Seli Toxicmoon

Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍

There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.

When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.

These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.

Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…

Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.

Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄

I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?

After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.

As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️

This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.

Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.

Say it with him, folks!!

For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.

Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.

I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?

So first off there's the "recom" Au.

(I don't know if you have watched Avatar from James Cameron) Basically the gist of it is the same facility that made Caine also worked on a new way for Marine biologists specialized on Merfolk research, to work on field without the hussle of operating a loud mini submarine.

They created these bodies, fusing human DNA with pre existing species of Mer, and they were meant to be controlled remotely by the scientists (the pilots). Think animal spy cams but you're wearing a suit that makes you look like them... It was kind of a fucked up concept, but the result of this bio engineering was interesting to people that wanted to use the same concept to one day even live forever.

The problem with this research was that much like the og material, there was this faulty thing that they couldn't control, that sometimes upon activation the "Avatars" instead of accepting the data transfer from a human brain, they'd copy paste the consciousness and effectively become sentient clones of their human counterpart.

As you might have guessed, in this au the human cast were all failed experiments. As far as they're concerned they got turned into a mer, they don't remember being clones. All except Grant (Kinger), but he's a little lost in the head. This au is the closest to the Canon we got.

The facility is abandoned and they're all left there to rot, the only source of food is a tank that is connected with the sea outside where fishes come and go from.

Food is scarce and some closed off tanks have started getting stillwater, which ends up being the "abstraction" in this case because humans that try and flee by getting out of one tank and drag themselves to others while looking for an opening to get out, they get infected by the germs in the water and start getting a fever that makes them lose their head kinda like rabies.

Caine is not immune but really resistant to it because he was genetically engineered to withstand critical living situations to ensure survival.

The second au it still doesn't have a name.

Its where the humans are all still humans, work on the research facility that has been bought by the government, they're all on site workers. Kinger is what is left of the originally vast scientific staff, and the other humans have all been recruited by the government through deals not to end up in prison.

They're trapped there because the contract is binding.

They can't leave, they have little to no contact with the world outside and are forced to use code names with each other.

The only test subject left in the research facility from the previous genetic experiments is Caine.

They all don't know but they're all part of a bigger ongoing experiment. The government every 4 months send medical staff to survey both Caine and the worker's status for some reason. They "vaccinate" them all against something mysterious, and then leave.

To keep the experiment ongoing without casualties derived from mental health (abstracting here means losing your head and trying to kill yourself or others in a psychotic spiral) they all have monetary monthly allowances to spend however they please. Within limitations of course.

That and an on site therapist. (Which in our case would be Tari, codename: Akela, but in your case it can be anyone else)