Comic Sketches: October 2020 + "[S] Turnin: Check social media."

Well, that took longer than anybody expected.

I'll spare you all the details of how we got into this mess, because we basically already deep dived into the grand majority of it in our latest newspost. 

But the point is: we're back! We're making the content, it's going live, and nobody can stop the train while it's chugging down the track. Things are back in order and we are back in action. So let's get down to brass tacks here, people.

We've got a lot of ground to cover, so we'll be doing this by sections.

PHONE MOCKUPS AND CONCEPT ART:

After settling on names for apps and a general plan for what we planned to do with each of them, we started with mockups for how each of the interactive components were going to look and function. Xam took the helm on that.

Twinsticks, Parallaxis and Skorpe already had their base in reality, so they really didn't need much work outside of seeing how their real world counterparts functioned. Filler ended up being kind of a hybrid of Tumblr, Twitter and Myspace. 

You can see that a bit more clearly here. The top spaces were still something seen in the final product, notably used for good friends and soulmates, but the music player did not make the cut. 

This was due to the fact that we actually just forgot about it during finalization, but it was probably for the best. Given that this game already had some much in it to begin with.

I have no idea why two of these are small, but they are.

After that Ciro, Charlie and Eddie were on the case with finalizing the prospects and giving it some more Repitonian flavor. Which as we all know, means making a few things have horns and be more colorful as a whole.

Icon concepts for Filler, Twinsticks and Parallaxis. I wonder if anybody has recognized that a lot of these apps are named after television terms yet?

There's also this very detailed crail phone icon that was made as a pitch. Y'know how the app that actually holds all of your contacts and keypad had what looks to be an old house phone to note that it is THE phone app? That's sort of the idea here. 

But I thought it would be better to be less cryptic and just use the trilobyte from Act 1. Since it's pretty recognizable and we already know buggy items on Repiton mean they're old fashioned.

Still not quite there yet in terms of finality, we totally got rid of the stories function because we have enough on our plate as it is. 

That alone would have taken up to fifty more drawings to cover each trolls story. Not to mention the fact that I don't even think Turnin follows a majority of the trolls on their feed to begin with. Filler is a functional app, Corporate PROMISES that.

A little bit closer.

Profile was pretty finalized from the get-go. Though as you can see, the music player has already been unceremoniously cut. NOW where will we see the music coming from?????

Parallaxis, Twinsticks and Skorpe were also pretty much finalized right off of the bat. 

It was never mentioned in the game itself, because we didn't have a good place to insert it, but observant fans older than 20 might recognize the color scheme in Turnin's Skorpe theme. It's based on the old show, 'Fear Factor', which already works as an alliterative title.

The last messages sent by each trolls were meant to be readable at the bottom of each Skorpe chat, even if the chat itself was inaccessible. But I forgot about that and then got too lazy to conjure up one line out of context for each conversation. So it was scrapped.

APP ASSETS:

Even though we did a lot of work to make most major assets expandable so they can be seen properly at full resolution, some weren't able to. 

I'll only be posting the drawn or more extravagantly edited assets here. The rest are pretty simple, already able to be seen in the flash, or you can find them elsewhere.

The names for all of these streams were effectively just edited names of their real world counterparts. There was no overly important reason to include these streamers in particular, outside of Jerma, who was always planned to be very important to Repitonian lore. 

I weep for the day when fans finally have enough leverage to tell these poor guys what they've been inserted within. I'm pretty sure Wayne actually listened to Blood Right on stream once and commented on it? Don't quote me on that.

I actually contacted Jerma through email to see if he could record something we could play off as a video message to Turnin, but it didn't pan out. Perhaps some other sunny day.

This update makes it pretty clear that being an alchemist on Repiton isn't exactly something that's admired. Most trolls don't know anything about it or how it works in any legitimate fashion, and those who do are either tied to Corporate or some shady external source. 

Obviously we know where Sestro falls on that spectrum, but this shows that the general public doesn't. You don't get to be forcefully placed as a successor to anybody without a few conspiracies.

Oh? You're wondering what the deal with Aumtzi and the terrorist attack on Stronghold 21 was? I'll tell you. You see, at the end of Snowbound Blood, he- [CONNECTION TERMINATED.]

I originally wanted to add Doug Walker in I2S1 in place of the Chuck E. Cheese portrait, but Xam practically begged me not to. And I obliged because I didn't want to see them in tears over Doug Walker, as he is prone to cause one to do so. But I couldn't pass up the opportunity here.

I made a joke a while back about how my human Gaiaeon headcanon was just Darkiplier. It was very funny. And now I got to make it kind of real? It's more of a Gaiaeon-like tangent, bordering on the allegorical. Darkiplier is a representative of Gaiaeon, perhaps? The shadow that haunts Repitonian Markiplier's reality. Oh well, it won't be important ever again.

YourFavoriteMartian not only confirms that outfits like it and Gorillaz are tangible holograms with bonafide lives, feelings and personalities, but also the ability to become self-aware and change their outlook on those who created them. 

They're effectively Repiton's 'Rage Against The Machine', and I think that's incredibly powerful of them.

Repitonian's love to eat wood. All there is to say on the matter. Pairs well with glue, by the by.

Finally, clarification about what the long acronym from Act 1 meant. Oh, and how Arcjec's quirk works, I guess.

There are a couple personal injokes tossed into this picture, some that only me and my friends would understand and some only Weezer fans would understand. Regardless, Repitonian Rivers Cuomo is the first canonically straight troll in the comic. Congratulations, everyone. We finally got them.

I originally wanted to write a transcript of the actual rap battle, but then I realized I didn't have the time or will to make that happen. Maybe one day a devoted fan will do it for me. 

Oh, and if you're wondering why The Vivifier looks so different from her canonical counterpart, that's because almost all ancestral tales are based in fictionalized retellings of their stories. Trolls like Caesar and Vivifier are well known among the population, for better and for worse, but that doesn't mean that the population really knows who they are or what went down between them. Bias and outlook, people. Bias and outlook.

I promise you that most of these trolls aren't important.... Most.

These few definitely are though. 

UNUSED FILLS AND MEMES:

Most of the the fills and some of the memes within them were made by fellow members of the VE team, we made a few announcements in our work server asking for pitches and a grand majority of them made it into the final product. 

But as with everything, some did not. Either due to the content already being covered by other fills and memes, being too heavily based on an outdated meme, not really being Repitonian enough, or just being a little repetitive in what it was communicating.

Bart grub has six legs here, which means that this Bart was made before Reduplication was a notable thing. Which makes sense, considering how long 'The Simpsons' has been running on the planet. But I decided to leave this one out just to make sure it didn't get confusing.

There were like two other whole jokes about McDonalds. I know the McRib was a joke that we wrote in SBB Vol. 3, but it was a one time thing. The idea of Repitonian McDonalds and how it operates will forever remain a mystery.

In retrospect, I probably should have used this one.

UPDATES:

We're somehow still not done yet, because we haven't even touched the sketches for the other two updates! 

I originally wanted to have the graffiti on the left building be a little more visible. I was going to make some estranged and cryptic confirmations on it, not too dissimilar from what we see in Necron's route. But the composition just didn't really fit. So I'll put it in my pocket for later.

The "hands-on" joke was one of the first things written for this update, and to this day I am very proud of it. Equally as proud as I was when I opted to call it his "palm pilot" in Glomer's route.

Endari's story was also planned, albeit a little retroactively. When Endari, Raurou, Pozzol and Talald originally showed up in SH21 near the end of Act 2, there were no plans to use them in any major capacity as characters. 

Of course, that all changed when SBB started coming to fruition. So I opted to merge their current plot lines together and make a tiny cohesive story about it, based on a throwaway line from post-EOA2 and their cameos.

Oricka's mech is a very slight nod to the Candy Mecha from Problem Sleuth. Would not be the first time the second intermission calls back to it. As you can see, everything is coming together.

I can only imagine the reason why Sabine is doing this specifically is because he enjoys going out of his way to use his sonic abilities as obtusely as possible.

This panel concept is actually taken from an exact screenshot of Mandark from Dexter's Lab. 

Keen eyes were easily able to spot Edolon in the crowd among all of these background trolls. This was more for the readers than anything else, allowing them to easily connect what they see here with an event soon coming up. 

Nobody else around knows who Edolon is or what he looks like, so otherwise he blends right in. I suppose the hood makes him a little conspicuous? But we've all seen what Repitonian fashion is like. It's not really that odd.

Raurou's personality fixation is Paranoia. And he's been on edge since that pillar dropped right in front of him and he couldn't do anything to stop it. All he's able to do now is watch and wait, which he takes to with gusto. He feels a sort of responsibility to keep watch, especially at a time like this.

I wonder where Talald is headed?

Raurou does too, it seems. He's not the kind of guy to leave loose ends. Even if he himself, is seen as a loose end by some.

For the next few pages, we're within the ENTHAL PSYOP. Which does not have a formal name (yet), so if you want to be tacky, you could call it the ENTHAL MIND PALACE. 

It's a sort of merger of how the Enthal PsyOP traditionally works (with Sestro able to actually go inside of his own head to pick apart and visualize immense amounts of retained information), merged with the expansive power that comes with Mind alchemy.

There are a lot of little details in this panel, and it's obviously not what Sestro is used to seeing if the Executive's lines are anything to say about it. It's been twisted and warped, expanded with the amount of memories that Clarud had to give to his descendant to begin with.

Sestro is still processing everything, hence the mess and all of the retained memories flying around every which way, fogging his path.

However the Enthal PsyOP does have a very distinct look if you pay enough attention to the sides of the "hall". It seems as though this version of Clarud and his plus one are standing in front of what would otherwise be the main room of this place. There are many books and trinkets on these circular shelves. Sestro has had to look into a lot to get where he is today, to train his mind and gain knowledge, to accept this burden suddenly placed upon him.

My design instructions for Sestro's "domain" (as Turnin called it in an older conversation), was to make it feel very much like a cool colored version of something like the Black Lodge from 'Twin Peaks', or 'Within Black Blood' from Soul Eater. Which I'm fairly certain is a direct reference to the Black Lodge to begin with.

There's also the question of how The Executive and his plus one even manifested here to begin with. What are they? Is this The Executive himself or some vague recollection of him? If it's the latter, then why is someone who Sestro seemingly doesn't know at all there? 

All good questions, all with answers we won't be getting quite yet.

The identity of who the somebody that wants to meet Sestro is chief among these inquiries for a lot of fans, it seems. Especially why they seem to look so different and young here. 

Again, more to be explored later. But it's pretty obvious that there are some conclusions to be drawn from this, and also even more questions. It wouldn't be Vast Error without a constant bombardment of confusion and contradictory information.

Also good to note that Sestro does not seem to be cognizant of what he's doing while using his PsyOP, or at the very least he hasn't been since the transfer started. Does this have something to do with how his comas work? Maybe...

Also Hamifi keeping spare glasses for Sestro? How nice of her. These two are in love, I have to say.

There are those gloves again. It must be hard carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders and still not being able to show them all of you.

This is a direct callback to one of the final scenes of EOA2, where Sestro looks at the alchemical symbol on the pillar and associates it with himself. There he looked fearful, like he had something to do with the catastrophe overtaking the world. 

Here he looks at his hand and there's more of a remorse, something that he wants to say but knows he can't. But he gains the resolve to push forward anyways, because he believes the faith and work of others far surpasses his own personal trauma. Sestro is a man who has learned to accept his circumstances, no matter how much they hurt and no matter how long he has to carry them with him.

I think he learned that from someone.

WHEW. God, okay. 

That's all for this month, and last month, and also the month before that. I'm sorry this is a ludicrous amount of content for one post, but we were gone for a long time. I considered splitting this up into two posts, but I just wanted to uh, bite the bullet as they say.

See you all soon! For real this time!

- Austin