So using Chapter 1 as a base, we’ve started creating Chapter 2 since May 2020.

A lot of progress has been made since that time. I believe we can complete this chapter, content-wise, before the end of the year (not accounting for translation, bugtesting, and porting).

I feel very confident. And the strange thing is, even though we ended up using the original engine, I don’t regret the lost time, either. Not only was I still busy designing the game, but during that long period, I was able to think of many ideas that make the game’s story and characters better.

I’m glad that I’m making the Deltarune that I have now and that we are making healthy progress.

Deltarune Status Estimate

■ Chapter 2 (04.15.20 – 08.13.20)

Phase 1: Design

Main Design: 100% (dialogue, etc.)

Initial Setup: 100% (stuff involved setting up people to make the game, adding debug tools, documentation, etc.)

Phase 2: Implementation (05.01.20 ~ 08.13.20)

Art: 90%

Cutscenes: 80% (90% are started, needs 2nd pass)

Bullet Patterns: 70% (enemies are mostly completed, bosses are about 40% done, needs 2nd pass)

Non-Bullet Battle Elements: 30% (Some ACTs are done and enemies are fightable, but interactive ACTs need to be completed and polished and the bosses aren’t programmed outside of bullet patterns)

Audio: 80%

Maps: ??% most are started or placeholder, most need 2nd pass. NPC interactions are completed in all spots where written.

Other: 65%

Phase 3: Finishing

Balancing: 0%

Bugfixing: 0%

Translation: 0%

Porting: 0%

(Honestly, a lot of stuff FEELS like 80% to me, but the truth is that what’s there is quite rough now. Polish ends up taking a lot of time, so the real actual time value may be around 50% done…? We’ll see what happens. It’ll be a lesson for everybody.)

■ Chapters 3 and Beyond

Phase 1: Design

Story and General Game Progression (first-pass): 100%

Cutscene Dialogue (first-pass, lacking cutscene instructions): 95%

Map Design (textual): 70% (varies per chapter, earlier chapters totally completed)

Map Design (drawn): 0% (this takes a lot of wrist energy so I don’t do it until we start programming)

Enemy Design (conceptual): 90% (all bosses are known)

Enemy Design (bullets / visual): 80% (varies per chapter, earlier chapters totally completed)

Music (concept): 95%

Music (completed): 50%

Visual Design:BG Concept (first-pass): 75%, Important Character, Bosses (first-pass): 100%

Phase 2

Sprite Art: 20%?

Other Content Creation: 0%

Phase 3

Release Readiness: 0%

(These numbers can be somewhat deceptive though. My true design style is to reach the moment where we have to make something, then suddenly think of something different at the last minute. This is always how it’s been with me and my work. It feels like no matter how much I plan, everything comes down to what I think of at the last second…)

Team and Disability

You may have noticed from my phrasing, but yes, there is a team helping me create the game. Other than me, there are about three active team members working day-to-day, with a few other people pitching in from time to time.

Their roles of the main members are overall content implementation and organization, bullet pattern implementation (part-time), and art (Temmie). Other than designing, I still have the role of system programmer.

I’m extremely grateful to have a team helping me carry out my design especially because of my disabilities, which have also made development more difficult.

Although I have long suffered from wrist and hand pain, about five months ago my wrist was the worst it’s ever been. I could not play the piano, use the mouse, and barely could use the keyboard. I navigated everything through voice to text.

Through weightlifting, exercise, and various equipment I have been able to somewhat increase the stamina of my wrist to an extent. Various solutions have included trackball mice for each hand, using voice to text whenever possible, using a foot pedal to click the mouse, etc.

Now I can use the mouse and keyboard for a certain amount each day provided I take frequent breaks. I wish I could work without stopping. Once the world situation improves I would really like to take physical therapy again and/or investigate surgery to repair my wrist.

Future Plans

Once we finish Chapter 2, I would like to use it as the base to create future chapters from. After gaining experience from this chapter, I think making future chapters will be easier.

Part of me wonders if we could make the game faster if we increased the size of the team and did something insane like create multiple chapters in parallel. However, another part of me understands that, adding more people doesn’t guarantee that the game will be created faster if it’s not done properly. I’m already just barely avoiding becoming a bottleneck on development even with a team of this size, due to my physical limitations.

To that end, I am interested in making a list of people that could potentially help me make the game. I’m not 100% sure if I’m going to ask anyone to help, but I think if I could find just 1 person that works well with me, it’s worth asking.

Chapter 2 is proceeding at a good pace, so if we do take anyone on, it will probably only be for Chapter 3 onward. So please understand that anything you send in may not have an immediate result.

People I Am Looking For

Feel free to send in your portfolio if you have the following qualifications:

Worked in the game industry before

Worked under NDA before

Have professional references

A degree of creativity while also being okay with just following directions

Fluent in English

People I Might Actually Use

Music Transcription / Basic Arrangement (Part-Time)

I usually start making songs by playing the piano and singing. An important step after this is to take this basic outline and transcribe it into melodies and chords. Though there are not too many remaining songs to transcribe, it would still help my wrist to have someone else start this process for me. Although I know many musicians, I’m sheepish to ask for help to them, because the main role is actually just to help me compose my own music…

Helpful qualities:

Good at transcription.

Can stand listening to me sing.

Optional: can use an old version of Fruity Loops.

Bullet Pattern Programming (Part-Time)

I’m looking for someone to help me program bullet patterns into the game. These people will work from text and visual designs to create fun battles that match the feeling of the game. I already have one person helping with this, but I think a second person would help a lot. You have to be able to use Gamemaker Studio 2 to manipulate objects on the screen / okay with using pre-existing scripts to accomplish this.

Helpful qualities:

Sense of fun and understanding of player perspective and gameplay balance. This aspect is [many times] more important than programming ability.

Reliable.

Able to make patterns based off of visual/text instructions.

Fine working with a poorly made battle system.

Able to sprite bullets.

Good visual / timing sense.

Minigame Programming (Part-Time)

There are a few minigames and small interactive events in the game, which appear in and outside of battles. These could take any kind of form… who knows what I’m thinking! Have you made a game before?

Helpful qualities:

Same sense of humor as me.

Some level of spriting ability is useful.

You have to have made a game that is fun.

Ability to work together with me.

Unlikely to Hire, But Send Me Your Information Just In Case

Cutscene Programming (Part-Time)

Besides the battles, the largest amount of content in the game is definitely the cut scenes. You will have to understand Gamemaker Studio 2, but the majority of the work is simply using a scripting system that I created to make characters move around the screen. The most important quality you can have here is not programming ability but the ability to efficiently use the system in order to create scenes with a good sense of humor, timing, and emotion.

I’d strongly prefer to hire someone I know to do this because it involves the story. So I most likely won’t hire anyone else.

Helpful qualities:

Can take text instructions and impart a proper sense of timing, humor, and weight to them.

Fine working with a custom scripting system (or smart enough to make something better that makes the game easier to make).

Art (Part-Time)

Sprite art—Temmie has already drawn a massive amount of art for the game, and continues to do so. And I actually already have a few other artists that have helped me that I’m more than happy to keep working with if things become more overwhelming. So currently I actually don’t need any more artists.

However, personally, I’d really like to build up a portfolio of available pixel artists and even concept artists. It’s not as if this is the only game I will make during my life. Anyone chosen for this game needs to be able to match the style of the game, but I’m interested in seeing people with different styles as well. Knowing that I have different options can open my mind up to different creative pathways.

Helpful qualities:

Can take bad looking sketches and turn them into art that looks good (magic).

Don’t mind if your work gets completely drawn over or thrown out.

Anyone that can draw cute or cool poses is good.

Uninterested in seeing people that have an art style outside of the scope of the game.

Write (Full-Time)

Someone needs to transform into a new wrist for me.

Helpful qualities:

Flexible.

Doesn’t hurt.

Musical sense.

That’s everyone I’m looking for. The only other kind of person I might hire would be a single jack-of-all-trades type that can do any sort of things such as cutscenes, bullets, or even system programming, with a good degree of visual flair. (But if you can do those sorts of things, aren’t you busy making your own game already!?)

Anyway, I’ll show you the e-mail now. Just make sure you read these rules first:

Don’t send in e-mails about anything else!

Don’t send to other team members, Fangamer, etc. about helping out!

Got it? Then please send your information to this e-mail address:

deltarunejobs@fangamer.com

Since Fangamer will be sorting through the e-mails for me, we’ll stop taking e-mails at the end of September so they don’t get overwhelmed. Ultimately, I’m only looking for one or two people, and to make a list of the rest of the potentially helpful people in the world.

Undertale is available now for PlayStation 4, Switch, PS Vita, and PC via Steam and GOG. Deltarune Chapter 1 is availble for PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC via Deltarune.com.

[phoenotopia]

2020 March Update

Happy New Year! Well, I guess it's a bit late for that...

Much of what transpired in the past few months will fall under polish and bug-fixing. Will and I have a mutual friend who got married, so I had the occasion to visit Will to attend the wedding as well as have Will playtest the game in its most complete form yet. He logged 24 hours of playtime and just reached the entrance of the final dungeon. Then we had to call in for the night since it was 5 AM, and I had a flight to catch in the morning.

His completion rate where we stopped was 42% of Heart Pieces, 33% of Energy Gems, and 44% of Moonstones. So... I think we have a pretty lengthy game!

This will take a while to playtest & polish... Will's daytime profession is QA Engineer so he's pretty great at catching bugs. From his playtest, we jotted down 200+ items to fix/adjust. Some as small as a simple misspelling, and some more significant (like Gail being unable to jump when standing at the edge of a steep slope). I'm about half-way through fixing that list...

(Will’s living room where much playtesting was done)

Here are some other things we've accomplished in the past few months. A lot of it falls under polish and bug-fixing, which won't sound outwardly impressive, so I'll dive in a bit under the hood.

-------------------------- Item Balancing --------------------------

There are over 200 items in the game. Of which, 90+ are healing items. While much of their flavor text was already written, their stats weren't yet finally decided. So a large effort was spent to balance them as well as possible. Initially, I balanced items by observation (ex: "The player is relying on this item a lot, so I will nerf it...") Now, I've moved to a more systematic way of doing things. I made an equation that takes in all of an item's parameters, and spits out a score. The higher an item heals, the higher the score. The longer an item takes to consume, the lower the score. And so forth.

As usual, I used google spreadsheets, since they support equations. I could tweak the values of a healing item, and immediately see how its final score was affected. I also made use of automatic color formatting, so a field becomes highlighted red, if it's particularly bad, or green, if it's particularly good. Of course, the sheet is just a guideline. The aim wasn't to make all items have the same final score, but that they made sense for what they were and when you could get them. Late-game items tend to have higher overall scores versus early-game items. Some items, like doggy biscuits, have notoriously low scores across the board - as a joke!

-------------------------- Cooking Systems --------------------------

Another thing that had to be done with the healing items was finally determine their cooking sequences. 38 healing items could be cooked and will transform into something else. The way I specified that an item could be cooked was to add a a little snippet to an item's "meta data". An example would look something like, "COOK,57,62,ABXY,10,1.5,1".

In order, this specified the item_ID that would result on success (57), the item_ID that would result on failure (62), the button sequence (ABXY), the time you had to complete the sequence (10 seconds), how quickly the cursor should move (1.5x speed), and if the item multiplied on success (1). The system appears simple enough - but it was actually extremely inefficient!

For one, this system didn't allow random button sequences - all "berry fruits", when cooked would have the same button prompts and in the same order every time (ABXY). Initially, I thought having set button sequences would be a feature, but in practice, it was less fun. 

Two, this system wasn't human-readable at all. I'd see a sequence of numbers, forget what they were, and have to look them up over and over.

But the biggest problem was that you couldn't evaluate an item's cooking difficulty from these numbers without manual testing. At 1.5 cursor speed, how many times does the cursor pass the center panel in 10 seconds? Maybe that's 15 times... for a 4 button sequence, the player has 11 opportunities to miss - that's too wide a berth for failure. The system also had variable penalties - if you misspressed a button prompt you loss time on the cooking meter. If you didn't press anything, you missed the opportunity, but not the time - but the clock was still ticking, so you did lose time, just not as much. In the end, the difficulty of cooking each item was all over the place. It was also possible to create "unwinnable" scenarios if I made the button sequence too long, the time too short, or the cursor speed too slow. Testing each item manually to ensure doability was too tedious and unreliable - it was a mess!

Which is why, the underlying cooking system was revamped. The new meta data looks like : "COOK,57,62,seq_length,5,spd,1.5,ease_add,2". This is a lot more readable. Beyond the first 3 entries, the arguments could be specified in any order. And their meanings were easy to understand.

"seq_length,5" means a random button sequence of 5 will be generated (no need for me to personally generate it)

"spd,1.5" means the cursor moves at 1.5x speed. I could also leave this field out to get a default value of 1x cursor speed.

"ease_add,2" - the biggest improvement to the system is how we now approach difficulty. We streamlined a miss-press and a missed opportunity as the same level of "mistake", and difficulty is framed as, "how many mistakes is the player allowed to make and still have a successful result?" By default, the player is afforded the ability to make 2 mistakes, and "ease_add,2" bumps the number of allowable mistakes to 4. We then automatically calculate how much "time" the player should have to cook something based on its cursor speed, how long the button sequence is, and how many mistakes the player is allowed to make. This was a more sensible and efficient system that let me knock out all 38 healing item cook sequences in one sitting!

-------------------------- Badges Nearly Done --------------------------

As you may recall from the last update, I was working on implementing the badges.

Thinking up the badge and having its graphic drawn is just the first half. Underneath, the code also needs to be made to track all the relevant player stats - how many times the player fished, ate, got money, used a certain move, etc. Some badges require extra guards, because they can be spoofed. For instance, the "Treasure Hunter" badge is obtained when the player has collected XXXX RIN through the course of your journey. However, there is something like a "gold exchange" in the game, where you could circularly trade gold and RIN to boost this number artificially. It's important to guard against cases like those.

So far, 30 of 33 badges are implemented. The last three have to do with late-game things that have inter-dependencies that we're still figuring out. The Speed running badge for instance is still dependent on two things. One, I need to speed run the game a few times to see how fast it's possible to beat the game and decide finally what's a reasonable time-limit. Two, there's actually a time-keeping bug which can inflate the game time if the system is left in sleep mode. I don't expect either things will be too hard to figure out - just gotta find the time for it.

-------------------------- Script Extra Polished --------------------------

We continued to polish the script, which I thought was basically done before. We added some extra NPCs here and there, and fleshed out the world with lore text where it seemed appropriate. In the end, the game's script ballooned to over 100,000 words! Hah... It's definitely DONE now however!

Some interesting things I noted as I was polishing old text - there were quite a few instances where Gail talks. I began the game's development with the idea that Gail should definitely talk since I wanted her to be a more active participant in what she chose to do. But I discovered later that if Gail talks, but only talked a little, she comes off as a very reticent person. There's no middle lane here - you're either all in or all out.

If Gail was a silent protagonist, she still talked symbolically. She is understood to be talking based on how people react to her - kinda like Link. So that's the direction I went with in the end (again). When Gail has occasion to talk, it comes in the form of a player dialogue choice. She also has an inner voice when she needs to remind the player to do something.

Another reason I went with this direction, is for brevity. Take this exchange for instance: QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : Maybe. I can't make any promises...

If Gail is silent, I can reduce those 2 lines to 1. QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : ...

-------------------------- Business Taxes --------------------------

Not too exciting, but new year means I gotta do taxes for the business. They're a lot more complicated than personal taxes, and more expensive! Since the game hasn't sold anything, you would think there'd be nothing to file. Hah! If only... The business is there so we can act as a legal entity and record expenses for when we do start selling. I really want to focus on making games, but there’s a small percentage of it that is sometimes boring and dreadful (-_-) ... still it needs to be done.

------------- Why no Public Beta Testing? -------------

As you may have noticed, I haven't put out any public calls for testing help despite being at that stage. Some have offered to help, which I appreciate! But sadly, I cannot accept. Here's the story for that.

Two and a half years ago, I got my hands on a console dev kit - that's very exciting, so I hurriedly took the steps to convert my dev station to be console-capable. After about two weeks, I had the console version working and integrated into my workflow, so all appeared good...

4 Months later, an artist needed an updated PC build to test some new art assets, so I went to build a new PC version. We use Unity, so generally you just need to click your desired build target, and hit "build". However, I now discovered that by attaching the console "hooks" into my work environment, I could no longer build to PC... It was possible, from my end, to test the game from the dev station in dev mode, which was why it went undiscovered for so long.

I did try to excise the hooks, but proved unsuccessful after a day of work. I decided to take this as an opportunity to focus exclusively on the console version first, which afforded me some niceties. Knowing that there's a standardized control scheme meant I could make full use of the control stick for the fishing mini-game. I also didn't need to create a rebindable keys menu - which is a MUST for PC versions... Most importantly, it lets me focus on making the one version as good as possible before moving onto the next. I have NO idea how those other guys release on all platforms at once...

Chalk it up to inexperience. In my defense, this will be my first commercial release, so bear with me. Don't worry, I still plan to make the PC version! It's a bit unconventional, but we're just going to go in the reverse direction of the usual. Console first, then PC, then other consoles. Wherever it makes financial sense, there we will be. (Sorry Ouya!)

Back to the original question - that's why I haven't sent out any public calls for playtesting. Current playable builds of the game are locked to my console dev kit. So actual playtesting unfolds in a very closed setting. Like what I did with Will, I literally sit behind the playtester, breathe down their neck, and watch them play, taking notes all the while.

But since I'm observing the player directly, even just one playthrough nets me a TON of bugs and adjustment tasks. So it evens out I think.

-------------------------- Trailers, Release Dates, etc. --------------------------

Alright, get your frowns ready...

We finished two trailers, and they're raring to go. BUT! We can't show them yet... We're sort of at an awkward spot where we're waiting on some conversational threads to conclude. Say we win a slot in a show - that'd be a HUGE plus for us - but that may also be contingent on us having NOT shown anything substantial yet. The game in its unrevealed state is a negotiating chip. So we're trying to leverage that... and you can only do the reveal once...

We also want to have some "actionable" items in the trailer - a launch date you could mark on your calendar, a wishlist, a website you can visit, etc. So since those things aren't entirely lined up yet, we can't let the trailers rip just yet...

Right now, I can only say we're *aiming* for a late Q2/early Q3 launch. But I can't commit to anything concrete yet. As soon as we know, we'll happily sing it from the rooftops. I hope I can update this blog sooner with good news, but if things move slowly again, I'll send out the next "we're alive" update 2 months from now (end of April).

I know it's frustrating to have nothing major after so long still, so I captured some gameplay footage... May it sate your hungers!

-------------------------- Footage 1 : Fishing --------------------------

You've seen pictures of the fishing, but never video of it in action. Well, here it is!

(And right after I uploaded the video, I noticed there actually was a video of fishing before. D’oh)

The idea is simple. First, get the lure in front of a fish, and assuming the fish isn't scared, it will soon bite. Then begins a fight sequence, where your energy meter is pitted against the fish's energy meter. Whoever's energy outlasts the other's wins.

The fish's resistance is represented by a red moving circular subsection. You fight the fish by pushing the control stick and keeping it on the subsection, which will dart around and try to escape you. Bigger and tougher variants of fish will do a "shake" which will reverse the wheel. When the wheel is reversed, so too are the controls, so it gets extra tricky!

While fishing, your energy meter doesn't recover, so one of the ways you level up your fishing ability is by finding energy gems to increase your max energy. There's another way - but we'll keep that a secret.

-------------- Footage 2 : Kobold Boss Fight --------------

You can actually skip the next section if you'd prefer to be surprised and you find your hunger for info sated. That's how I prefer to consume the games that I know I'm going to get. If you're still hungering for info, and you don't mind the slight spoilers, then feel free to proceed!

The next video shows the new Kobold Boss fight. Let's take a moment to reflect on the old game's visuals and how far it's come...

(we've come a long way since the time of the flash game)

You'll notice the Kobold boss has a name now - Katash! He's a significant enough character that he's earned it. The second thing you'll notice is that he looks better!

Some people have humorously pointed out that the old boss looks like Wolf O'Donnel from Star Fox. There's a funny story behind that. Basically I asked an artist to draw me a space wolf. And the artist, whom I'm assuming wasn't familiar with Wolf O'Donnel, drew that - all of it - all the animations and everything. The first time I laid eyes on it, it was already done, so it was too late to ask for edits. So I just ran with it.

That was seven years ago. Nowadays, I know to involve myself more in the process. I ask for just the design first, and we don't move forward with animations until we're happy with the design. Life lessons!

By the way, if you like Katash’s personal boss theme, give it a lesson on Will's Sound cloud (LINK)

-------------------------- Fan Arts -------------------------- Lots of fan art came in over the past 3 months!

This one is a pixel animation made by Pimez, and shows Gail singing a Christmas carol in various parts of the game. So cute! Years ago, I too was making little animated gifs for my favorite games, so it really brings me back!

This one was made by cARTographer (twitter link) after a request by Deli_mage, so thank you both. Gail rocking stylish boots with a pose that shows confidence in her batting skills. Very anime - Love it!

Another submission of laptekosz of the Last Song of Earth area. Whereas the last picture depicted the night sky, now the orange trees are lit by a rising sun. Artfully done! Kinda makes me want to eat eggs. I hope you'll like the new Last Song of Earth area just as much :D

A new artist to the scene, Not_Quin, submitted two pictures, one of Gail and one of the Sand Drake re-imagined as a centipede. I'm always a fan of these re-imaginings! I like how it's spiky all over and appears to be wearing a skull mask. The Sand Drake is often pointed out to be too similar to Zelda's Dodongos, so maybe a long slithery body would have indeed served better. Fun fact, long ago, when we were working on Phoenotopia 2 in earnest, we actually had a giant man-eating worm planned - WIP animation depicted below. One day... one day...

Negativus Core made two cool new arts! I'm really impressed by their use of unique perspective! Having characters run towards the screen or reaching close to the screen from afar is tricky since the proportions get all distorted - but not an issue for Negativus Core! Love the blur on Gail to show speed, with 66 in focus - really skillfully done! And the cube. Amazing!

--------------------------

I'm really honored by the huge fan art community. Thank you all! 

[llama-milk-for-the-egg-nog]

Thoughts on Mulan (2020)

Ok so I had heard some stuff beforehand about this movie, but I didn’t wanna let that tint my experience too much, though it kind of did in the form of noticing western influence on certain things. Here’s a list of thoughts more or less in chronological order.  First I wrote these in a notebook, and now I’m putting them here.

The beginning sequence reminds me so much of Kung Fu Huslte

though honestly it might just be that stephen chow’s movies are pretty much the extent of chinese-made media that I watch

Rosalind Chao is here, I’m a Keiko O’Brien stan so she reminded me of DS9

Fa Zhou saying something about “emissary” also reminded me of DS9

The music where the rourans first attack is cool I guess

idk if the brass made the music of the imperial city sound kinda western or what, but it certainly did sound militaristic (which I guess it’s supposed to)

Why does mulan have a little sister instead of a little brother? to add more female characters to the story? she doesn’t really do much though

After mulan’s whole childhood sequence, it cuts to a shot of the witch in the desert, which if you didn’t already know the story, might make it seem like mulan grew up to be the witch

although this makes some sense too bc the movie likes to compare them

the witch twists into a hawk (?), neat!

I saw people earlier comment about both men and women in china (and other parts of the world) keeping their hair long, so when mulan’s hair fell out of place in the matchmaker scene it made me notice that both the men and women also wear their hair up, which in turn causes the part of the movie later when mulan emerges after the avalanche to make way less sense since how would they know she’s a woman?

ok this is the thing I’m upset about, its a small thing but still, Why don’t we get to see the sword form?? If you remember in the animated version, her father does this straight sword form. (It’s a real form, not just made up for the animated movie). So I was like “ok maybe mulan will do it later” and then it NEVER HAPPENED. (possibly she did it during the “make a man out of you” training sequence, but the odd camera angels and quick cutaways make it impossible to tell)

I also had heard earlier that the script was not subtle at all,,,y’all were right

oh look, a phoenix

mulan: “the phoenix”

yes, we know

Commander Donnie Yen Tung’s entrance is iconic

BAHAHFHDSK mulan’s reaction to seeing naked men skjfdk

uh oh,,only 40 minutes in and the forced romance is already upon us

although, in retrospect, the way they resolved it at the end didn’t make me cringe that much

I’m a slut for butterfly kicks

the scene where mulan bathes in the lake has a much more predatory undertone now, especially now that Ling, Chien Po, and Yao are missing

the trio made the scene funny in the animated movie

can the not-Li-Shang-love-interest Honghui please leave Jun/Mulan alone?? ffs

speaking of no Li Shang, I liked the Donnie Yen mentor character half better than the Honghui half

Honghui kind of comes off as a simp ngl

what’s with the witch’s makeup/outfit? are they based on something?

speaking of outfits, awhile ago, I saw a really cool doll alteration video for mulan 2020

Commander Tung’s monologue/ mulan’s and the army’s training sequence about Chi where the words “Tranquil as a forest, but on fire within” are spoken is actually my favorite part of the whole movie. As much as I would have liked a musical remake, I think they translated the visual elements and the words together well in a way that was different enough from the animated version, but still satisfying to watch (at least for me).

They also integrate the music of Reflection here really well imho.  In the animated version, there’s a point where mulan modulates to a higher key, but the live action version doesn’t do that, which further pushes it away from sounding like disney’s classic musical theatre style.  They also changed a few of the notes, and I think the overall changes to Reflection in this part of the movie really improve this montage.

Compared to the Spiderman where they changed the notes from harmonic minor to (normal) minor (idk if that’s the real term I’m not actually a music major) in the MCU opening sequence, the note changes in Reflection don’t actually upset me.

my brain: oh look!! flowers!! cool! whooshhhh (honestly I couldn’t even tell if she was doing flowers right in the first part of the movie until here)

Mulan/Jun is gonna marry Commander Tung’s daughter? Yeah girl!! Get it!

oh look at me I’m a rouran and I gotta turn around on my moving horse to shoot arrows let me just swoOP

1:01:56 WHY ARE YOUR FINGERS IN FRONT OF THE HILT oh ok they fixed in the next shot but its still annoying

Unsubtle phoenix imagery not subtle

I guess I was warned about it :/

oh look its my fav interval a major 7th, I wonder if that’s supposed to be like “the last step before rebirth/the octave” bc of how Jun “dies” after the witch throws a weapon that gets stuck in her chest binding

at least she’s not using ace bandages or smth but idk much about binding

WHY ARE YOU THROWING OFF ALL YOUR ARMOR WHEN YOU’RE GOING INTO BATTLE? ACCEPTING AND PRESENTING YOURSELF AS WHO YOU REALLY ARE DOESN’T MEAN YOU HAVE TO TAKE OFF YOUR ARMOR

ok I know it was so she would be visually distinguishable from the other imperial soldiers, but still

the soldiers doing the turtle thing with their shields reminds me of the “we irritating 😂😂😂” meme

brass to signify that mulan is going to have a heroic moment (causing the avelanche) seems western to me. Idk much about traditional chinese instruments but it seems like they could use more of those.

Guys,,,I’m so fucking stupid I- .... it took me an hour and ten minutes to register the Lucky Cricket stand-in character,,,excuse me,,,,

the scene where mulan saves hongui and puts her hand over his heart gives me r*ylo vibes and I hate it

the witch, 1:14:40: “🎵yes I~ am a girl like you~🎵”

damn the music even reminds of the barbie movie a bit

The emperor’s voice reminds me of the mentor character from Kung Pow Enter the Fist which in itself was a western guy making fun of old cheesy martial arts movies (and how movies sometimes have a white male protagonist when they’re deadass set in asia and everyone else is asian)

the mentor characters voice was dubbed into english (and you can tell) but to me the emperor’s voice also kinda sounds like that

I’m disappointed that we didn’t get some kind of scene like the part in the animated verison where Mulan leads Ling, Chien Po, and Yao to cross dress to help save the emperor.

to me, that scene in the animated ver. is a reminder that it isn’t shameful for men to act/dress feminine

in general the animated version, to me, sends the message that it is ok to have both feminine and masculine traits, and that they don’t undermine each other or your identity, so they should all be embraced as a part of one’s personality (which tbh really helped me as a young kid)

the 2020 ver,, just doesn’t really send that message, instead its more broad like “be true to yourself”

I’m a slut for butterfly kicks

the witch taking an arrow for mulan really didn’t do it for me tbh, it made her seem a little wishy washy

like, I get that she wanted acceptance/validation, and that a part of her was glad that mulan found that for herself, but what about the rest of her motivation? Isn’t a desire for power or something what separates her from mulan?

Unsubtle phoenix imagery and dialogue is unsubtle

The music playing during the Mulan v. Khan duel reminds me of Duel of the Fates

actually the setting of the duel and other things really remind of of the Maul v. Ahsoka duel from Clone Wars s7

damn I really wanna watch the Maul v. Ahsoka duel cause the fight choreo is just,, so much more interesting

aww! Cricket is alive!

Around 1:34:39 , the music does not feel like it should be building up to Reflection here.  At this point, I think the melody had been reprised too many times and was getting to be overused (I still like it in the training sequence though).

I was happy to see Ming Na Wen!

Mulan is going home and ugh! Honghui! Don’t you know she’s betrothed to Commander Tung’s daughter? smh. homewrecker simp.

the matchmaker reminds me of Baron Harkonnen (Dune)

cheezy credits song is cheezy, even cheezier because they reprised reflection again

[vroenis]

The 2019 Charlie’s Angels Reboot Was A Good Project & Deserved More Respect From Hollywood

We’ve just finished watching the film and there was a lot both J and I really enjoyed about it. We’re critical of media and art in different ways and I certainly don’t speak for them, as for me, oddly I’m lenient in ways that they probably aren’t when it comes to production and culture. I don’t have to dive too deeply into the cultural response to this picture to know how it went down, I’ve come into contact with just enough of it to have a clear understanding of the popular digest. The response is not at all unexpected, it’s just uninformed.

I feel that the 2019 (year of publishing) Charlie’s Angels reboot was a good project with a wonderful spirit. Elizabeth Banks’ aims were clearly evident in the final product, however it may have been shaped along the way, and that it was under-served in the production process likely from the very beginning.

This casting is fantastic.

I do wish there were better cast-ensemble promos for me to lift from the internet and wonder whether that’s another telltale sign of production or whether the heat has just faded since release and they’ve just dropped out of the archives but I struggled to find well composed images.

The first short sizzle-teaser I ever saw for the film, I thought was quite good. Neckbeards and mouthbreathers won’t have paused for a second thought before launching hate for the project - anything in the most vague proximity of feminism or empowerment of women, or even simply just not being centred around men - will be enough to bring snide internet snark by the truckload. It remains interesting that men continue to struggle to live in a world where there can be things that also exist that are not for them, they cannot simply let these other things also exist without contributing in some way. As it were, the project looked good. Sharp, clever, playful, and a timely reboot reclaimed in the most contemporary way. When I looked up the production details and found out Banks was championing it herself, I really took an interest in it. As the first full trailers released, the casting looked great - genuinely diverse and with real chemistry, I hoped it would find the audience it was looking for.

J and I have had a lot going on in our lives over the last two years and still do. We’ve gone to theatres I think twice in that whole time, maybe three times and I think two of those were gift certificates generously paid for by family. So tonight we finally got around to watching Charlie’s Angels. If we’d seen this in theatres, I’d have still be satisfied and had the same evaluation.

A production budget of $55 million is low-balling a project of this scope; 

There seems to have been a bit of pre-production shuffling and Banks did a lot of wrangling herself early on. 

The whole shoot front to back was just over two months and I assume three countries, US/or studio inclusive. 

CGI is noticeably subpar but not exactly cheap either, so it still would have cost a significant portion of that prod. budget. When I say subpar, the CG in this film isn’t bad, please don’t take that criticism as overly negative of the CG artists’ work - remember that people do the best they can with the time and money they’re afforded. If you want to understand what that’s all about, I encourage you to watch Corridor Crew’s channel on YouTube.

Combat choreography with principle actors isn’t great, there’s far too much editing but again, I’m betting there wasn’t a whole lot of money and thus time for training and rehearsing for them, so combat is noticeably slow. 

2nd Unit photography looked very good because this kind of thing is very old-school Hollywood in that it contributes to what makes an action/spy movie look like one. Unfortunately, that means it was also expensive. We’re really running out of money here...

There is a lot of licensed music in this feature which isn’t cheap at all. Again this feels super old-school Hollywood and definitely demographic targeting, but it firmly timestamps the feature - any film, really - and unless your film is about capturing the essence of the time IT WAS THE 80′s! or FOLK FESTIVALS JUST BEFORE COVID BROKE OUT as an example of not necessarily wanting to capture the past, I really think trying to nail down pop songs of the hot present ultimately does your film a disservice.

And I’ll address that one first because I feel like it may have been one of the easiest changes to make to lift the overall quality of the picture. Instead of burning thru an immense amount of budget on a pile of pop licenses, I think a calculated risk could have been taken in getting a young contemporary musician to create a slick electronic score in its entirety to back it along side the generic orchestral action fare, no disrespect to Brian Tyler. To be honest, Tyler probably could have done it all himself but was also probably just writing to spec. BUT HEY... WHY NOT SCOUT FOR ANY NUMBER OF AMAZING WOMEN OUT THERE WHO ARE PHENOMENAL ELECTRONIC MUSICIANS AND PRODUCERS what am I talking about it’s Hollywood...

This is what I mean by the project deserving more respect and being under-served. Hollywood doesn’t believe in projects like this, they don’t realise what the project is and why it needs frontier, sincere, good faith hiring and instead under-funds but funds it nevertheless SEE? WE FUNDED IT, WE DID THE GOOD THING, SEE US SUPPORTING THE WIMMINS? WE’RE NOT  SEXISTS YOU CAN’T SAY WE’RE SEXISTS YOU CAN HAVE YOUR FILM oh it didn’t do very well except we didn’t let you make it the way you wanted to make it, we still shackled you to 

THE SAME TERRIBLE HOLLYWOOD TRADITIONS THAT, BY THE WAY, ARE FAILING OUR MANLY MAN MOVIES FULL OF MEN HOLY SHIT THE DEBT-RECOVERY CYCLE IS REALLY DOING A NUMBER ON OUR INVESTORS I SURE HOPE WE DON’T HAVE TOO MANY CONSECUTIVE FAILURES OR, SAY, SOME KIND OF GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC AND/OR ECONOMIC EVENT HAND-WRINGING

ahem where was I

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provided the entire soundtrack for The Social Network and it’s both fantastic and timeless. OK oranges and refrigerators, but the principle still stands - I get the intent of Charlie’s Angels was a summer blockbuster but it would have still been elevated by being all the more slick having its own identity in music, having its own sound. You want that soundtrack by that amazing young woman because it sounds fucken awesome.

Charlie’s Angels still needed a few passes by a dialogue editor. I say that a lot. I know my standards are high and it’s a Hollywood film. There’s no problem at all with the vernacular, idioms and the casual language, that was all fine. It’s always just the little details - again, it’s always time and money which - really is just money. A good dialogue editor or script supervisor might have been able to just elevate this whole thing to that super-smooth level of flowing just right. Or perhaps if the actors had spent more time in training and combat rehearsal together, they’d have riffed better and improvised more. They still have good on-screen chemistry but again, more time - more money for time - and things improve.

If you don’t know my taste in film, you could see if you recognise anything in the Film Notes page of this journal, but it’s totally OK if you don’t. Basically most of them are long and boring, with super long takes of people not saying or doing much. I still love Hollywood films tho - I love all cinema and I’ll repeat like a broken record, I should either add a section to Film Notes of my favourite blockbusters or create a page for them. Anyway - Charlie’s Angels still has too much editing mostly due to the aforementioned combat, but also because of that good old Hollywood formulaic style-guide. It’s easy to look up the production credits and pluck out names but on a project like this, it’s difficult to pin the end result on the roles themselves. In these cases, personnel like editors are more like daily jobs rather than creative contributors which again is an immense shame. I catch myself before saying “It doesn’t have to be a Malick/Shortland/Lynch project...” but why not? Why can’t a summer blockbuster have its own fantastic identity? General audiences can identify Michael Bay and Christopher Nolan - sure, one or perhaps both of these people take themselves far too seriously, but why not let a project have its own identity?

We run back into the conversation of protecting investments and style guides.

The easy answer to Bay and Nolan is they’re men, but they’ve also had time to prove their worth over time with previous work and track record. Because they’ve had the privilege to do so. Because they’re men. And most of the people making decisions and letting them experiment and sometimes fail to recover investment on their projects and hey, don’t worry, just try again, are men - and they were permitted to try again because they were themselves men.

Whether individual men do or don’t deserve whatever they did or didn’t get, I’m not here to discuss. Many of them definitely didn’t and I can’t change it.

What we should be changing is how we finance, how we empower and how we hand over autonomy of projects to women in cinema, in the arts - in professional life, in any industry.

YOU DON’T KNOW THE DETAILS OF THIS PROJECT

So. Fucking. What.

I can make educated guesses and I can support as much as possible as fair and equitable an arts industry wherever I engage with it.

I really liked Charlie’s Angels. It had a lot of heart. It had a wonderful sense of play and sass and smarts. Yes, a few too many “why didn’t they just shoot the bad guy” moments etc. - again - script reviews, better writers, more time...

More money.

More respect from an industry that doesn’t respect women and women’s autonomy; social, professional, in all aspects.

I hope Elizabeth Banks wants to make another one, can raise the finances for it and has even more control of the next project. More power to her.

[comicteaparty]

April 4th-April 10th, 2020 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble  chat that occurred from April 4th, 2020 to April 10th, 2020.  The chat focused on the following question:

What is something you’ve improved with in regards to writing or comic creation thanks to working on your story?

carcarchu

Oh this one i can answer definitively. it's 100% lineart. forcing myself to have to do lineart for hours everyday is definitely a way to force yourself to get better at it while i still don't like it it's something that i can do now without being scared about it

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

Colouring. I had to get really creative in expressing emotion and hinting plot devices with colour. Also got much better with drawing gesture drawings due to looking at a lot of references!

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

Either writing dialogue or drawing/painting backgrounds... I used to be particularly awful at writing dialogue. It was too stiff and formal, and sounded a lot like old prose. Now, because of writing a comic and going through several scripts, the dialogue is a lot more natural, and the pacing is more realistic to actual conversations. And the other: backgrounds. I really used to not even draw them at all, and doing a comic forced me to have to think about environments in scenes. So I went from drawing floating characters to having to consider where they are and how it affects the story/mood.(edited)

Feather J. Fern

Paneling! That was my main focus to figure out how to do good paneling to have clearer pages

Deo101 [Millennium]

Honestly? Everything. It's all gotten better and I've learned so much. I would say my biggest improvement is probably in my time management, and art wise is probably composition and layouts. But it's hard to pick because I've grown so much in every aspect!

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

Biggest thing I learned was to keep the story small and focused - and that the smaller, more human struggles are much better in creating tension than the whole default "the world's gonna end!" thing. Mind you, I still love a good "world's ending" story, but you gotta make people CARE about the people in that world first!

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

ohohohoooo I have done more drawing in photoshop in this short time I have worked on Wayfinders, than the rest of my life! That has given me some skills for sure! Coloring is another one, and generally just efficiency and flow in a comic

Nutty (Court of Roses)

For me it's been my use of color, and getting more confident in experimenting with it to really drive home a scene's mood!

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

The clearest improvement I always notice is my layouts - I’ve gotten more adventurous with panel shapes and placement as time has gone on, experimenting with more interesting designs for the whole page. Some of those experiments haven’t been totally successful but it always feels like a worthwhile try. I’ve gotten some really, REALLY cool layouts out of these experiments, and I love seeing how dynamic the panels have become compared to my first chapter. Also speed. I’m so much faster now. Thank gooooooodness (edited)

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

@LadyLazuli (Phantomarine) I've definitely noticed the experimental panel layouts! They're really cool.

AntiBunny

Planning. Book 2 is when I started using sketchbook thumbnails to plan ahead. The luxury of that first draft meant I could rethink panel layouts and how to best express the events happening if I first had an idea of what was happening laid out.

Also digital art by necessity since I switched to digital during the current arc. I was decent at lineart already, but other aspects have really challenged me to grow as an artist. I had to totally rethink the way I create backgrounds for instance. During this time the background quality actually declined a little while I got used to a new method, but experience has improved my skills greatly as I force myself into new methods.

DanitheCarutor

Hmmm maybe paneling, speechbubbles and backgrounds? My current project is my second real attempt at doing a comic, but I have learned a lot of stuff from the community and general art and story tutorials. Backgrounds and bubbles were the worst for me when first starting out, I only read manga before starting so the speechbubble shapes did not fit with how English is written. Plus I've only drawn wooded fantasy settings before making my comic, so using a ruler, figuring out perspective points and drawing buildings was very new to me. I still hate drawing cities and such, but I've gotten a lot better at it and it is easier to do now. Since I mostly stuck with B&W before my current project, coloring also kind of improved? Depending on who's looking at it. Lmao If I were to think about story/characters/dialogue, I have no idea if I've improved. Honestly, I don't pay much attention to the quality. Also my brain kinda says it's all bad regardless of what I make.(edited)

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

For my Improvements: I'm getting better at my comic panels, as I adjust to the vertical style. Before I've always drawn the standard format. It's more than just boxes, I try to keep a variety of sizes. I'm picking up roughly how much 'gutter space' I need per 2-3 panels.etc I'm also improving on choosing colors that fits my love of detailed linework.(edited)

OH! I'm also learning about Clip studio shortcuts, how to use the assets they provide which makes the process, abit easier on me. Things I need to change, is I want to get a good speedy coloring style, without referring to my usual coloring.(edited)

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

the more I worked on the comic, the more I feel ambitious in making different angles and perspective. So it's really hitting me out of my comfort zone which is good! lol Though I'm trying to keep in mind of my speed, what I feel like I've improved a bit is trying to keep in mind of paneling and dialogue.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

Process! Space and i have definitely figured out the most productive way to produce content at the rate and quality that also provides us with time for our own projects. Comics are a useful tool that helps you discover ways to better organize your creative workflow for sure!

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I think probably scenery. I used to dread drawing inanimate objects but now I feel more confident in filling in a scene & even look forward to it sometimes. Maybe also page composition and paneling but I still have a lot to learn there

eli [a winged tale]

One of the reasons I embarked on the webcomic journey is to push myself to improve not only storytelling but also utilizing art to create a reader experience that would be difficult to replicate with just words. I’d like to think that 9 months into making A Winged Tale, I’ve improved on deciding when is a good opportunity to invest more into backgrounds vs character dynamics and when should be focused more on sequences of panels and composition. While the comic is written in a four panel format, more and more I’m finding areas where the story could be told by breaking those rules (attached pic). It’s a balance and I hope going forward I will improve more in pushing the limits of panels and find ways to express the story in fun and interesting ways.(edited)

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

Wow that's a very good description @eli [a winged tale] I look forward to reading more of your story journey

eli [a winged tale]

Thanks so much Joichi! I’m eager to keep learning~

Capitania do Azar

I'm gonna go with planning and actually getting it done. I'm so much faster because now the process is much more streamlined to me

kayotics

My whole comic was started s an exercise to just get better at comics generally so I’d probably say every part I’ve improved at? The biggest things are probably colors and the upfront planning process

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Ooof hard question. I think my main improvement lies with page and speechballoon layouts and writing natural feeling dialouge. I'd say maybe also character acting?

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I'm slowly learning how to create more engaging comic narrative. I read and research in the polished prem webcomics to see what makes them engaging? Like I'm going to challenge myself by creating a series of short stories with a reoccurring set of characters. Every new comic series I create is an experience, trial and error. Sometimes I skip the writeup and just go in blind, trust my own instincts. I'm glad to reach out and talk about it than in my own head. I hope by this year, I'll have at least 2 chapters of Hybrid Dolls out.(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I've definitely gotten better at planning/ outlining multiple chapters ahead of time. I did not even do this when I was doing the first 10 something chapters. (I did attempt an outline before I began the comic, but the story changed significantly from the outline by the time I started the comic, and I did not try to do it again for a long while.) I can't remember when I started, but I do recall having a lot of trouble the first time I tried to do it. It's gotten a little easier each time, though. In fact, I just spent the past few days outlining the next few very important chapters, de-tangling some big tangles. I'm really glad my outlining (and overall writing) skills had leveled up, because HOO boy, I don't think my 2014-2015 self could have done this!

I also became friends with enviros. I had already become somewhat comfortable drawing perspective when HoK started, but I had a sort of mechanical approach to it, like "oh I need some enviro for these establishing shots, guess I'll draw them." But now I LOVE drawing enviros! (some types anyway...) It's my comfort activity, something I treat myself to after a long day! In the thumbnails for my next few pages, there's a few enviro-heavy panels that I have to remove, because I drew too many of them (and the pacing got too slow as a result). I have to stop myself from drawing too many of these.

My biggest improvement is probably I've come to understand my characters and my themes much better, but that's more of a "I got better at making HoK" than a "I got better at making comics." There's definitely a difference between the two.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

@keii’ii (Heart of Keol) ah I totally understand I tried the outline method before I start but my story changed alot after I drew it. So it start to feel like a waste of time for me, but I'll still write an outline to make sure to plan where my story heads(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Yeah! I needed to draw those first few chapters to understand the direction of my own story.

The drawing part is an essential part of self-reflection, to try to understand what it is that I want out of the story. The answer has always been there in my heart, but I'm not able to see it clearly from the get-go.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I end up breaking scenes and put them in for future episodes, since I want to get a certain flow in the story.

It could be tricky to see what it is you want out of the story until you are in at least 3 chapters in?

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I needed way more than 3 chapters -- though granted, my chapters are short, so that could be a part of it

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I see the early first script as testing the water. like a test to figure out the characters personalities. Unless you are bringing in old characters which you knew before?(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Even if the characters have been with you for a while, unless I have made a comic with them, there is a big chance that the characters will completely change, too.

DanitheCarutor

You know, I was thinking about about this, mostly about how I wouldn't have been happy if I was able to finish my comic the day I started. Then I realized I'm happy that I didn't. The first chapter wasn't the best, I was just learning how to coloring a comic, still fleshing out my characters and was still brainstorming small kinks in the story. I also still didn't have as much of an understanding of perspective, or panel and bubble layout. Even though I still have a lot I need to work on, I've gotten a lot better in all those aspects. Even though my use of color is weird, I've definitely gotten much more confident in it, enough so that I experiment and take a lot more risks with style. Even though my panelling can be boring, I have a much better understanding of how I want a page to look. I've improved a lot with my planning as well, like even though my thumbnailing/storyboarding only takes maybe 30, I've learned to step away for a bit if I don't like a layout, or analyzing why I don't like it and brainstorming ways to make it better. If I had magically finished the comic all at once, it would look really bad and may have been less readable.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

That is inspiring to hear about your improvement @DanitheCarutor

Natsu-no-Hikari

Chiming in! Just this week, Miko (my co-creator) and I were discussing how far we've come from when we started our first comic (https://liarsgotoparadise.com/) vs. where we are now. I think there have been a lot of learn experiences, such as art, dialogue, general editing - but especially with pacing and character interaction. We regret that we didn't stop to focus more on that interaction, as we wanted to move ahead in the story...and now we can't change that, except to start now and not allow ourselves to grow impatient. Take our time and enjoy the journey - that's our new motto. There's a time to rush ahead in perilous moments, but there's also definitely a time to catch our breaths and let the characters mingle and speak. It's an improvement that will become more noticeable going forward in Liars and our second comic as well.

[bethygauw]

[2/2] Online B’s-Log Interview with Satoru Kuwabara

Released 4 June 2018

Original source Part 2 The original article has pictures that complement well so please check it out too.

This is B’s-Log’s new project, “Creator Touch”, an interview series with creators of popular series. The first person they interviewed was Satoru Kuwabara, the music producer of Ensemble Stars!.

In the first half of the interview, they asked about how Kuwabara started to get involved with Enstars unit songs. Kuwabara also talked about the points he focused on in the song series that have been released so far. (~2.8k words)

In the second half, they talked about song numbers that left the biggest impression on Kuwabara, the 3D live concert, the voice actor live concert and Enstage. (~2.2k words)

In their third single, I wanted to show everyone Trickstar who had transformed.

Q: You had created numerous songs for Enstars, but which one left the biggest impression?

K: There are many… but outside of first season songs, I’d say it’s Trickstar’s BREAKTHROUGH!. It was supposed to be the B-side at first. We made DIAMOND SUMMER with the intention of making an A-side because it was a very Trickstar song. But we also wanted to show a different side to Trickstar—a transformed Trickstar—and not just their cheerful and positive side. That’s when we brought up the suggestion to make BREAKTHROUGH! as the A-side song. Both songs were very important, but the first song would be the long-lasting impression after all. That’s exactly why we made BREAKTHROUGH! as the first song.

Q: That’s a good point. As opposed to the other songs that Trickstar have released so far, it’s like they’re fighting in this song.

K: I wanted to show how Trickstar has an enemy that they cannot oppose at their current state through music as well. I thought that if they were to challenge their rivals—Eve, Adam, and Eden—it would make things better if they weren’t the “usual Trickstar”. That’s why I strongly pushed BREAKTHROUGH! for the A-side forward.

Q: Were there any other songs that left an impression on you?

K: It would be 2wink’s TRICK with TREAT!!. One reason is because I was the one who wrote the song, but it was also the first time “Saito-san” and “Soma-san” got to sing with the others so I was happy for him (laugh). Saito-san always looked so lonely all by himself, so it was a long-awaited moment.

Q: TRICK with TREAT!! has UNDEAD singing as the backing vocals and voicing out dialogue lines. Speaking of UNDEAD, I think there were a lot of fans who were waiting for the veteran unit, Dead Man’s.

K: You must mean Dead Man’s Death Game Holic. In that CD, Dead Man’s song took priority and was made first, so making UNDEAD’s songs was a herculean task. UNDEAD’s second season CD was considerably cheerful, so I wanted to show their corrupted side more in the third season, but there was a restriction where they must not feel more corrupted than Dead Man’s. I’m the composer of Gate of the Abyss, and actually it was a song that was chosen through a contest. Happy Elements chose this song in the end.

Q: From a professional’s point of view, what would be your fixation in Enstars unit song series? Specifically, can you tell us if there’s anything like, “Maybe you won’t notice if you don’t listen to it carefully, but actually…”

K: I wanted to deliver the best sound quality as best as I could, so we made it compatible with high resolution sound quality. It’s actually made in a much better sound quality environment compared to generic CDs. Although when you burn it into CDs, it’s not high-res anymore… Also, up until around the second season I took into account the units’ upbringing and position. I made some delineation in my mind, for example how I think I can make some parts more extravagant. I thought to myself that I’d better make those improvements.

Q: …In other words?

K: “We should record a live string performance for fine!” (laugh) Valkyrie is a unit of artists so naturally we would record the instruments’ live performance, ditto with Akatsuki and the traditional Japanese instruments. On the contrary, I try not to include acoustics as much as I can for 2wink. For Ra*bits, they’re also a rookie unit, and although we had skilful musicians perform for us, we didn’t use live recording as much at first.

3D live concert, voice actor live concert, and the secret episode behind Enstage’s production

Q: Enstars’ unit songs have been performed in various types of media such as the 3D Live “DREAM LIVE” (Star Live) and the Starry Stage, a live concert of the voice actors. Can you tell us a bit more about them as well?

K: With the Star Live, I was the one who wanted to have a live band. In 3D Lives, the characters’ movements are pretty much the same for every session, so I think putting on a live band accompaniment would make the audience think that the characters are alive even more. I supervised the band arrangement of the songs and also the casting of the band members. It was only the performance on December 31st where one of the band members couldn’t make it and I had to fill in for them (laugh).

Q: Now that you’ve seen the Star Live, what do you think?

K: I simply thought that wow, we live in an amazing era! Sorry if that sounded like a 5-year-old commentary (laugh). I was blessed with the opportunity to feel the fans’ wish to see this concert first-hand. I was able to take on a new challenge and I felt grateful.

Q: What about Starry Stage?

K: I was involved from the planning stage. I was actually the one who wanted to have a live performance with the voice actors. Our plan got through after right about 2 years, and it was approved with the title "Starry Stage”. I actually don’t know what “SS” is the short for, but when it appeared in the game I thought it was “Starry Stage”. In Starry Stage, I was involved in casting, stage production, and production supervision. I really got to do many different things!

Q: What did you think of it?

K: Goodness, I was just emotionally overwhelmed. One of my strongest feelings would have been, “I finally got to see this scenery!” But more importantly, it brought to surface my powerlessness and what I was lacking (bitter laugh). To bring forth a live performance, we made the fans wait for 3 years, so the Starry Stage also had a concept of getting up close to the fans as much as we can. That’s why I wanted to absolutely have all of them get on the moving cart and also have them go to the smaller stage (at the back). I think we managed to clear that part. Although, among the 13 cast members, to more than half of them it was their first time singing and dancing for an idol series. That’s why it was difficult to ask them to learn difficult choreography so we just did the best we could. Those were some of the challenges we had, so it was a really touching moment for me when I watched the performance.

Q: There’s a second concert for Star Live, but how about Starry Stage?

K: The official title had “1st” in it so, in other words, you know? (Laugh) As for me, I’d like to make it happen!*

*[T/L note] It’s happening! 13 January 2019 at Nippon Budokan.

Q: You guys from Arte Refact are also involved in creating original songs for the stage adaptation, Ensemble Stars! On Stage. Are there any differences in the processes between making a song for a CD release and making a song for a stage play?

K: In Enstage, we basically received the script and then we were asked to make a particular type of song. Enstage played out the main story. Around that time, we kind of already made them into unit songs, so it was difficult. But we took out some specific parts of a scene and looked at them from a different point of view. That’s when we could create. We made them as we thought how this unit was singing this particular type of song, and how this was the kind of music that would fit this kind of scene… So what we did was the same, but we made the song from a different viewpoint.

Q: In Ensemble Stars! Extra Stage ~Judge of Knights~ that used the event Rebellion! The King’s Horseback Ride as its theme, they performed many new songs during the Judgment Live scene.

K: Judgment had a developing battle scene so they asked us to make a medley. At that point, the script was not yet finished so I had no idea how it was going to be. But when I read the finished version I understood what they meant. Although, I asked them what would happen with the dialogue bits in between, since it wouldn’t be called a medley anymore if they had stopped [the music]. Then, they told me that they were going to include something like a dance choreography as well. That’s how I decided to let the music play in the background during those times and let it develop entry points for the singing to come in again.

Q: So you made it based on the fact that it was going to have both acting and singing included.

K: Also, the actors can sometimes change when they choose to take a breath between the phrases. When that happens, the timing feel will change as well. I can’t create with the stance that they have to breathe at some specific point. When they sing, it’s fixed, but other than the singing part I make the music loop (so that they can get back onto it should they be running behind). Since the battle scene was made to accelerate, I and the composers’ side suggested to also increase the bpm (tempo) a little by little. It was subtle so that the audience won’t feel the abrupt change.

Q: You really made these songs based on how it’s going to be sung at a stage play.

K: When there are dialogues within a song, I would read those dialogues out loud to myself and think about the timing of how the character speaks. Then that’s how I figure out how long the phrases should be.

Q: Have you seen Enstage?

K: I’ve seen all of them, of course. All of them and all the characters are truly really good, but personally I really like Eichi Tenshouin’s actor, (Takahisa) Maeyama-san! I was like, “Thanks for giving me a chance to write a song for Eichi-sama! It was the best!” (laugh)

The main point about character songs is that it’s not unnatural.

Q: I’d like to ask something with regards to what we call character songs in general. Is there anything that you feel you must do every time you create character songs or unit songs?

K: It’s difficult to explain it in words, but I myself don’t think of Enstars’ songs as “character songs”. It’s like I’m actually producing idols and real life idol songs. But if I have to answer from the viewpoint that they’re character songs, I guess it would be how I won’t make something that’s unnatural for that character of that world to sing this kind of song. I want to make a song that can let you picture the world and the character. That the world matches the character themself, and that it’s nothing out of place. For example, you don’t feel right hearing digital instruments in an anime with an idyllic setting. But if there’s someone in that anime who likes games, it won’t be strange to insert something digital. I think about how I should set things apart like that.

Q: Do you not approach the way you make [character songs] and songs you make for real world artists differently?

K: There’s no difference. But for me, it’s often the case that I would ask the artists to write the lyrics as a condition when I’m the one producing or providing songs for them. If the situation proves to be difficult, or when they have other tie-up songs to work on as well, then other lyricists may be called in. But as long as that is not the case, I’d like the actual person who will be singing this song to write the lyrics themself. Otherwise it won’t get through to the listeners, is what I think. If they sing words written by someone else, there’s always something about it that doesn’t feel right. I want to make a song that includes the singer’s feelings in it even just a little, so I’d like them to write their own song’s lyrics whenever possible.

Q: Lastly, please leave a message to readers who are looking forward to your next work! What would you like them to hear in the songs that you have produced?

K: I think music is something alive. Even if the melody and the lyrics don’t change, your emotions don’t stay the same when you listen to the song for the first time, the second time, the third time, and so on. I want you to enjoy a song by paying attention to the way the singing is different, or how the accompanying music is different even though the melody is the same. It may make you think how much the world in that song have changed. For Enstars unit songs, you can spot the differences especially if that song has live performance of the backing instruments. Or even though it’s not a live performance, more instruments may be added and the way the melodies play out may also be different. We make that kind of contrasts so I think “spotting the little differences as you listen to it” is another way of enjoying the songs. We are very particular to each and every musical part of the song and not just the melody, so I hope you can pay close attention to that. I’d like you to listen to the karaoke versions that are included in the CDs single as well!

[vcg73]

Witch!Kurt #27: Good News

Time to give the non-magical part of Kurt’s life a little attention. 

As soon as the blizzard cleared up enough to let everyone get back to their daily routines, life shifted in high gear.  First thing Tuesday morning, after a lift to school from a willing Elliott, Kurt turned in the final draft of his Junior work-study to the Dean of Performance. 

Carmen Tibideaux took her time reading over the material, jotting down an occasional note or making a non-committal grunt over some bit that caught her attention. Unfortunately, neither her face nor her reactions told Kurt anything. She could have loved it, hated it, or found it the most mediocre project turned in this year. There would be no determining her reaction until she had finished every last page and pondered her overall impressions for a few moments.

It drove Kurt crazy, that opaque deliberation, but he knew better than to interrupt or to fidget in her presence. Carmen hated interruptions and she hated distractions. Every student learned the futility of trying to hurry this woman along, as well as the danger associated with saying more than one meant to in her presence. In a way it was fortunate that Kurt always had to fight the tendency to become tongue-tied around her. Kurt had witnessed more than one schoolmate dig themselves into an ever-deeper hole by saying too much while trying to anticipate their teacher’s opinion.  

Today patience really was a virtue. As she closed the back cover on the sturdy red binder Kurt had used to protect his beloved musical from the dangers of dripping icicles and drifting snowflakes after Elliott had dropped him off a couple of blocks from school, preserving the illusion of having commuted in the normal way. 

Carmen folded her hands over the book and looked at Kurt for a long nerve-wracking moment. “Congratulations Mister Hummel,” she said. “Your final script is hereby approved for production. The structure and dialogue have both improved noticeably from earlier drafts, as have the songs, which you may recall I deemed trite and uninteresting during your initial assessment.  The choice to move the ballad from Act One to the beginning of Act Two is a wise one. It feels more natural and effective after the sisters’ argument. Taking on a romantic comedy for your first solo project was a risk, but the humor flows in a natural way that should bring an appropriate amount of laughter from your audience.  Assuming your cast is up to the task.”

She paused and Kurt realized that he was expected to interject. “Yes, Madame. I’ve drafted seniors Clark Tidwell and Tonya Lowenstein, juniors Macy and Lisa Martin, sophomore Luis Hassan, and freshmen Laronda Williams and Antonio Garde, as well as myself, to play the housekeeper, children and grandchildren of the sisters and Ted the suitor. The actors at Lexington House have been practicing since Christmas and everything is going more smoothly since we switched two of the supporting roles.  I feel confident that everyone can be ready to perform on whatever date you choose for us.”

A hint of a smile flickered over Carmen’s lips.  Kurt was certain it had not escaped her notice that he had drafted all of his student actors from the Adam’s Apples. He had many friends around school, but it had occurred to him that that particular talent pool tended to go unused by the majority of NYADA’s elite. Kurt knew only too well what it felt like to yearn for a spotlight no one was ever willing to shine on you and he had wanted to give those deserving underdogs their chance. 

“Excellent,” the Dean said. “Then as you’ve managed to be the first of your class to turn in a completed project, I feel you should have the honor of the first performance slot. Since you’ve been rehearsing at your actors’ residence up to now, I take it you’ll need a couple of days to properly reblock the scenes onto the stage of the Shapiro.”

Kurt nearly squealed, but managed to hold himself back by sheer force of will. He had originally assumed he could stage the production at the Lexington House, but he had found out at the beginning of January that all student productions would be held at NYADA, to be graded by a panel of instructors.  He had immediately gone to the older actors and their caregivers to arrange permissions for a series of “field trips” via the bus company that serviced the elder care facility. To his relief, the cast had been very excited at the prospect of performing on a real stage and happy to invite an audience of relatives and friends. (Something Kurt had then had to obtain a second set of permissions from NYADA to allow.)  Still, even with all this negotiation he had not expected to be offered the biggest and grandest venue in the school. 

Doing his best to appear composed, Kurt channeled every acting lesson he had received at this school to say calmly, “Yes, I think a tech rehearsal and a dress rehearsal should be enough. The elder members of my cast are stage veterans, so I won’t have to simplify the directions for them.” He paused, frowning slightly as he ran the play through his mind at a rapid-fire pace. “Although with such a big stage I may have to reconsider the blocking of the scene where Eunice storms out after her fight with Constance. Mary Ellen is nearly eighty five and I’m not sure she’s capable of storming more than a few feet.”

At this, the dour Dean actually chuckled. “A fair point and I’m glad to see that you’re considering the physical capabilities of your cast as well as the professional. That shows insight as a director.” She checked her appointment book, as well as a couple of schedules on the computer screen to her left. “I’ll reserve the auditorium for you this coming Friday and Monday afternoons for rehearsal and schedule your graded performance for next Wednesday at 5pm. Can you have everything ready by then, Mister Hummel?”

Knowing perfectly well that the question was largely rhetorical; he would be graded on Wednesday if he was ready or not; Kurt nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you for your time.”

~*~*~*~*~*~

“Adam!  Elliott!  You won’t believe it!” 

Kurt burst through the apartment door at 5pm, having taken the long way home just to give himself a few extra minutes to think and plan. He had been on Cloud 9 all day, making calls, meeting his fellow Apples, arranging transportation from Lexington House for the days his cast would be needed, talking to students in the props and set-design departments and slipping in to measure and carefully block out the stage of the Shapiro. 

When he had assumed he would be performing in a small venue, he had staged his play in two acts with everything to take place in the living room of the Atworthy home. It would be a small matter to move a few chairs, tables and set pieces from the well stocked prop building. Part of the overall education at NYADA was learning how to dress a stage on short notice and Kurt - without quite realizing how rare such a thing really was - had cultivated friendships with people from every creative Major in the school. He had served as a costumer, editor, background actor,  and supporting chorus member for half the productions in school over the past two and a half years and everyone he spoke with was happy to return the favor now.  

His fiance and Familiar had both leaped to their feet in reaction to Kurt’s dramatic entrance. “What? What’s happened?” they demanded.

“The Real Housewives of Albany’ is going to be performed next Wednesday evening on the stage of the Shapiro Auditorium!” he announced, doing a giddy little dance around the loft that Elliott happily joined when Kurt grabbed him by both hands and pranced him around the floor. 

Adam declined to dance, but happily hugged the stuffings out of his beloved. Unlike Elliott, Adam was a NYADA graduate and he knew exactly how much of an honor this was. “Darling, that’s amazing! Normally the Shapiro is strictly used for Senior projects and alumni events. For Dean Tibidieaux to give it to a third year student play is high praise indeed, and one that your fellow students will all recognize as such. I’m so proud of you.” He gripped Kurt’s cheeks and gave him an enthusiastic kiss on the mouth. “You’ll have a sold out show for certain.”

Kurt could not help preening at the praise. “I almost fell over when she told me. It adds a lot of pressure to make the final performance perfect, knowing the Dean will have raised expectations high by doing this, but I’m super- excited too. I’m not counting on a full house, but I did get permission to block off a section for the actors’ families, so I just hope we’ll at least pull in a decent sized crowd on top of that.”

“You will. Student musicals usually do very well,” Elliott said, parking his rear on the back of the sofa and pulling his feet up to sit cross-legged on the narrow surface, a huge grin lighting his face. With anyone else, Kurt would have been afraid they would fall from such a precarious perch, but Elliott always somehow maintained his balance. He had moved some of his belongings into the loft during the recent blizzard and for now the little couch was his. “NYU isn’t strictly a performing arts school, but original shows get lots of interest. And you’re still Winter Showcase recruit, Midnight Madness winner, last man standing from Lima, and guaranteed future Dean’s Award winner Kurt Hummel. Not to mention, one of your cast members won an Obie back in the ‘70s and another one was nominated for a Tony.  At a place like NYADA, you’ll probably get S.R.O. just for that!”

Kurt beamed at this assessment. It was so nice to be surrounded by people who believed in him after all those years with no true support from people he’d considered his best friends. “Well, thank you for that but we’ll have to wait until next year to find out who gets the Dean’s Award. That’s for graduating seniors and there are a number of candidates in other programs who would be completely deserving. I don’t want to get over-confident about anything and have it bite me in the ass, so I’ll just hope the show draws enough of an audience not to embarrass us. It’s a big venue, after all, and not everyone is as fascinated with theater history and musical-comedy as us.”

“Your modesty does you credit,” Adam decided. “But I am under no such obligation to control my optimism. You’ll be packing them in like sardines next Wednesday night. In fact, I should start knitting souvenir socks for the occasion. We can hand them out at intermission, since I’m positive that your play will have knocked them off of everyone by then.”

Kurt laughed. “Well, save me a pair if you do. That would be a hell of a keep-sake.” He grinned, hugging himself and spinning in a circle to express his excitement. “Oh, gosh. I have a million things to do before our first stage rehearsal on Friday. I know you’ve suffered through all the various drafts, but I can’t wait for you to see it on stage with a real . . . ”  Suddenly, his happiness dimmed and he looked at his fiance with wide eyes. “Oh, Adam, I forgot! The play is at NYADA. Will you be able to attend in such a large space, especially if we do get a full crowd?”

Adam had been sticking close to home since his nerve-wracking adventure in Lima, but his proud smile did not falter. “Yes, darling, I will. For your big night, I’ll manage even if I have to render myself invisible to do it.”

“You should disguise yourself as a prop and watch it from the stage,” Elliott suggested around the mouthful of the apple he had just plucked from a bowl on the coffee table as he rolled down the sofa to lounge on its cushions. “I think the Atworthy living room could use a coat rack, don’t you, Kurt? And doesn’t Constance have a wheelchair? Maybe you should suggest that she needs a lap cat, so I can have a close-up view too.”

Kurt relaxed again at their easy banter, Adam debating the merits of becoming a coat rack versus a flower vase and Elliott speculating that if Constance did get a cat then Lord Tubbington, who considered himself quite the thespian after starring in Brittany’s old “Fondue for Two” YouTube series, would probably make himself the feline understudy and find a reason to take over when show time came.  

Privately thinking that a cat would indeed be a nice touch for his show, Kurt said, “Well, don’t worry. I intend to reserve the coven seats in the front row, assuming you all want to come.  I’ve recruited half the Adam’s Apples already, so I’m sure the rest of them will show up to watch and they’ll probably invite people too. And some of my friends in in Stage Combat have been bugging me to let them know once I got a firm date from Carmen. I texted everyone on the way home, letting them know the venue and the rehearsal schedule.”

“See?” Adam said with a smile. “Everything is moving along and your audience is multiplying as we speak. You have nothing to worry about.”

Kurt sat down in his favorite chair, the one he had designed and built himself from an old Mercedes car seat he’d found in a junk yard, sagging back with exaggerated exhaustion. “Nothing at all. Except for finalizing the set, the costumes, the transportation, the props; wrangling a dozen actors, doing two run-throughs, and not having an aneurysm if anything goes wrong on performance day. Not to mention that I still have to practice for my mid-winter critique next Friday.” He flipped one hand and closed his eyes. “Oh, my god, give me a distraction before I start overthinking everything. Did anything happen to you today? I thought I detected some emotional roller-coastering today, but that could have just been me projecting.”

“As a matter of fact I did have some news today if you’d like to hear it.”

Kurt opened his eyes and leaned forward, eyes lighting up with interest when Adam nudged Elliott to sit up and took a seat on the sofa next to him. “Tell me!”

Adam smiled at his enthusiasm. “I heard back from Stewart Henderson after you left for school this morning.” He held up a forestalling hand when Kurt squeaked with excitement, both hands clasping as he lifted them to cover his lips, while his hips did an excited little chair-dance. “Unfortunately, he’s decided to go with another candidate for the assistant’s job. He was very kind about it and expressed his sincere regret, but he’s not a young man anymore and he needs someone who can be more hands-on, following him to productions and jet-setting about with him on a moment’s notice. Even if I wasn’t still battling post-traumatic stress and agoraphobia, I wouldn’t feel right committing myself to spending months at a time away from you and our life in New York.”

Kurt could not prevent a small pout. “I understand and I can absolutely appreciate both of those reasons, but it would have been such an amazing opportunity for you. I was sure that you were meant to have that job.” He cocked his head, realizing that Adam was still smiling in a rather smug fashion. “Why aren’t you disappointed?”

“Because Stewart also told me that he’d been impressed enough during our interview that he had put me up for a different job as a booking assistant with Hanover and Bradley. He forwarded my resume and arranged a phone interview, with his recommendation that they hire me on the spot. Which, as it turned out, they were quite willing to do after speaking with me. H&B handles a great many clients through online meetings and remote scheduling, so I can do the job from here, plus have the freedom to take on Mrs. Bui’s kind offer of part-time employment at the tea shop. The job at H&B should pay enough to be a real contribution to our finances, but I think it will do me good to also have a reason to go outdoors on the regular.” 

“Adam, that’s amazing,” Kurt said, shaking his head. “You’re amazing. Seriously. Here you are, having survived one of the worst experiences imaginable and still recovering from a massive scare just a few days ago, and yet you’re ready and willing to face your fears and get back out into the working world again. You’re just . . .”

He had no words, but he hopped out of his chair and into Adam’s arms, kissing him so thoroughly that Elliott started playfully fanning himself with a magazine.  “Should I leave you two alone?”

The couple parted, flushing at the reminder that they had an audience. Kurt laughed. “We’re done.” He gave Adam a saucy wink. “For now.”

The Familiar grinned. “Understood.  Maybe I’ll go see what Dani is up to tonight. “Meanwhile, if you two are up for a more prosaic diversion, I knew you’d want to celebrate Adam’s new job, so I’ve got a nice green salad in the fridge, a melt-in-your-mouth tuna casserole in the oven and a chocolate sponge cake with pudding for dessert.”

“Custard,” Adam said with a playfully long-suffering roll of the eyes. “Seriously mate, if you’re going to borrow dessert recipes from Gran’s cookbook, you might at least give the components their proper names.”

Elliott just smiled. “As long as it tastes good, I don’t care. Especially since now we have two things to celebrate.”

“Well whatever you call it, I want a big serving of everything.  I knew I smelled something yummy when I walked in,” Kurt said, sliding down into the corner of the sofa and draping his legs across Adam’s lap. “I’m ready for a good meal. I’ve been so busy today, I didn’t have time to stop for lunch.”

Adam made a scolding noise. “Then by all means let’s tuck in. Your Familiar has been tormenting me with cooking odors all afternoon and I’m fairly starved.”

Elliott happily jumped up and went to put out three place settings. 

“What about you?” Kurt said a few minutes later when the three of them gathered around the table and began filling their plates. At Elliott’s inquiring look, Kurt said, “Adam and I both have things to celebrate, but I’ve been so caught up in my own stuff lately that I feel like a horrible friend. Here you are, giving up your privacy for an undetermined length of time to teach me and look after us both, not to mention being my on-call magical taxi service and I barely even know what’s going on in your life. Did you ever get to do that lab time you were trying to arrange when the blizzard hit? Did you get your grades back from winter Finals yet? Have you applied for that internship you want at that Animal Wellness Center in Long Island yet? Are you writing any songs?  Any new men in your life? I need dish!”

Elliott laughed as Kurt ticked off each question. “Well, let’s see. No time for song-writing lately, but when we had band practice on Monday night Johnny gave me an idea for one that we might work on together.”

“Rock song?” Kurt guessed. Being a drummer, Johnny had a natural draw toward songs with a beat and a strong lyrical hook. Kurt had developed a better appreciation for such music since starting up his band. The original idea of a Madonna cover band had quickly given way to an eclectic mixture of genres and artists that appealed to all of its members and eventually led them to weave a few original tunes into the mix. That variety had given Pamela Lansbury/One Three Hill a niche with local audiences and proved a winning formula for the band itself.

“Actually more of a ballad,” Elliott said, surprising him. “At least for now. I’ll let you know when it’s developed more. Right now I’m a little busy with school, both NYU and Coven 101. I did pass all my exams last term, though I could’ve done better at cellular biology. I aced bio-chem and that might be enough to get me the internship come spring, but they won’t made a final decision until March and it’s a pretty competitive slot. I’ll need to bump up my lab time and slam-dunk the immunology course if I’m gonna have a shot at it.”

“If you need any help studying, we’ll be glad to help,” Kurt offered, feeling it was the least he could do after all the help Elliott had been giving him lately. “Just don’t make me look at any pictures of sick or wounded animals.”

“Deal,” he said. "I don’t like seeing animals hurting either, but I need to learn how to alleviate their suffering in order to get them healthy and happy again. It’s what I’ve wanted since before I even figured out where my Potential was headed. I think I’d be studying to become a veterinarian even if I was a Standard.”

Kurt nodded thoughtfully. “That’s interesting. Carole said something similar to me when she was here over the holidays. About how our powers seemed to go in line with our personal interests. Like how so many witches are also singers or musicians, when music lends itself so well to spell-casting. Or the way Adam and I have both always liked to cook and we each developed a Talent for potions, minor in my case, primary in his. It’s just a theory, but it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I have some old pictures of my mom puttering around in her grandparents’ garden when she was a little girl and her Talent was apparently in plant based magic.” 

“What an interesting theory,” Adam said. “There may be something to that. Your step-mum went into nursing and she’s an Empath.  I’ve wanted to be an actor since I was just a tiny lad and my other major Talent is Transmogrification. Johnny’s is as well and told me he was painfully shy as a child, wanting anything other than to be noticed.”

Seeing that Adam’s attention was drifting, no doubt mentally adding a chapter to his future tome on the definitive study of magical powers, Kurt just patted his arm and turned back to his conversation with Elliott. “What about guys?” he asked in a teasing tone. “I noticed you and Sebastian seemed to be doing some pretty serious flirting last week.”

Casually stretching his arms overhead, Elliott folded his hands behind his head and pretended nonchalance. “Aw, that was just in fun. I suspect we both have too much going on right now to start up a long distance thing. Though if the signals he was throwing were accurate, that could change.”

“From what I saw, those signals read, ‘let’s go find a dark corner and drop our trousers’, so I’m quite certain he would be happy to have them picked up at any time,” Adam said dryly.

The Familiar chuckled. “Yep, that’s about what I got too.”

“And would you?” Kurt said curiously.  “Sebastian’s good looking and all, but as far as I know he’s always been a wham-bam and forget your name the next day man. While you strike me as more of the long-term relationship sort.”

“I am, mostly, but I’ve been known to do a walk of shame or two in my time,” Elliott admitted, contrarily looking rather proud of that admission. “And considering what you told me about his attitude toward non purebreds, he could just be intrigued by the notion of slumming with an Animagus. Still, it might be worth it. I could show him what he’s been missing.” He smiled and took another bite of tuna casserole, all but wrapping his tongue around the bit of pasta before putting the fork in his mouth and then pulling it back out with exaggerated slowness, giving his eyebrows a suggestive hitch.  

Kurt stared at him for a moment, then laughed. “Why, you dog! No offense.”

“Speaking of Sebastian,” Adam said, pushing away his empty plate and settling back in his chair with a satisfied burp. “Pardon me. I’ve been meaning to ask; did either of you happen to notice that Carole’s new Familiar looked rather constipated every time someone mentioned her son?”

Kurt nodded. “Particularly in connection with Blaine. He didn’t seem to want to talk about either of them. I decided to leave it alone for now since I was more concerned about Carole getting some help with her magic, but if Sebastian thinks he can steer her away from talking about anything she’s set her mind on, he’s sadly mistaken. Dad is a lot more concerned about eliminating the threat to all of us than he is about sparing any tender feelings from the new kid and having two of her sons’ peers living in the house, one of whom was a good friend, there’s no way Carole won’t be eager to talk about Finn. I figured I’d give them a few more days to get used to each other before I go in demanding answers.”

“Maybe you should grill your dad. Burt will be in the audience for your play next week,” Elliott pointed out. “He told me to just come get him on whatever night you ended up performing it.”

Kurt stared at him, surprised. “He did? I didn’t know that. I assumed he wouldn’t be able to come, considering he and Carole just spent two whole weeks out here. Did he really ask you to transport him?”

“Yep. And sorry if I just spoiled a surprise,” Elliott said, looking sheepish. “I assumed you’d talked, since he didn’t seem too keen on magical travel the last time I saw him.”

Kurt laughed. “He still isn’t, but he likes to spring surprises on me, so I should have guessed. I kind of assumed he’d never want to actually do it unless there was some kind of emergency, though.”

“Burt has seen us Teleport enough by now that I think his curiosity has begun to overcome his nerves,” Adam suggested. “You know what an effort he’s been making to accept your new status and to pretend that he isn’t still gobsmacked every time he sees you perform an act of magic. Now that he knows he’s also married to a witch, and for the second time to boot, I rather imagine his need to become comfortable with magic has indeed reached critical status in his mind.”

Kurt nodded. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but diving head-first into things once he’s made up his mind is very much my dad’s M.O.” He smiled again. “And now that you’ve spilled the beans, I can save him the best seat in the house for Wednesday night!”

“Excellent. Then after the show, once you’ve finished receiving your no-doubt glowing assessment from the Dean’s committee and seen all of your cast off home, I really think you and Burt should go out and have a good chat over a nice meal. Just the two of you.”

Surprised, he said, “You don’t want to come?”

“Not just then,” Adam said, a reassuring smile on his face. “Elliott can pop me on home, if he doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Elliott interjected, standing up as he began to clear away the remains of their dinner in preparation for serving dessert. “Any time.”

Adam nodded thanks to him. Seeing Kurt’s still concerned expression, he reached out and squeezed his hand. “Even at the holidays you and Burt never had much opportunity for a one-on-one. Oh, a few minutes here and there, but there was always something needing to be done, or some of us hanging about sharing attention, or some other pull on your time. Not to mention all the tension that stood between you before you cleared the air at the holiday party. You and Burt share something special; a bond that existed long before any of us came along and that that bond was badly damaged during and after your time with Blaine. I think you need a chance here and there to firm up that connection and I want to make sure that you both to have the opportunity to do so. You need to spend a little private time together, to chat and catch up; rediscover the closeness you used to share.”

Kurt put a hand over his heart, imagining that he could actually feel it swelling with the pride and love he felt for this man. When, in the entire span of his relationship with Blaine, had his ex ever behaved with such simple loving selflessness; seeing what Kurt needed and providing him with an opportunity to get it with no thought of himself? 

“Thank you,” he said softly. “And that goes for you too. Any time you want to invite Henry or the rest of your family for private Crawford bonding time, don’t be afraid to say the word. They’ve been nothing but sweet and welcoming to me, but you’re their family and they haven’t had much time to be alone with you either. After two years without you, thinking you’d never have that chance again, I’m sure you could all use more time to catch up.”

“Thank you, Kurt. I promise you I will, just as I’ll eventually end up spending time alone with your dad, I’m sure. Just not this time. And don’t think for a moment that you’ll escape all my family’s mad plans to sweep you into the fold,” Adam said, squeezing his hand. “As long as you aren’t still afraid of Gran.”

He grinned. “I’m not. June is surprisingly awesome once she stops looking at you like you’re an ant on her picnic table. So thumbs-up to all forms of family bonding.”

“I vote for friend-bonding too,” Elliott said, raising his hand. “Adam and the Apples. Kurt and One-Three-Hill. Coven Time. Non-magic time. The works! Sorry, bud, but you may never have a moment alone again.” The twinkle in his lovely blue eyes proved that he was only teasing. 

Kurt inhaled a whiff of rich chocolate from the plate of warmed sponge cake, resting in a generous serving of vanilla custard, that his friend had just set in front of him. “Mmm, if it comes with benefits like this, who needs privacy!”

As the three of them dug in, Kurt felt a set of strong toes slide up under the cuff of his trousers - thankfully he had worn straight-leg pants today to better show off the designer argyle socks that complemented his blue and gold sweater - and caress his ankle. He glanced at Adam, who gave him a subtle wink. 

Perhaps a little privacy would be needed tonight, after all. There would be a million things to do over the next week, for both of them, but for tonight they still had some celebrating to do.

Elliott must have sensed something, for he suddenly looked up. His eyes darted between the two of them and he smiled, spooning up one last taste of the rich dessert before standing up and wiping his mouth on a napkin. “Since I cooked, you two can do the dishes. I’m heading over to Dani’s.” 

With a wink, he grabbed his guitar and leather jacket and vanished. 

THE END

[urukyra]

Min’atoa Station Post Mortem

Min’atoa Station, my 6-month capstone project for my Game Development course at Yoobee Colleges, in which I fall down a rabbit hole, drown in a pool of tears and learn to make magic.  Or, less poetically, scope too big, lose and remake multiple assets multiple times, and launch a game that falls well short of my goal - yet shows a glimpse of a potentially amazing experience. 

My aim was a linear 3D narrative game - think Gone Home in a Myst type setting with a terrorist theme.. I reckon I got halfway, so there’s only 90% left to go. 

Team vs Solo 

Tutors urged us to push our boundaries, and in my Goodest Boi team I stretched my wings into new areas and thrived. In other teams (whether real or not) I’d felt held back by low expectations. My mantra was ‘play big’. I love to learn, and that means embracing looking stupid, stumbling before you can walk. I chose a solo project, so I’d be propelled to shine, and I was pleased I did. The gasps of surprise from the class even at my prototype were validating. A teacher once said more learners rust out than burn out - having a tutor that believed in me created its own empowerment magic.

New Idea vs Darling 

I was torn between:

A new game, designed for addictive game-play loops, replayability, marketing hooks, commercial 

Min’atoa - unknown market, unproven gameplay, not replayable, huge scope, high risk. 

The gamedev mantra “kill your darlings” echoed in my head. I brainstormed great alternatives that I loved. And yet, YOLO, carpe diem. I left a ‘safe’ life doing what I was told for this. The window was open - now or never.  I’d never “finish” Min’atoa left to my own devices. It needed a structure for existence - the force-field of deadlines, accountability, of expert help. I knew it was too big, so I ‘maimed’ my darling - reduce scope, use existing assets, basic textures, no puzzles - just a story game. That seemed do-able (cue evil laughter). So I talked myself into ‘story-only-Min’atoa.’ Call me crazy, but I don’t regret it.

Tools

I got overwhelmed.comparing narrative tools: Inkle, Twine, Yarnspinner, Ren’Py, Ink. Prairie, Fungus, Novel-software, Scrivener. My author friend Peter cut through my angst by wryly observing that Shakespeare used a quill pen. For my Myst-type story - linear, non-branching, no dialogue - Google docs was fine!  

Writers Block

Although I had a plot, I couldn’t start. Tutor Matt P got me to put story beats in linear time order, then rearrange them into the order the story needed. Write short  ‘memory joggers’ of each plot movement onto Post-It notes. This simple process broke the writer’s block. 

Later, I found myself blocked again, and dedicated an entire week turning these brief notes into strings of story.

Story gating

Player autonomy is a key feature of game design. In game writing, each story elements has to stand on its own in whatever order players come across them, and the plot still has to make sense.  So story games build artificial ‘gates’ to order key story elements (eg in locked rooms), to achieve greater dramatic tension and plot cohesion,  

I fit the plot into the game’s natural gates: portal, balcony, room, and controller balcony, and Arrivals (and later,,Departures) desk drawers; Doors opened with buttons, and crystal docks.. I felt clever making drawer locks, and hiding keys and crystals. The gates were not infallible, but ‘good enough’ in playtesting. 

The downside was, the story game became a puzzle game. It changed how players played, from a slow pace that encouraged reading, to active, testing interactable objects to see what they did. In retrospect, i wish I’d deliberately designed for the slower game feel of Gone Home, where players interact with passive objects whose function was to add atmosphere.

Story Element Workflow

There were 25 notices and 21 letters, each with two gameObjects - players click on a 3D object in the scene, to bring up UI with its matching 2D readable. This meant 92 assets whose materials change when I edit their words. A simple workflow was essential. 

Playtesters noted the 25 notices were easily legible; that removed 25 UI assets. 

For the 21 letters, I felt clever about my idea of stationery. I made stationery (paper, design and font) for each character (Tris, S’tiel, Priestess and Council). Each in-game letter automatically populated its UI stationery with a text string. Instead of 21 UI assets, I only needed four.

I was smug about this at first - I’d polish text; and the UI automatically updated. But for beta, for the first time I had to have textures on all 46 3D documents. It was an awful workflow. I’d play through, click on each letter or notice, bring up UI stationery with its unique string, snip it, create 46 materials from the snips, and tile these to fit each gameObject. 

It was so tedious to change materials, it created a mental barrier to improving the text, even if it was way too long, or made me cringe. I deleted eight noticeboard posters that were too embarrassing. I left “Lorem Ipsum” text on most letters. I wish I’d fixed these. I did find ways to automate this process, but events overtook (see refactoring section) so I didn’t get time to code this.  

Localisation

The more words, the more difficult and expensive is localisation, reducing the potential market, if I were doing it again, I would aim to 

reduce word count dramatically, and use more images

have illegible 3D textures (see for example Zelda, Breath of the Wild) or develop an alien text / symbols

retain the process of populating 2D UI assets with strings, so that it would be easy to populate strings in different languages.

Prioritise Your Intuition

Sam Fleury, Runaway Play gave an NZGDC talk on prioritising your intuition to reduce burnout and improve personal effectiveness. He noted that our tendency to try to ‘push through’ a wall was often driven by feeling unworthy. It often led to bad code (or other work) that had to be redone. 

When I noticed my brain clearly saw the chains of logic, I coded quickly and cleanly When my ‘programming mind’ lost it’s edge, went ‘fuzzy’, if I continued to push I wrote bad code, and felt burnt out. I found it took an active decision to resist the ‘imposter syndrome’ urge to push on. I’d step back, take a rest, or pivot to a task that used another part of the brain (art or story).  

I took note of sunshine, various foods, coffee and rest affected my focus and set up the right environment. Dancing barefoot on the grass is great therapy.

More often than not, when I came back I’d see a bigger picture, and pivot to a different priority, or to a fresh, cleaner approach. I’d never pivot when I was nose to the grindstone. 

I heartily recommend this practice. It was vital for a solo dev on a big scope game.  Pacing myself was not costly, I wrote better code in less time with less stress. And it might seem obvious, but burnt out, tired devs don’t make games that are fun, intriguing, and delightful,

Attributions  

I wanted assets that left the option open to allow commercial use. This hugely limited choice for the game’s many imported assets: ~20 sound effects, music,  five fonts, five paper textures and plugins, . 

I recommend designing a good filing system for attributions. I did record them as I went, but not in one place. Finding them months later cost time I’d rather spend on my game. 

Brian and I made most of the images and icons from scratch. But right at the end I realised an image used fan art I’d made for #Myst25 from Riven, a game by Cyan Worlds, Commercial use violated their very generous terms for fan art.

I wrote to Cyan, saying I’d remove it, but it’d be a lovely Easter egg for Myst fans. Hannah Gamiel, Director of Development, Cyan Inc immediately wrote back to give permission to use it, which was typical of the lovely Cyan approach to their fans. 

Refactoring

We’d planned for Brian being away for 3 months OE, but didn’t factor in a month to reinstate his melted server and hospital with pneumonia. Since Yoobee had only Unity 2018, I’d coded the prototype, Sabotage, from scratch in 3 weeks. 

Once Yoobee got Unity 2019, I reverted to Min’atoa with Brian’s code, which was robust and elegantly effective, But since we were both new to Unity it used unusual approaches - event signals, listeners via parented assets, and master controllers with enums. After painfully watching me struggle, my tutor Woody spelt out the stark choice: strip out Brian’s code and he’d help me rebuild it, or struggle on alone. 

I chose to strip it out. I really wanted to step up at coding, and Woody was brilliant at it. Although Min’atoa would not be finished to the level I wanted in other areas, I could do the writing and art later.  

Deleting two years of scripts left 416 fatal errors; removing ‘missing scripts’ from assets took hours. It would be an enormous task to rebuild. I brutally trimmed my asset list of Brian’s features (a fully functional inventory, and putting items down). and features I’d planned (writing, art, animations, codes and puzzles). 

Then I got intensive tutoring from Woody. I learned: 

keep it simple - add complexity only as required 

use prefabs - get one asset completely right, then 20 others work 

get the essentials (story gates) working - doors, drawers, lifts and locks. .. 

Within a month, most of the functions worked again. My crowning achievement was replacing Brian’s inventory with a scroll-selectable list that appears on hover (over a lock that takes multiple items) and shows what carried items fit in. 

I was also pleased to get different endings working (including one that pivots the whole scene).  I’ll never know what Min’atoa would be if I’d made the other decision, but I do know I would not have learned as much as I did.

The biggest code drawback was no inventory for the 21 letters,they’re just lost . The player can’t refer back to any letter they’d collected. Woody had shown me how to do it, but I spent the remaining time fixing bugs I had, and improving art and gameplay. This is such a major drawback that if I get time, I’d like to issue a patch for it, and I (think) I now know enough to do it. . 

Result 

I launched a game that I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, I have another game in my public itch.io portfolio. Overall, for pretty much a solo game made in a limited time, it showcases my capabilities and adds to my credibility as a  game developer. 

On the other hand, I wish it were more fun, that the story was better, the puzzles more difficult, the game design was more complete. The main failing with the game was the story. I have so much to learn and I plan to fully engage with expert writing mentors next year to learn to

create empathy and connection with the main characters 

reveal through what’s not said, rather than tell

reduce word count (strict 140 character limit per item) 

use environmental storytelling.

Given the need to limit scope, I only included very basic puzzles, that were not at the level of complexity or engagement of good competitors, like Aporia or Eastshade. Brian and I had designed more complex puzzles, but specifically removed those for scope reasons. If I were to do it again, I would prioritise adding to the puzzle component in simple ways such as:

embed hidden clues, codes and hints

add images, sketches and drawings . 

Not having clues to choose different endings is a major omission. For much of the development, I placed puzzle items to make life easy for me, rather than for the player’s satisfaction, The player finds them in obvious places, one after the other repetitively, instead of having to use deductive reasoning.

I would put more time into thinking about how to make it fun for the player to discover hidden items, work out lore-logical places for them, and hint at their location rather than make it so obvious. 

Conclusion

There are definitely things I want to improve in Min’atoa Station, but for now, the game is out ‘as is’. 

Next time I’d invest time early to “find the fun”. Find the fun in the story, puzzles, and gameplay from the player’s perspective as early as possible and build from a solid base of a proven enjoyable gameplay experience. 

At the end, my measure is not even the game. but instead what I have learned. I'm a person with new skills. Looking back my progress seems humbling and miraculous. In 2017, I first clumsily opened Photoshop, my first ever digital tool. In 2019, I made Min’atoa Station, a credible 3D game. Without diminishing Brian’s enormous contribution, or that of my tutors, it was ‘my game’. I designed the world, characters, story, gameplay, modeled and textured 3D assets, 2D assets, the menus, animations, lighting, audio, did the voice acting,  used many plugins and more..I ended up coding everything, I listened and learnt, I asked for help and got lots, I struggled and fought and.. Lo. 

As I reflect on the end of my time at Yoobee, my journey as a game developer has been, and I hope will continue to be, intense and exhilarating. To me, it’s been an incredible privilege to learn to make worlds from my imagination come to life. 

[marvelandponder]

I ❤ Comics

Because I’m so incredibly creative, this month of Year of the Pony has been all about lurve. All kinds of the stuff! Self-love, romantic love, familial love, and, of course, some good ol’ fashioned friendship/platonic love.

But, we all know there’s one love to rule them all: dorky/fanatic love!

The obsessions and ideas that rule our hearts and, in MLP’s case, drive us ponies. 

As much as I don’t want to take all this too seriously, this kind of love really is something special. For many of us, it’s the reason characters stick with us for so long, through any kind of mood you can imagine. It’s why we get lost in fantastical worlds on our screens and pages, and come back feeling like we’ll never forget the adventure we went on. It’s common ground to socialize in if we wish, or a quiet comfort that yours and yours alone. 

These things mean so much to us that it becomes a part of our identity. I’m a Brony, I’m a Rainbow Dash fan, I’m a this that or the other. We want people to see us for things we love because we’re just that proud of them. So long as there’s a healthy dose of perspective in the mix, I think that’s a good thing.

And one of the nerdiest, if not the nerdiest MLP topics I could think of to geek out over is the official IDW comics (the Enterplay trading cards, Star Trek cast members voice-acting for the show, and upcoming table-top RPG, Tails of Equestria, obviously deserve some honourable mentions here, but the comics just gave me more to talk about on a technical level)!

I figured the best way to go about this would be to go by artist (sorry colorists, letterers, and editors; you’re necessary and appreciated but apparently not glamorous). Last month, when we dove a little into Design and Animation, I didn’t really get to talk about the teams behind the work---which is mostly because MLP is a script-driven show as opposed to a storyboard-driven show, so the same animation teams and the same style goes into every episode (unlike Steven Universe, for example, which is ‘board-driven)---but here, who’s working on a comic makes a massive impact on how it’ll turn out.

With that said, we’ll stick to the most reoccurring artists (and gloss over the writers to save on time); if you’re ever curious, you can check out this page on the wiki for a full list on who did what, but I really ramble on too much as it is. 

Artists 

Here’s a big name! Andy Price, the man with the shadows and long, bendy pones. Price excels a quite a lot in terms of expression, and I think it’s because he adds such a sense of drama to these characters without taking away the cuteness or light-hearted personalities we’ve come to love. 

If anything, he’s gotten to add personality, especially to characters like Celestia and Luna who express their emotion much less visually in the show. Just take a gander at the sketches he gives out at conventions!

And as to the shadows, look at how involved the shading is in these inked panels:

Just look at how much of his panels are darkened, and just how much more dramatic it looks than it would with flat or lightly shaded colours.

Even a simple scene can benefit from Price’s style:

See where the shadow draws your eye (even when the shot is coloured)? To the sinister looking rat emphasizing the books, to Sunset, and to the shocked librarian who would know these books best. If you’ve read this issue, you know Sunset’s reading some books she’s really not supposed to---and in fact this is what leads to her downfall.

It’s a simple panel, there’s not even a lot of dialogue on the finished product, but you can tell Price uses shadows to compose his shots in a way that tells the story visually. 

Also, a word on page layout (this isn’t necessarily exclusive to Price, but since we’re talking about layout in terms of one panel...):

This is one of those things that I had a hard time finding a place for in this post that I would kick myself for if I didn’t talk about. It’s something exclusive to the medium and something that’s extremely impactful (as comic fans know).

It’s the flow of the page. How your eye moves from one panel to the next, and how different movements are expressed.

Price is one of the many MLP comic artists who do this effectively. In the first example there, you can see how the emotion shifts as we go down the page, how Celestia’s mane both transitions us into the next panel, and seems to hide her reservations from Sombra, Luna, and Starswirl.

And in the next example, there’s this wonderful transition mid-panel at the bottom there that takes us from the interior of the train to an exterior shot outside of it for Applejack’s final line of the scene.

It’s things like this (and even the layout of the word-bubbles, because those take a surprising amount of consideration to place in a panel) that shows you the artistry and thought behind these comics, and Price’s art in particular.

A personal favourite of mine, for sure.

What’s special about Amy Mebberson’s art-style is how it’s tweaked just so from the show, but certainly stands on its own as it draws emphasis to the roundness of these designs.

You’ll probably notice the simplicity of Mebberson’s designs, especially compared to someone like Price, but look how that works to her advantage:

Check out how close to the show it is, but just a touch rounder. Cute, right? The eyes are cartoonishly big, the heads closer to perfect circles than we normally see even in a 3/4 angle shot, it just brings your attention to how sweet these characters are.

Then there’s the fact that her work will often be coloured with a really soft, soothing texture to boot:

That powdery softness only makes these ponies cuter---and here I thought they had laws against that kind of thing!

Another awesome big player!

The thing about Hickey’s art is that it’s often coloured so that the manes are especially shiny, making the characters draw focus and pop off the page.

And even when things aren’t especially shiny, she still often finds ways to use the background to emphasize the characters:

(Underrated moment in the comics award might have to go to this, by the way)

It’s a very simple snowy scene, but that matches the tone so expertly, so isolating Applejack, her breath, and the snow is an excellent choice to get the emotion across.

And when things are glossy, it strikes me how energetic the characters can still look.

When things look this polished, the worry tends to be that you might make the characters look stiffer, but Hickey’s style strikes such a great balance between polish and flexibility.

This art style comes with its pros and cons, in my opinion, but it can still serve MLP pretty well. Garbowska’s art is often coloured as if with coloured pencils, which gives everything a really soft, soothing finish, and in addition can make for some pretty cute pones.

The downside is two-fold: The characters can seem like they all have Same Face syndrome, if you know what I mean; and the ponies are often posed in needlessly anthropomorphic poses (we’ve certainly seen a few more human-like poses throughout the series---yes, Lyra, we love you, you oddball---but there are some poses that just seem uncomfortable and [to use a slightly redundant word] unnatural for them to want to be in).

Still most definitely a great part of the team, just with a few quirks that come along with the sweetness.

Welp. Guess I couldn’t steer clear of controversy entirely. Jay Fosgitt’s art style in and of itself is divisive among fans---like, really divisive.

The reason being the drastically different shape to everything. Compare a Fosgitt head to a Mebberson head, for instance, and you’ll see there’s a lot more emphasis on the foreheads and cheeks than on the muzzle or an overall roundness.

It’s a very distinct style that comes with its advantages and disadvantages. Fosgitt’s not afraid not go for some extreme expressions, for instance, and that can really serve the story well in chaotic and/or comedic situations, but he’s also had that same problem of putting ponies on their hind-legs when it doesn’t seem organic for them to do so, and combined with the proportions exaggerated the way they are (like sometimes I don’t know how those necks keep their heads up), that can make for an off-putting panel or two.

It’s definitely cartoony. I’ve never been able to place exactly what artstyle it reminds me of, but cartoony is a good word. It’s grown on me, personally, especially considering the improvement from issue to issue, but I thought I’d mention this never-ending debate so you could make up your own mind.

Tony Fleecs is a great addition to the team. He’ll often give the eyes a point or just a different shape, which takes some of the cartoonishness out, but still allows for some great expressions in a way we don’t normally get to see, with our bulbous-eyed characters.

It can especially work if he’s trying to capture something menacing:

So, I think he’s among the better ones.

On the other hand, there have been a few times Fleecs’s art has lacked depth solely because of how things are shaded, like here (I can obviously tell where everyone is in relation to each other, but it’s flatter than if there had been some shadows to it):

But overall that feels more like a nitpick.

Now, we’d be here all day if I started going into all the cover artists (as much as we appreciate their work), but there’s one in particular that’s done enough that I’d feel remiss leaving her out.

Sara Richard is a good name to know because once you know it, you’ll always be able to point out her art. She’s got some of the only traditional art in our little roster, and it’s often got some gorgeous swirls. So many swirls.

If I wanted to be crass, I could call it colour and swirl porn... so I will. It’s colour and swirl porn, and I love it.

Writers

To preface this section, I’d like to take a moment to steal a catchphrase from the ever insightful MovieBob, previously of Escapist fame: comics are weird.

Really, even the best and brightest of the medium will occasionally have some really out there arcs or issues. For every intellectually stimulating, deeply meaningful story you can tell with these characters, there’s a silly rendition of them that’s just... odd. The same Batman who comes to grips with the death of his second ward, Jason Todd, is the same one who later owns a Batcow, thanks to his son Damien.

Yes, Batcow is canon.

So, if genre-defining superhero comics have been known to divulge into stranger stories from time to time, it absolutely follows that we’d see the same from colourful, pony-based children’s comics. Basically, that shark-jumping weirdness just... comes with the medium.

You can make all sorts of arguments about the origins of that oddness---the creative freedom available, attention-grabbing to boost readership, the Comics Code Authority heavily censoring violence and delinquent behavior in the 50s and 60s which forced writers to come up with tamer but also more creative stories, etc---but one thing is clear, if you’ve noticed some interesting choices mixed in there, it might just be a comic book thing.

But, then again, there are also issues that go way more in depth than you would think!

In particular, I have to make mention of my absolute favourite arc (I never claimed to be unbiased): Reflections. For the details, the comedy the lore, the immaculate world-building, and the emotions---but most of all the character-building.

Starswirl is an absolute delight, the good King Sombra breaks your heart, Twilight faces exactly what I wanted her to face once she became a princess, and the Princesses and their sisterhood get to be developed even more here than they have been in the show (especially Celestia; here’s hoping season seven really will break that streak).

Okay, example time. 

Here’s a detail that was just pointed out to me recently that really nails all of this on the head (and granted, I don’t know whether this came from its writer Katie Cook, or the artist Andy Price, but if nothing else it shows you what they can do together):

Two silent frames that tell us so, so much. 

It’s a simple idea, that these parallel universes have developed in different ways, but that tells us so much about why Equestria’s technology is the way it is. Having the power to jump to more technologically advanced universes has allowed our Equestria to be as anachronistic as it has been---to have arcade machines and silent movie theaters, but not automobiles or light bulbs in common use.

But this is what the comics can do: contextualize. 

Take characters and worlds we love and expand on them in new lights. Some weird, strange, or just cute for the sake of being cute, but some more involved and some even inspired.

The comics, overall, can be pretty divisive in this fandom. There are fans who frequent them for every new issue, and those who have sworn off them entirely. Artists and writers we revere and some we outright revile. But when all is said and done, being able to take on this new perspective of MLP in an entirely different medium is something I for one really appreciate---especially when it’s this good.

Here’s some more pony analysis for you! The whole compilation post here, or three of the latest/most relevant, just for you:

EMLP: Design & Animation, Pinkie Pie’s Editorial, and Top 10 Cutest Families

Year of the Pony

Header Image and Art Wouldn’t be Possible Without...

Luna and Celestia by dSana Elements of Harmony by SpiritofthwWolf Elements of Harmony by TechRainbow

There’s of course all those great comic artists and writers to go check out, but aside from the official art in this post, there’s some hard-working fan-artists who made some stellar vectors! Check ‘em out!

Love Me Some Comic Books

[stargrek-blog]

LANA RHOADES: The story of a beautiful girl #5 - Hype -

One more important mentor at the beginning of her career was James Avalon, for whom she shot a scene for the sake of EroticaX. In the scene, Lana was paired with the well-known stud James Deen. “Lana Rhoades was wonderful to work with,” the AVN Hall of Famer James Avalon told AVN. “She’s incredibly beautiful, but also surprisingly humble with an adorable touch of sarcasm, which I found very delightful. I very much enjoyed her company.” “She was very excited to perform and had so much pent-up sexual energy that when I just let her do her thing, she went wild. I didn’t try controlling or telling her what to do, and the result, in my ‘un-biased’ opinion, was an incredibly hot, slightly kinky sex scene. She’s one of the best I’ve ever shot. She reminded me of a little girl in a candy store, only it wasn’t candy she craved. I think she’ll quickly become the next No. 1 porn star, adding stellar beauty with raw sexual energy. That’s why I already booked her for two more projects coming up.” Deen seemed equally pleased, posting on his blog “Lana is a super babe and is going to go as far as she wants in this industry.”

These comments are very interesting because they reveal the incredibly sarcastic nature of Lana. Not only on others but also to herself. In fact, she declared in Twitter at some point that people who are sarcastic are intelligent. Lana used lyrics from songs on numerous occasions in her public declarations. And although she was innocent, young and possessed a soft voice (a fact that could be misleading), she still had the ability to conceal some of her feelings, thoughts and comments under the ironic and metaphorical meanings of her posts, denoting sometimes a sharp criticism on many wrongs of the wider adult industry. There were other times when she used word scrabbles to do that but because she wasn’t always good at spelling many readers couldn’t clear out if her mistakes were intentional or just plain grammar errors.  

When I Watching J.Avalon’s scene, I realized that Lana had something one more thing that made her unique. But In general, it’s easier for every female talent to act submissively on the screen.  But Lana didn't act like the. Lana came with an excessive sexual audacity. She showed a determination to expose her sexuality and establish her brand and define her place in the star system. This is the material which naturally born stars have. wanted and tried to communicate with her companion in many ways, participating actively in the sexual game. She was giving control but she was also taking it back, making the mating more interesting and stepping away from this monotonous submissive character that most starlets seemed to adopt, especially in the early stages of their career. Lana wanted to please her partner and encouraged him/her to please her in turn, responding expressively to his/her treatments. She wasn't always successful in trying to bring chemistry (was not always her blame) on the stage but she had the seeds and the proper MENTALITY to do so. It was just a matter of time to reach perfection in her performance too. 

I have personally noticed a slight twist in the way “eroticism” is expressed by women in the last years, at least in modern western societies. A trend that started in porn but quickly expanded in other fields of our life (literature, mainstream cinema, magazines, tv dialogues and reached social conversations. This trend portrays a very submissive female character with “slutty” personality who gives complete control to her partner and who is ready to endure and accept whatever he decides to do to her. And I am not talking only about “50 shades of Grey” phenomenon and . I don’t really know if this is an answer to

After their common scene for Brazzers, the contract stud Keiran Lee said: “I honestly don't know where to start with Lana. I had seen the buzz on Twitter about the new Spiegler Girl and thought she looked great. But with years of experience, I know that sometimes the newest, youngest, prettiest, hottest girls don't always do the greatest of scenes. Well, Lana didn't read the script for that bit. She totally blew me away in more ways than one. It was one of my favourite scenes I have shot during my whole career and it was all down to the sexual energy of Lana. If this girl doesn't win an award at this year’s AVN Awards Show I'll be really surprised”.

What G.Lansky, J.Avalon, K.Lee, J.Deen and many other directors and colleagues discovered is that Lana was not only a very pretty girl but she was very talented too and she entered the industry, having an enormous sexual appetite that she was always ready to unleash it on screen. If natural beauty is the key for a starlet to open the door of adult entertainment, SENSUALITY is the element that defines in many ways her career. As far as adult models, I could better describe it as the ART of locking the spectator's attention and make him fantasize about her. The art of convincing him that what she is feeling is genuine and wonderful. It is what makes you think "I need a woman like her" and what inspires you to seek your own personal Lana. This is what distinguishes the real talent from the rest. It is definitely not her anal skills or how "dirty" or extreme she can be. In fact, extremity can mislead and isolate a girl from her real sexual identity. Yet, it takes many years of practice for an actress to develop and improve her sensuality and in my opinion, in order to claim herself an adult actress she’s got to have it inside her, she’s got to love what she does and therefore she’s got to do things which draw pleasure from.

Next in line was the notorious Jules Jordan. For many, the undisputable king of “Gonzo”. Jules was not only one of Lana’s favourite directors since he used to let express herself freely in his scenes, something that Lana loved to do, but also an experienced mentor that tried to guide her at many occasions in her career by intervening in her ADT forum. Mind that although she was nominated later by AVN for several scenes of various genre, it was only one scene she was awarded for. And that scene was directed by Mr. Jordan. Besides Greg Lansky, Jules Jordan is the director who shot more videos with her than any other else. However, for some reason, I cannot clearly clarify, he took a very long time to release them. In fact, at the time this page is written Jules had a stash of at least three unpublished scenes which are dated more than two years old.  

The propositions started to fall like rain and Lana's future in the industry seem to look exceptionally bright. She shot a scene for Bangbros and a Virtual Reality encounter with Chad White for Naughty America VR. Mind that Chad was having an affair with the adult actress Kimmy Granger. ZTOD, PornFidelity, AmateurAllure, MonstersOfCock and New Sensations followed the booking list. During her career, Lana tried to be a proper professional, cooperating harmonically with every director, listening to his instructions and adopting his overall philosophy. However, when the chance was given, she would like to improvise, adding her own distinctive mark on the script. From an early stage of her career, she seemed to possess that excessive confidence, that defines not just an artist but a future star! And this is one of the basic elements that distinguished her presence from the rest of the new “arrivals”. It is true that most of the adult debutantes are nervous, shy and reluctant on set. They stand relatively passive and they depend heavily on their partner, following the rhythm he/she gives in the scene.  Of course, this is logical considering they are not experienced enough but it is also more convenient for them since they don’t have to do a lot. But Lana was not just another pretty girl with an awesome body that wanted to earn money by getting laid. Lana seemed to comprehend the concept of sensual performing, the fundamental difference between an adult actress and a general sex worker. 

  I am not gonna extend into the reasons why this happened because we have to take consideration I am just gonna refer the impact it has in porn.

  affect a big number of women, especially young ones. 

But apart from all these Lana had one more crucial characteristic/advantage. She had an attitude! 

The truth is the overwhelming majority 

 . Considering the dominant  

But on the other hand, does not give them a comparative advantage against the competition since they all look the same.

. If you add the fact that there are many “Christian Grey” behavior Rocco Shifreddi Thus t

 Plus, if their partner is very dominant it is possible to be obscured behind him, condemning their brand.

 Without any trace of exaggeration, Lana was the Number 1 wanted model in the States.

 She was flirting with the camera and with any viewer who lied behind. 

And the more I read about her the more I realized that Lana was definitely NOT the type of the girl who would bring down her natural defences so effortlessly or accept everything someone proposed to her. Mind that before she joined porn she had slept with only one person. She abstained from addictive substances and she lived a healthy vegetarian life. She was raised at a farm, by a religious mother who transmitted her principles and morality. She is a humanitarian, she loves animals and she won't hesitate to protest publicly against cruelty. She mentioned many times in her interviews that her dream was to meet a decent person, create a family and live a normal quiet life.

Despite the fact that certain forces in the adult industry, using every means you can think of, intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly were pushing every girl towards SLUTIFICATION, the point where the girl loses the measure of sensuality/sexuality and breaks her limitations, Lana seemed to withhold and RESIST. She wouldn't give her holes so easily, at least not without setting her own terms. In fact, there was an old radio podcast to prove that. She, Stella Cox and their common at that time agent visited a radio studio. The presenter, an acclaimed "Analist" said something like "Do you want me to fuck your ass?" and Lana gave an immediate, witty and disarming response. "Do you want me to fuck yours?". I dunno if Lana would ever become the spirit of the party (she claimed that she was introvert and conservative) but I strongly believe that she is a girl that you would definitely like to take her out and introduce her to everyone you know, even to your... parents.

No, In my opinion, Lana was NOT a slut or a nympho or in desperate need of a few more bucks. Lana was simply a SHOWGIRL. She used to dance in nightclubs for money. She got to expose her natural beauty, her sexiness and her swinging skills in order to visually please people who rewarded her in return. I guess she liked to entice people by dancing and stripping in the stages, she craved for public attention, she was seeking recognition and she was using her natural talents to get it. As a stripper, she learned to be comfortable with her nudity, especially in public. She got familiar with the adult audience, deciphered many types of them and understood how important is to "control" them. But the most important of all was that she realized the concept of the sex show, as well as other similar elements that exist in the wider adult industry.

She even experienced by firsthand its characteristic DUALITY: PERFORMANCE and PRIVATIZATION. She would perform her number alone or with other girls for all the spectators of the club but she would also do private dances for specific clients who would be able to put their hands in their pocket in order to experience a more intimate thrill with her. In these private sessions, she would try to SIMULATE a sensual interaction in a SAFE CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT, where the client knew what is HIS ROLE and what is hers. He was aware that he is not allowed to... misbehave but he is still eager to reward her for those invaluable moments that he spent with a divine creature like her. Yet, whatever she was doing at the club when the lights were turned off and her number was completed, she would return to the cosiness of her warm nest, keeping company to her beloved dogs.

This sensual gameplay, this simulation that is happening in these clubs, this mutual conscious awareness of the roles of both the client and the showgirl is reflected in the ENTIRE ADULT INDUSTRY. So, whether she is dancing, webcamming, acting or escorting, whether this happens in the social media, through a dedicated video channel or in much more personal level, whether she is very friendly and responsive to him or not that much, whether he is a die-hard fan or just an occasional adult consumer the relation between them must always be CONTROLLED and kept at SAFE EMOTIONAL DISTANCE. In this concept, every viewer is a potential client and therefore she should act accordingly. She should attract him, be friendly with him and give him attention, she might even go as far as offering him a virtual girlfriend experience, yet she still have to remind him that she is a professional whenever he attempts to cross the distinctive lines. Likewise, the client needs to realize his role as well as the fact that although she is professional, she is still a woman and she has feelings,  weaknesses, limitations and personal life. Therefore he must behave and be respectful to her.

This persona gets dirtier as the sexual repertoire on sets loses its sensual breeze and becomes more and more extreme. I personally find this tactic anachronistic and irrational because it comes at a great cost for the girls. It creates twisted public impressions about these girls’ real personalities and subsequently causes a direct and severe impact on their lives which becomes more evident as their fame grows. In other words, it gets much more difficult to convince their real-life relations and any potential new partner they met that all this is just a part of their job. People who are not related to these girls or familiar to the way Xbiz works do not understand and cannot decipher the adult actresses public behavior. All this theatre of insanity doesn't come without a cost for the girls themselves increases identity issues, morality dilemmas, depressions, numerous insecurities and isolation tendencies, especially in sensitive and young characters.

Until the summer of 2016, everything looked rosy for the attractive brunette. Lana had made quite an impression in the industry not only with her impeccable natural beauty and her elegance but also with her sensuality, her mentality. Already a few weeks in porn and she was booked until October. “Everybody seems to really like her,” Spiegler said. “Everybody is shooting her and reshooting her and that’s the important thing.”