Bot's Squibbles

(And sprite silliness)

I've already done a post that details most of the exterior in more detail; I've touched it up a bit and added the chimneys since then. Look at that post for a closer look at it.

But now it's finally time for the interior.

There's a "canon" part, the main one, which houses everything that you see in the game. The part on the right is the side that you don't see, so it was up to my imagination to decide what to put there. I ended up making a detailed tool workshop.

Let's look at the main part first:

(It doesn't show terribly well, but there's a miniature Silkfly in the desk's lantern. Same for the workshop lamp.)

The shelves in the back have all eight mementos on display. I didn't want to make them in the relative scale they have in the game art, since that would mean having them be half the size of Hornet's whole body, which is silly. So they're a bit smaller, and arranged with a variety of other domestic odds and ends, which are also modeled off of what you see in-game.

The bed doesn't look like it has any sort of sheets or anything in the game, more like a big framed cushion with a built-in pillow. So that's what I made.

It's stuffed with wool, so it's soft.

Now for the other part. When thinking of what to put there, the main idea I had was some place where Hornet could not only store but work on all of her tools. The desk looks more like it's for reading and writing than anything else, and we see no shelves for her to keep tools she's not actively using, so why not a full workshop?

I only ended up crafting around forty per cent of the total tools, and meant to do more, notably some throwing pin variants and Sting Shards. They were awkward to make in larger number, though, so I took up that space with other ones. May yet make them someday, who knows. I invite you, though, to see how many tools you can make out from this selection here.

(There are a few odds and ends thrown in as well, partly to add to the feeling of home-clutter and partly as support for some tools, like the Silkshot and Curveclaw, that don't stand up well by themselves. Presentation is important here.)

Some spots on the walls felt a little barren without anything on them, so I made a couple things to hang up. Given Hornet's penchant for mapping out areas (and adding colorful identifying details here and there on the area selection view), I figured that she might make a simpler one to hang up in her house, so I made one to go above the tools:

And here's the active crafting area. I made a Cogfly schematic for that area, both because it filled up some empty space and just because I thought it was cool.

(Was surprisingly frustrating to get a picture of it that wasn't covered in glare from my lamp. Still a bit bright.)

That bit's the real center of that side of the bellhome, if you ask me. Coglflies overall have a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to them, so I wanted to put a little extra emphasis on their spot in the bellhome.

The last element is the lights. If you've so far been thinking, "Huh, those work all right, but they're a little... plain, and it's a shame they don't light up", you'd be thinking the same as me. I wanted to go with electrics at first, but found nothing for the string lights that was small enough while at the same time being okay to look at or at least able to be modified appropriately. So I ended up using glowing paint. Each one of the string lights is made of a tiny ball that I dipped in the stuff before stringing up, and the bath has many coats of it underneath the surface of the "water" and wool. It's hard to get pictures of, and this is the best I managed. Not very strong, but it's better than nothing.

This doesn't do the effect full justice, so I'll likely take a short video showing it off and put it in another post. This gives you the sense of it, though.

...And that brings me to the photo limit anyway, so that's it for the bellhome. This took me around seven weeks of work (though it would have been less without school), and I'm very glad to have finally finished it. If you want to see some elements of it by themselves, I've got some "sneak peek" posts a little further down on my blog, where you'll also find some of the many characters I've made. (Here's a post with all of them listed as well.) I could do much better a second time around, and who knows, I may end up making other bellhomes/dioramas or similar things in the future. Whatever the case, goodness knows I'm not going to stop making things of this genre anytime soon.