#bgtes

I wanted to be all cryptic and cards-to-my-chest with this site and the project(s) I'm working on, but that's not really how you get people invested in your stuff.

There's plenty I don't wanna yap about just yet, but as for what I'm doing here;

This is Boltzmann Expy. He's wants to be a supervillain.

And the best way to learn is by teaching, so he's gonna teach you how to do it too!

Bex here is making a tutorial series. His "lessons" range from evil lair design, to espionage, to philosophical inquiry as to what makes an action qualify as evil. He's got cartoon logic on his side and a penchant for chaos.

This series is set to take place within the world of Minecraft (so, I don't have to draw backgrounds, but can instead build the sets) and expand on it's world building in ways similar to the way the MCYT fic communities do whereas the movie failed spectacularly (seriously, that thing gave me so much more confidence in my own project).

(Their name is Marbles, they make the end of each episode. They happen to be glitched, but they're doing their best. This is also one of the finished scenes I have so far) The hopes is that the series will last a dozen or so 15-25ish minute episodes where I can practice/ teach myself different animation techniques and tell the story I wanna tell along with some other... fun stuff that I'll reveal when it's time (cough 1-19-7 cough).

Every character uses a different animation style;

Bex is animated in After Effects through puppet animation, his 2D assets all being premade in Krita and then manipulated in a 3D environment

Pack is a PNG who gets physically drawn with markers before being squashed and stretched

Sprite is made with pixel art

Marbles is a sketchy animatic with outlines shown and proportions left loose

??????? is fully cleaned and animated smoothly in 2D

(This is concept art of Pack, she's based on Pack.png and she's here to investigate some suspicious activity. She also happens to be a living piece of the UNIVERSE who wanted to better understand players.)

I've got a ton of concept art for this thing, but it's wayyy off from being ready yet.

So I was thinking, Why not start showing my concept art, my works in progress? I've always been nervous about doing that, but that seems to be how indie creators find their footing; they show their rough stuff so people can see how they grow.

(This is Sprite. They're on the same mission as Pack, but have a very different point of view than she does. They both work for the Administration, or Admin for short.)

I'm really excited about this project, but it has a long way to go before I can even air episode 1 and I've already been working on it for a year!

...

Well, that's not entirely true... Technically a large part of this project was started in January of 2021, but for the sake of what I'm talking about right now, this batch of stuff...

... has been in the works for about a year with a ways to go before episode 1 is ready.

Imma keep at it and imma show y'all how I'm doing. Feel free to ask questions or check in on my progress every once in a while.

Sincerely,

[REDACTED}

Some concept art of Pack.

Her skirt is a handkerchief skirt of the pack.png map and her tie is meant to be the waterfall in that image.

Her eyes are all skyish like that because she sees from the top down. She sees the world like she's looking at a map. To her, players are the little arrow-dots. She can't see what's directly in front of her the same way someone with first person vision would.

Her malar rash is due in part to her being disconnected from the UNIVERSE and her code's reaction to playerhood, but also because players can't get the seed for pack.png anymore through natural generation since the mechanic changed. Her code tries to read the ported data and it manifests as a rash. Plus, it looks like the little line of stone on the cliff face.

She's meant to look both like a modern young lady, but also like an old timey princess since she's from a bygone era but also actively working in a high tech agency.

She acts like it too. She has a lot of older wisdom due to being around since beta (she misses how brightly saturated everything used to be), but she's also in the know about modern updates, player slang, and building standards/trends.

At one point I thought about giving her wrinkles, but to be honest she still acts pretty childishly (her immortal self giggling about the silly little modern players) and she's not THAT old. Her knowledge and memory is, sure, but her playerhood isn't. So... imagine being conscious years before you're actually born, seeing and hearing everything without being able to touch or say anything, and then when you are, you're stuck in a body that hasn't matured enough for your brain yet (a baby who already knows quantum physics but has never walked before). You've lived for decades, but only been physically able to interact with the world for a few months. High INT with low WIS except... she's also watched players build stuff on her seed and listened to how they've grown and interacted with each other before it was no longer viable. She knows the concepts behind social interaction, but hasn't gotten to practice them herself much yet.

called it a "pitchcronomicon" instead of a pitch bible lol

the master doc has a master doc of the other master docs too

The voice guide is probably my favorite of the ones shown.

It covers diegetic game mechanics and how they shape the development of language, player slang, and each individual character's speech patterns and motivations.

Here's an example;

"Dye the town green and gold," instead of "Paint the Town Red"

Vanilla MC doesn't have paint, but they do have dye

Entities flash red when they take damage, but they don't really bleed. They DO drop green and gold Exp when they die.

It still needs to roll off the tongue and be snappy enough to be used often, so gold fits better than yellow and it has the bonus of alliteration and sticking to the monosyllabic trend

With PVP and MC's difficulty mechanics, there would be a demand for a phrase of this nature to still exist

This would also trickle into players and mobs associating specific shades of those two colors together with death in addition to red (heck, in the creaking's reveal trailer xp was used as a short firm for someone dying off screen, so that aspect is canon already

...

Realizing how much of my original concept art was on the rotation slips and spare receipt tape of my old job. Not ready to show most of those yet, but there's a lot.

17? Maybe 20? drawings and script excepts if I remember correctly???

They range from episode one to the series finale.

sketches for what the title card. I like the current version, but I'll probably still modify it at some point. Also a little group doodle of the cast.

The back of Pack's page has doodles of Sprite.

Its hard to see, but they have some gold and iron teeth due to a history of getting into fights.

Where Pack's page uses marker and colored pencil for a smooth and colorful look, Sprite's is mostly crayon and pen to be rougher and muddier.

As for how they act... Sprite's an interesting case that I'm still trying to figure out how to write properly.

They're directly inspired by a friend of mine who's politics are my complete opposite... except she's part of the demographic(s) those policies target and oppress. She's adamant in her belief in them despite them being actively to her detriment. It's a fascinating dichotomy and I want to capture something like that with Sprite; someone who doesn't fit within a system but believes in it to the point of trying everything they can to do so and uphold it.

Sprite is someone who by their very nature doesn't fit the mold of the organization they revere, but desperately wants to prove they can and should be a part of it. They're not like other glitches. They're one of the good ones...

They also take inspiration from my time working with neurodivergent adults as a studio assistant. When someone was having an off day or an episode, some of the others would insist they weren't like that or that they were better than that and then have something similar happen to them in reverse later that week. They would tear each other down and distance themselves due to stigmas and anxiety instead of trying to lift each other up. It was sad, but... fascinating to see the effects of long rooted prejudice echo out of the mouths of the people it targets.

Sprite is a glitch who can't stand glitches.

They are a living "error" who believes all errors can and should be corrected.

They are someone who mistakes order for peace and prejudice for sympathy.

They're also a snarky asshole when they actually manage to loosen up. Plus, they're not just loyal to the Administration. Sprite cares about Pack and Marbles. They see the two of them as EXCEPTIONS to the rule instead of proof against it, but it's... something.