Latest Posts by sleep-ing-mars - Page 4
things jon missed while stalking his colleagues:
the fact that sasha had been half lined up for gertrude's job and how that would be a pretty good murder motive
the discrepancy between elias's hiring in 1991 and how he said he was working as a filing clerk in 1972
tim's brother's mysterious disappearance/death directly preceding his change in careers
martin's real age and literally any of his academic or employment history
conclusion: he's bad at this <3
HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE! This was an idea I had several months ago and having gotten the chance to work with all these amazing artists has been such an honour. Everyone did a tarot card inspired design based on the magnus archives fears and OH MY GOD they turned out so good.
feel free to check out each participants work and socials as listed! :D
The Lonely - @mariibeann
The Hunt - @oceanichymns
The Vast - @vpstrange
The Stranger - pencilshavings13 (IG)
The Flesh - @mintybagels
The Extinction - @wolfythewitch
The Desolation - swing_byforest (IG)
The Spiral - @mistspelt
The Dark - raven_and_rook (IG)
The Eye - @lailas-in-space
The Slaughter - eggbench (IG)
The Web - @mossiistars
The Buried - @teafromthemicrowave
The Corruption - @jouxlskaard
The End - @yelloartt
Finally finished this god damn thing!
Mostly did this for my friend who is starting s1 but it took me a stupid amount of time (mostly because of Tim)(still not happy with that mtf design)
Some folks were asking whether the frames in the new trailer were hand-drawn: yah!
I tape them to my desk and just draw little crosshairs on each so I can line them up post-scanning. I tried to get a pegboard but they were too small ToT Paper for ants...
You know what. Fuck you.
*unhallows your ween*
Slay the Princess: a summary
I got inspired by the post with the voices in stp and assigning dnd classes….I’m going to do that with the princesses, specifically chapter 2 princesses. Let me know if you want chapter 3 princesses too!
My gut instinct is to make adversary a barbarian, but I don’t think she has as much rage as her 3rd chapter forms, so I think either a monk or fighter fits her best. Battle master fighter or Way of the open hand monk
Beast would be a circle of the Shepard Druid I think, protecting herself from who she perceives as a hunter
Damsel is difficult because she just wants to make you happy and is willing to do whatever you like. However maybe life domain cleric? Or oath of devotion paladin? Maybe a glamour bard could also work???? A support character for sure.
The nightmare I think is an aberrant mind sorcerer, being able to control the things around her by just getting close and killing someone just by slightly touching them.
I don’t really know what the prisoner would be. She’s colder and more collected so maybe a rogue? Assassin rogue could work I suppose but I don’t really think it fits her. Does anyone else have any better ideas?
Razor is another difficult one, rogue and fighter are my best bets. I think she’s more akin to a rogue but she’s not a stealthy rogue. Maybe inquisitive or mastermind for her subclass
Specter is a phantom rogue, makes sense to me. Also the wails from the grave is just something cool she could totally have
The stranger is all of the different classes all at once. She’s really talented.
Tower is definitely a sorcerer to me! Probably with a divine soul subclass especially because of her power and self-importance
THE WITCH!!!! I can only see two different paths for her! A Druid or a Ranger. For Druid I think she would either be circle of spores or circle of the moon? For Ranger I think she would be gloom stalker or get wanderer
autism be damned my boy can heart. lungs. liver. nerves.
Slay the Princess Concept Art
We shared a bunch of concept art on Twitter today. Sharing it here, too, where you can find it all in one post. Post contains spoilers, so proceed with caution (or just play the game already if you haven't 😉)
Going to start with the first piece of concept art Abby drew for the game.
In the earliest stages of development, we toyed around with the concept of there being multiple "end game" forms of the Princess.
The initial outline, rather than being tied together by an overarching metanarrative, structured a full playthrough as a 5-6 chapter long, self-contained journey down a single route, determined by your decisions in chapter 1. Here's an alternative late-game form:
The idea of deviating end-game forms didn't lost for very long, though. As we explored the game's themes more deeply, it made the most sense for there to be a singular "true" form.
If your reality is shaped by subjectivity and perception, then the "truth" has to be what's left when that subjectivity is swept away. the Shifting Mound's final design feels like that initial truth for the Princess, though there's also another truth if you push back against her and press on into the final cabin.
We really liked this "void" design, and I played around with the idea of it being an intermediary to the final form. The "void" Princess would be what you saw upon encountering the final Princess without understanding your own truth, but once you had that understanding, you would see her as the Shifting Mound, as depicted in the game.
That gave way to the intermediary design of the SM being a sea of disembodied limbs, and we also took parts of both designs and incorporated them into the protagonist (particularly the wings.) You can see the eyes and feathers for this void form in the ending card of the original trailer below:
You can see extremely early concept art for the spectre (top), nightmare (top-right), stranger (left), beast (bottom) and ??? (right) as well!
The eyes became a motif in the Nightmare route (Paranoid's manifestation of the fear of being watched), but I also like to think of them as a part of The Long Quiet's truth. You are space and emptiness, but you're also that which observes those things, and it's your perceptions that give the Shifting Mound shape.
Anyways, on the note of the original original concepts for the game, the Princess was initially going to remain human for several loops before taking on more monstrous forms. Some concepts of that are below. Had to get Abby to tone down some of the more horrifically cartoonish designs because they creeped me out and I didn't want to romance them in a video game.
We had to hold our cards close to our chest in the non-metanarrative early drafts, which is part of why, even in the first demo, the cabin doesn't really change much in chapter 2. More room to subtly play with the concept of transformation over time.
There were a lot of reasons we moved in a different direction for the full release. The branching was unmanageably large to write, and the game felt like a slog to write.
Using an overarching narrative as a framing mechanism in the final version gave us a lot more freedom to explore wildly divergent ideas within routes while still driving the player towards the originally planned finale.
Anyways, now we've got some concept art for individual princesses. There's a lot more than this lying around somewhere, but it's all in sketchbooks, and we'll probably wait until we make an art book to show it off.
First is the tower, who really didn't change much at all. (She got a little thicker, I guess. All of the Princesses did)
Not a lot to say about her, other than the fact that we knew we wanted a set piece where she gets so big that the trees and cabin orbit around her.
The stranger went through many many redesigns over the course of development. Here, she was a "princess skin" filled with a hive of sentient bugs. The script wasn't working for me, though, so instead she became a peak behind the curtains without the necessary context to know her.
A lot of people ask how these earlier drafts of the Stranger route would have played out, and the answer is I can't tell you, because I couldn't figure out something worth writing.
The writing process for individual routes didn't really start with outlines or plot beats. Rather, the routes started from a theme and a relationship dynamic, and I organically found their outcomes by exploring actions within those themes, and then seeing if those passed Abby's editor brain.
Neither of us found actions we wanted to explore with those versions of the Stranger, at least actions that weren't a beat-by-beat retelling of chapter 1, which contained way too much variation to put on a single chapter 2 route.
If each princess examines a relationship formed by perception and first impressions, the Stranger examines one that's fundamentally unknowable. One where you've seen too much, too quickly.
An insect hive-mind pretending to be a person seemed like a good starting point, but it was too difficult to write any interactions that didn't immediately feel knowable, if still strange. So the final version of the Stranger was designed in such a way where her unknowability makes interacting with her on a human level fundamentally impossible, and you don't get to have a real conversation with her unless you satisfy extremely specific criteria.
Anyways next up is the razor's final form. We decided she needed more swords.
Hearts became an accidental motif very quickly in the development process, too. (The fact that it is only strikes to the heart that fell her in the demo was accidental, but it felt poetic so we extended it to the rest of the game.)
So on top of adding more swords, we made her heart visible. This is something we did with the fury as well, as a way of showing their emotional (and physical) vulnerability.
Here's an early version of the Adversary and what would eventually become the Eye of the Needle, back when she was still called the Fury. Originally her hair was going to be fire (as seen on the right), but it didn't feel right in its execution.
She's hit the gym since this concept art. Good for her :)
And we're going to end with the Beast, who at this point was called the Adversary. I think this was before the Witch was added? The Beast was originally designed to be a Questing Beast who lurked in the shadows, where you'd only see glimpses of her, and where each glimpse would make her appear to be a different animal. This was too difficult to execute, though we gave her a more chimera-like appearance in the final game.
This design was from when we still has the Voice of the Obsessed, and the route was going to be a more feral mirror of what eventually became the Adversary, but it felt too thematically similar while being less interesting, so we moved in the direction of making the Beast about consumption as a form of love.
Anyways, that's all we've got for you right now. Hope this was fun!
Just Witch things.
✨And so Everything and Nothing hold hands✨
More princesses!
Slay the Princess: a summary
I love it when the princesses are slay
TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE l APRIL 2024
ALFREDO JUÁREZ | RAMI ASTRO | JOSHUA INTINI | KENDALL RUST | DERAN HALL | KUZCOKHANDA | TREVOR MAHLMANN | OTHINGSTODO | NASA | STEVEN RATNIK
Desertduo Vigilante AU Masterpost
Welcome to the Vigilante AU Masterpost, every single post that is important to the story will be found here.
Remember, if I don’t answer one question immediately, there’s a high chance it will be explained in the future, or it was already explain in comics or asks.
Feel free to ask anything !
Fanarts, Cosplays, Edits and Fanfics are VERY welcome, tag me on them or send me the link.
COMIC PARTS
Part 0 // Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4 / 4.5 // Part 5 // Part 6 // Part 7 // Valentines Special 1 / 2 / 3 // Part 8 // Part 9 // Part 10 // Mother Spore 1 / 2 /
ASKS / QNA
World Building summary
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// out of context the suckening spoiler
this is my favourite scene i love the thought so much
whats all this about just rolling with it?
something something Nat20 kiss
alt ending under cut
get bald idiot
Angelstone my beloved
I’m soooo obsessed with Rumi. A ‘steal from the rich give to the poor’ idealist with delusions of grandeur and a god complex, extremely prideful and extremely possessive, with enough wrath to make them interesting. Someone who is so inherently selfish with selfless goals and ambitions, who tries to spread hope and positivity in a bleak world and puts himself on a pedestal for it. The first one to advocate for peace, admonishing needless violence, but also finds a thrill in commanding people, and will gleefully indulge in violence to the extreme for who he cares about. He thinks that in spreading hope, more people will believe in him, thus making him a god, and he wants to kill the true gods of this world to give the people the power for themselves and right what he sees as an imbalance - but he’s an egoist and a bit of a Freak about it.
i can never watch a jimmy stream or ill end up with 10 thousand screenshots of his cats
Norman just woke up 😴