Alexandra IDV

Hello! Got a fun update for the demo today. It's...

...a glossary! I thought this would be something fun to include in the final game, but why not just put it in the demo? This will be there to remind you of what certain terms mean if you forget. And you might learn something new as well! Check back every time the game notifies you if you're interested!

That's not the only thing in this update either! I've also made a fun little update to the profile screen. I don't really understand programming, so I couldn't figure out how to change the background in the profile screen. It had a lot of weird quirks, like displaying images independently on the left side with the character names, and the right side with the profile information. But that gave me an idea!

First, here's our old profile screen:

It's fine, and it works. But I wanted to spice it up a little. So here's the new profile screen!

Now the left side with the names has a background! So it's like… you (the reader) are looking all this information up on a phone! I thought it would be a pretty cute touch!

That's all for now! I hope you enjoy the demo, and if you've already played it, I hope you enjoy these updates!

Hello again! Today I want to talk about another character from the demo (which you can try out here!). This time, let’s talk about Sally’s friend Meteor!

Here she is! Meteor’s the first character you encounter after Salamander. Her and Starlight contact Sally early on, but you don’t really meet her until part-way through Chapter 1, where she rescues our red-headed heroine from an early demise. I mentioned this when talking about Salamander, but Meteor’s a lot more put together than her. Meteor is precise, experienced, and fully confident in her abilities. In other words, she’s the perfect team leader! Though she doesn’t like being called that, for some reason…

When you first meet Meteor, she seems quite serious. She doesn’t appreciate Sally’s carefree attitude during the mission, and she ESPECIALLY doesn’t appreciate Sally’s nickname for her. “Sally” and “Starry” are cute, but “Metey” doesn’t come off the same way, does it? But that doesn’t mean she’s all business all the time! You get quite a different look at her in the second chapter, where she’s more casual with the other two. She even messes with Sally a bit! You’ll get to see plenty more of this side of Meteor in other parts of the game. I wrote in plenty of downtime to accompany the more dramatic parts, because I feel that it’s such a great chance for you to see these other sides of the cast shine! Meteor may not like all of Sally’s antics, but she’ll stand by her when it comes down to it. Tgirls gotta stick together!

Meteor’s ability is incredibly strong, making things she touches heavier or lighter on the fly! She swings that mace like it’s made of paper one moment, and has it smash down like, well, a meteor the next! She must be really good at keeping her balance. By the way, her name was the last we thought of for the main cast! Originally we had penciled in the name “Mace” for her, but obviously we couldn’t keep it as something so plain. It took Sadie and I a long time to think of something that suited her, and I think it worked out pretty well! The fact that Meteor’s so calm and composed in the heat of battle, combined with her sheer power, makes her a real force to be reckoned with. She’s a real stabilizing force for the team between Salamander’s unpredictability and Starlight’s focus on defense.

Her outfit’s rather eclectic, isn’t it? We wanted clothing that was a combination of something that gave off an air of authority, but also unusual enough to tie into her more playful side. 

And now, here’s a word from our character designer and sprite artist, @alexidv, on Meteor’s design!

"Hi again, this is Alexandra speaking! Last time I talked about working with Crystal and Sadie on designing Salamander and creating a look for the game. With the groundwork thus already laid, along with the excellent reference materials provided by Crystal and Sadie, Meteor was in many ways an easier character to work on. I tried to channel some Revolutionary Girl Utena into her fancy-yet-practical outfit and beautiful hair, making her look dignified, refined, and in control of the situation, compared to the more impulsive Sally and the more deferent Starlight.

Similarly to Salamander, the design did not have to go through many revisions. One change introduced early on compared to the original concept was making her mace look ornate and regal, almost like a scepter, befitting of her image - rather than the initial idea of a spike-ball type of mace.

Meteor was a lot of fun to work on, and she remains one of my favorites to draw when the characters are receiving new sprites. Her often confident and no-nonsense attitude means a different mindset when going into a set of new sprites and figuring out the posing and expression, compared to working on the other Side Future characters, and also makes her fun to read."

Hello everyone! Today Sadie and I are going to be talking about our inspirations for our VN, All the Creeps of the Cosmos (we have a demo too!). We did this in a sort of… cross interview format over Discord while I went out to get my hair trimmed. Without further ado, here’s…

Two Tokyo Tgirls Talk: Musical Inspirations

So about that title…

C: So, about this title! Neither of us are Japanese, but we are in the Tokyo area! Sadie and I actually met briefly before we even knew who the other was! That was at our job orientation in the big hotel.

S: Yeah, I asked you if my outfit looked okay, and then completely forgot about that until a bit before we met for real.

C: I didn't remember it at all! It was just meant to be, I guess. A year later I was on Her looking for someone new... and the rest was history! Now we live together, so it's easy to collaborate for a project like Cosmos!

S: It’s the happiest I've ever been. We used to have to commute 2 hours to meet, but we still met every week.

C: You used to live way out in the country! Now you get the big city experience. 

What would you say is the influence of music on Cosmos?

C: Sadie's the expert when it comes to music; before I met her I barely listened to anything outside of video game BGM! It was when we got a record player that things started really clicking together. We both started getting into old prog rock, and one day Sadie brought home a weird looking record called Flying Teapot by a band out of France called Gong!

I honestly had no expectations going in, but I loved the weird jazzy instrumentals and the playful, goofy lyrics (in particular, a song about a cat). As it turned out, Gong had, over the years, operated under a number of different names. Planet Gong, Mother Gong, New York Gong... drunkenly I kept joking about a version called "Air Gong". Just complete nonsense. But when we thought about it, that was kinda like a weird way of describing a UFO... so our studio suddenly had a name! One of our supporting characters is also named after the band as a bit of an homage to its lead singer, Daevid Allen.

S: I think we both became big fans of Daevid Allen's blissed out and stoned scifi optimism. He seems like he was such a free and beautiful person, and his anything goes experimental outlook is something that I think Air Gong takes with it. We're both huge fans of his solo album Divided Alien Playbax80. It’s advanced level Gong, but I think it fits what we're doing even more. 

S: On the other hand from Gong's silly sci fi optimism is Hawkwind, the official band of Michael Moorcock (more on him in the future). Hawkwind is all about how drugs are cool, but space and the future are cold, scary, and often violent places. The first chapter of Side Future is named after one of their very best songs on their best studio albums, Assault and Battery from the fantastic Warriors on the Edge of Time. I think we want to invoke the same kind of shock and action of their music. How about you, sweetie, what do you take from Hawkwind?

C: Sorry, I got to my hair appointment early and she did my hair early too. I’ll type up a response on the train.

S: Sounds good. We should keep this all in.

C: Even this!? No way!

S: It’ll humanize us!

C: We’re plenty human, aren’t we? Anyway, Hawkwind! Hawkwind is, as you'd expect of a band called Hawkwind, extremely cool! There's a sort of energetic quality to the guitar and vocals that just gets me pumped! So any time I wanted to write an action scene, I'd do two things. One was to drink a lot of coffee, which would get my mind racing at a thousand miles a minute. The second was to put on some Hawkwind! That got the ideas coming like nothing else! I hope the energy that music inspired in me carried over to the final product!

C: I think there's probably two more bands that really inspired Cosmos. The next one I want to talk about is King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard! By the time the whole "Mind Fuzz" suite had completed on "I'm in your Mind Fuzz", I was completely sold on them. That lo-fi, garage sound so many of their albums had was a huge inspiration to me. And if you're sharp enough, you might spot a reference I snuck in from their spoken word hybrid album, Murder of the Universe, in the first chapter.

S: Right, I forgot about that! King Gizz is a big one for both of us I think. Their songs are filled with bizarre imagery, action, storytelling, it's everything I want Cosmos to be. Might be the most referenced band in Cosmos? But we can just ignore their dire boogie album *dodges rotten vegetables thrown by Gizzheads*

C: Hey, Cyboogie is a good song at least!

S: I'd say the other biggest musical influence is Peter Gabriel era Genesis, for me at least. But I'd like to hear what you think of them.

C: Peter Gabriel's Genesis has some really fantastic imagery in it. I mean, there's not a lot of bands where I can sit back and unwind to a song about snake women, so they got that going for them! That era of Genesis has some truly sweeping narratives with some weird events going on! And we got the name for the standard goons from them. 

S: My biggest reference point for Cosmos from them is the fantastic The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Whenever I write for the Future at least, its surreal urban nightmare of identity is really what I'm trying to channel. It probably wasn't written as a metaphor for being trans, but the shoe certainly fits with its tale of an outcast street kid who struggles with masculinity falling into a psychic landscape trying to find who he really is.

C: You really hit the nail on its head. So much of the Future part is all about discovering who you are and struggling to survive in a nightmare world, so it works well. 

Hi everyone! Crystal here. Every now and then I’ll be posting little updates talking about different aspects of the VN. Today I’d like to talk about one of the two protagonists of Side Future. Here’s Salamander!

Salamander’s the second character we came up with for the game. The first is… the other protagonist of Side Future. You’ll have to learn about that character later, though you’ve already gotten a glimpse… anyhow, Salamander is, as you can tell, a very reckless and impulsive girl. She gets in over her head easily and has to improvise her way out of bad situations. I felt she was a good perspective to start the story from because of this. It’s just not as fun if your protagonist never makes mistakes! Her attitude also ties into her powers. Of course I had to give a hot-headed character like her a heat related power. I didn’t want to go the route of having her shoot fireballs or anything, in part because I was so set on the image of someone fighting using a baseball bat. So that became, “what if she could make the bat burning hot?”, and then, “what if she could heat ANYTHING she touches?” It was a lot of fun writing different ways she can use her power in combat. You’ve already gotten a glimpse of that, with her shattering the window, and one Slipperman’s explosive end. She’s got more tricks up her sleeve than that!

She’s relatively new to the underground resistance; her teammates Meteor and Starlight have been there longer than her. I feel like she plays very well off of both their characters; Meteor’s much more precise and serious, while Starlight is more sensitive and forgiving. I hope you look forward to seeing how their relationships develop as the story goes on! 

Of course you’ve already seen another side of Sally. Underneath her confident veneer, she’s actually quite anxious and unsure when it comes to the missions her team runs. She’s a bit like a wavering flame, in that sense! This part of Salamander is probably the most personal to me. The introduction of the game, where Sally walks through a crowd of people, is taken from my own anxieties of being out in public as a trans woman. Like, of course things have been fine most of the time. Where I live people generally mind their business. But there’s always been that fear of someone ill-intentioned clocking me and deciding that today’s the day they’re going to fuck someone up in one way or another. I wish that wasn’t there, but it sticks with you, and so it’s something that sticks with Salamander. Powers aside, she’s a character who’s lived the reality of being trans in a place extremely unwelcoming to her, and those experiences are really important to the character she is.

To lighten things up, let’s talk about names! Why Salamander? Well, salamanders have always been associated with fire. It’s said that people used to believe that salamanders were born from fire… though actually, they had just tossed logs that already had salamanders in them into their fire without realizing. That’s what I heard, at least! So there’s that old sort of association, but there’s also something bigger than that. And that is… I’m a big retro game fan. Can you guess my favorite Konami game? From Salamander, it makes sense to shorten it to Sally, and it’s pretty cute, too! On top of that, she has her real name, Samantha. Why all these names? I guess it’s because I know a lot of people who go by a lot of names; names used online, names used in real life, names used only with certain people… I thought it would be fun to incorporate that into the story in a way. If you ever get confused about who’s who, you can always check out their profile!

And now, a word from our sprite artist @alexidv on designing Sally!

"Hello! I'm Alexandra, and I'm the character designer and artist on All the Creeps of the Cosmos! Salamander was the first character design I worked on after joining the project, which also meant that her design would be what defined the look for Side Future, and the standard that future designs would be created to work well with. Crystal and Sadie were great at making the process as smooth as possible, though, discussing what they were envisioning for the game and answering questions, and providing reference material including photos, descriptions, and a draft of the script. The dream situation for anyone doing art commissions! 

In large part due to their excellent communication, the design only had to go through a few revisions before we had settled on what she should look like, primarily involving some minor changes to her hairstyle. The first draft left her ears uncovered, which was pretty cute (you can see a doodle I made of this on the design sheet) - but at this point I'm so used to her final design that it honestly feels weird to consider anything else. 

For the in-game sprites, we went for pixel art with an aesthetic influenced by adventure games like Snatcher and the GBA/DS Ace Attorney games. As I started working on them, I did end up tweaking the proportions a bit to focus more on her face and to make the patches on her jacket read better, and did a sketch in the intended resolution that I then pixeled over, to make sure that everything would be legible even when the game camera is zoomed out. 

I'm really glad to be part of this project, and I love these characters so much... I was about to end this little write-up by talking about how Sally is one of my favorites, but as I went through the cast in my head, I'm realizing that I like all of them and that it's difficult to say that any aren't among my favorites...... Crystal and Sadie are just doing too good of a job at writing them, I guess!!" That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! Next time I’ll be talking about our inspirations for Cosmos. See you!

All the Creeps of the Cosmos: Side Future Volume 1 demo available now!

All the Creeps of the Cosmos is a two-part kinetic novel spanning the distant past and future! In Side Future, Salamander and her friends gained strange powers after experiencing the mysterious phenomenon known as "Hatching". Follow them as they fight to free the surface from the tyranny of the alien Creeps! It's a story of queer love, self-discovery, and hitting fascists with bats.