#dt2

Eeyyy its ya boi. We probably don't know each other. I'm Evan. Real quick, lemme borrow your eyes, please. Look at this. This look like anything?

a character sprite for the prototype we submitted to indiecade

... Yeah, you're thinking what I'm thinking. It’s not there yet… Getting There is a whole thing isn’t it? Getting Here sure was. Difference is I can talk about Here. I can’t talk about There yet. There is a mythic place. Here's charted waters.

Who this, anyways? I tell. This is Petra, the protagonist’s war buddy and a three pronged pain in my ass for months. This is the story of how she came to be.

We knew very little about her when we started writing. The basic prompt was as follows: Got 3 spears and sort of an absolutist. This kind of setup begs so many questions. What do you do with 3 spears? Is it extraordinary that someone uses them? Is it practical? Absolutist about what? Why? Our initial instincts said this was either some kind of self-destructive twentysomething wunderkind or a soried fellow getting past his prime.

literally the second ever sketch page for this project

Sasha remarked how tenderly I drew this nude fellow. This made me happy. I'm a classical art guy, I've spent a lot of time trying to make nude people evoke some emotion.

We imagined you'd have to put in a lot of work if you were going to fight with three spears, so no matter what, this person had been doing this a long time. To us, the age difference spoke to the society that allowed and incentivized this work. Did we want to put a point on the mechanisms that enabled a young person to get really very good at war, or did we want to investigate someone’s ability to perform in that society past their expiration date? So much of our interest pointed to the society, and martial prowess as an extension of the state’s will, so dressing Petra as a warrior of the Hydratic state made a lot of sense.

The Hydratics are a weird bunch. They faced down a real apocalyptic threat and they did it as a people. This is utopian in some ways and deeply freaky in others. For a people to be that ready to repel an anime scale war of extermination, I reckon they’ve gotta be a little borked. I found this really fascinating in concert with our discussions of their politics and aesthetics. The Hydratics are all about community, the individual being the result of a community, and local politics and commerce being dependent on the network of people who support or enable an individual. “It takes a village” as Sasha is fond of saying.

The hydratics don't really like hero worship, or really idolizing anybody if they can help it. So how do you respect the influence of a community and an individual's contribution to it without building up any one individual too much? Their aesthetic solution is baffling and self-contradictory and I love it. They do iconoclasm by just spamming icons. Hydratic people all have an individual story that’s written for them at birth, and from that story they pull an image, an icon which they will identify them for life. The assembly of these icons implies a community, a Polis. And if more people affect your life, you add them to your Polis. Simple.

I really love birds but I don't draw em much. It shows.

We decided Petra’s icon was gonna be some sort of raptor. I really wanted something that communicated inertia, or driving force, drawn with an art nouveau sort of density. But this posed a problem. We’d decided that the Hydratics' big industries were war, food and textiles, and this was supposed to push them into a more modern look. Icons had become more like brands than illustration. This sort of style didn’t fit. Moreover the overall direction of her clothing wasn't quite right.

I'm not a concept artist at all, so this is the fidelity I can get when going for maximum speed.

Trying to aim at sort of greek flavored warrior junk was just making boring things. More charitably, we wanted something with a bit more specificity and personality. Something that felt uniquely Hydratic. Well a warrior is the same as anything else Hydratic, it’s a job supported by people. And being a big hero means working on behalf of a lot of people. There was something interesting about portraying Petra as the ideal Hydratic hero, wreathed in all this meaning, being reverent of and caring about all those icons, but underneath all that being sort of one dimensional, workmanlike, doing the damn job of heroing without fanfare.

I say one dimensional with love. A life lived in dedicated, high-skill service is a life without a lot of variety or a lot of time for anything else. After some work we found that the twentysomething hypothesis gelled a bit better with all this. We liked thinking about a very absolutist character in the prime of their life, having accomplished their great mission needing to reflect on their internal makeup. Petra is one dimensional in that she is absolutely dedicated to her craft, wholly zealous for the state, and the problem is that stuff's not entirely working for her now. She's got to address those ingrained values and reassess her self image to move forward.

I'm really happy with her portrait here. It's so much the women in my family when they were young, absolutely fuckin stone cold driven.

It put me in mind of my mom and my aunties growing up. Women doing an insane amount of family work without any fanfare, who never really had a chance to stop, reflect or just break down for a good while. I liked the idea of portraying an indian woman who was absolutely regarded as a hero for her work and abilities, and who could just suck for a while without it being a blemish on her person or her achievements. After all, DT2 takes place after the big apocalyptic event. Petra's legacy is already enshrined in Hydratic history.

Having those ideas in place helped a lot. She’s a workman with an important uniform. She doesn’t need to be this ceremonial greek hero looking creature, she just needs stuff she can fight in and places to wear the most important people and communities in her life.

While the armored version is definitely more developed, there was something more interesting to me about keeping it covered with that almost t-shirt like form. It was understated. She could wear as many overstatements as her societal role dictated on top of that.

Fabric is hard. I wish I didn't like the way it looked so much.

This is where the design actually settled. Modern = pockets. That’s my big takeaway. More pockets, more fastenings. Weirder cuts. Simpler overall shapes. It’s still trying to evoke the silhouette of greek wrapping but trying to break up that form in more angular, modern ways. It also turns out adding more overall form to clothing makes it more interesting to decorate. Rather than just deforming a tapestry across the body, there's architecture to highlight, things to accentuate. That's conversation for another time though.

You might have notice another pass at her icon in those previous drawings. In trying to get her closer to a modern aesthetic it turned out I needed to reduce and simplify a whole lot.

Even with their more modern mutations, I wanted Hydratics to have an old-world fascination with the natural world. If you look at animal drawings across cultures, you see a lot of odd fixations. People really wanna draw every feather on the bird or show the wildness of it's patterning, or some odd crook of its neck and most of the time it is weirdly complex for how utterly inaccurate it is. With these designs I wanted to get a little bit of that flavor by fixating on the pattern of a falcon's underside, and the strange tilt of the head.

I had to Rush w my dad to night healthcare at the hospital from which the doctor called an ambulance to take dad to the er on the other side of town, ambulance wouldn't let me tag along so i took a taxi in result arriving maybe 10 mins later and they wouldn't let me into the post triage waiting room. So i waited outside losing my shit and eventually er decided to keep dad under observation and on ivs til morning and they told me to go but i stsyed after a while they rly told me to go so i had to taxi back and im calling him every half hour or so, so does mom

We’re working on a video game! It’s called DT2, and it’s a visual novel that takes place after the business of averting the apocalypse. One of the questions it demanded we answer is: what kind of ship would you sail into the underworld?

For Io, our protagonist, it's the Oneiric, a gift they received many years ago from a king they instated. It's a luxury ship, a symbol of gratitude and flagrant wealth. It's also the home base of the crew, where they player departs and returns, and which weathers the journey alongside them. This one constant is very important! So what does it look like?

I did a fair amount of exploration with tall ships and the traditional Greek square sheeted sailboats, but the ones that resonated the most were triangular lateen sails akin to Indian dhows or Egyptian fellucas. The Styx is a river of a sort, after all, and the trip is ostensibly a victory lap with a small crew, so something between a river boat and a voyager isn’t the most unreasonable choice.

It started to come together with the sketch below. I told Evan sometimes twelve good lines is all you need:

The ship itself makes...well, let's be generous and say, a variable amount of sense. I'm not really worried about it as a real place in the interior; it's a goofy enough shape already, very broad-shouldered and alternately sitting very low in the water and hanging very high above it. It would probably be a very slow and annoying boat to steer! It's primarily driven by the rule of cool. I like the way this wheel mechanism works, so it takes up the whole of the top deck. I want the back of the boat to have a captain's quarters like a tallship, and I want the floors below deck to have pretty high ceilings. This thing probably looks like an iceberg under the surface! At least it's probably pretty stable.

It was the primary thing I illustrated in the prototype we sent to Indiecade, for both interiors and exteriors, and one of the first assets I designed over the course of the project.

Right now, in the uneasy limbo between submission and acceptance (c'mon Indiecade! be cool!) the Oneiric has been my testing ground for styles. All of that is still cooking, so keep an eye out for that in future updates.