Concept thingies for the Chaoswork Chimaera!

It's a very unusual beast made out of an odd material that seems to naturally levitate and consist of various (mostly) geometric shapes—a little bit like clockwork, except nobody knows its origin, it isn't really crafted to any specifications, and it doesn't make the slightest bit of logical or intuitive sense. Hence the name "chaoswork".

They're rather mischievous beasts that seem to delight in "creatively" rearranging their form to distinguish themselves from others and also in making things go terribly, horribly wrong. Although they aren't necessarily ruthless and evil by nature, they really don't mind seeing other beings in absolute misery, and if they see enough suffering/carnage/whatever, they can develop a taste for it. This can make them exceptionally dangerous. (Of course, on the other hand, if you happen to be a nightmarish bakuluki who delights in seeing the disorder of the universe increase faster than necessary, you might find them very useful...)

They also may or may not have been inspired by DHMIS. I'd lean toward not though since I think I designed them before I saw it.

Well, I've already done one of these posts on both Yanhas, and now it's time for an Observer one! Excited?

Not really?

Eh, here we go anyway.

Original concept for the Observer.

Attempt at a colour palette for the Observer.

A very rough start on the Observer. (“Pet” form; I’m going to try to make “boss” form a shape key if I can)

Fudge inside-faces all the way to hamsandwichland

In which I fly into a rage about inside faces and momentarily become Equius Zahhak.

Observer in progress.

Not sure how I’m going to handle the patagium, but I think I might add it as another mesh, maybe. It would probably be easier to blend into the body that way.

Then again, I could actually wield inside faces to my advantage, and get the best of both worlds. Hmm… I think I might do that.

That, by the way, was not a very good idea. It worked, sort of, but wasn't at all necessary.

There.

It still looks really “bluh” but I got the patagium there at least.

I extruded the middle of the snout to start creating a mouth and the Observer suddenly took on a rather goofy grin.

Wow, this thing’s tongue-hand sure looks oddly like a snake now.

I was goofing around with the procedural texture maker again trying to make some veins for the Observer tongue with the Voronoi Crackle algorithm but

Instead I made this. :p

This rather beautiful texture unfortunately got lost when Blender unexpectedly crashed, along with the one I was intending to make. Which is a real shame because I think it was pretty much the most perfect tongue vein texture possible from procedural noise, and even after a lot more fiddling with the same options (in a program that always uses the same seed for noise) I couldn't recreate it.

Whoa, you can display your mesh with wire over the top.

Convenient, but also makes me feel like I’m in some cartoon and it’s TIME TO VOYAGE INTO CYYYYBERSPAAACE.

I swear this green net effect is reminding me of an Animorphs book cover but I can't find it

That's all so far, unfortunately.

Well, after looking at the Ostentator and thinking, well this is sure a cool thing but it sure looks a lot like these other things for a while, I finally revamped it. Mostly I just ended up revamping the feet, but it also made me notice a couple of things on the other mystery beings as I was doing it.

So, here it is. Now the Ostentator has some very weird digits that are halfway between a bird (more toward a raptor) and a camel. How that makes any sense, I'm not really sure, but I'm more satisfied with it because it's more distinctive and mystery beings are supposed to be weird to begin with. My guess for now is that the claws stay out of the way but still allow it to grip surfaces if it needs to.

(I'm not sure what to do with the spurs it originally had, though. On one hand I want to eschew them for simplicity's sake, but on the other hand it somehow seems clumsier without them? I don't know how that works.)

As for the others, I'd been trying to get each mystery being to match up with the number I'd assigned it and the Instigator was kind of defying that rule, so I revamped it to where it only has two semi-retracting claws; it felt like an intuitive thing to do when actual crocodiles also have two clawless digits. I also noticed when I was doodling the Observer here that I'd been drawing the patagium fully extended all the time and I started to question whether that made any sense whatsoever as far as the thing moving around. The answer was... no, it didn't. In the future I'm going to draw it folded, as you can see on the rough Zfetagransza I drew if you look closely.

Lastly, here's "Lord Ostentatious". Click up the picture, and you'll find it's even weirder in context.

My grandma’s electric piano has a Conductor face. :p

Blender just does not know how to build a stellated icosahedron, does it? XD

This is going to be a Chaoswork Chimaera, one of my newer mystery beings.

A quick drawing on my tablet of a new form for the Observer, before I go take a much-needed shower.

I got the idea when I saw those realised ghostswords a few minutes ago. It made me think about the Observers for some reason and then I imagined the two different forms fusing together into a kind of “grand alpha” form. I now imagine that every group of Observers probably has one.

An attempt to design the "Alfagransza" and "Zfetagransza" forms ("granszata") for the Observer.

The idea is that though Observers, like other mystery beings, are biologically asexual and don't really even know what gender is, they do tend to form pairs in which one tends to be dominant and the other tends to be submissive, and occasionally they switch roles, also switching forms as they do so. Sometimes, when a pair has especially good unity they can literally fuse their bodies into one and become a powered-up Alfagransza or Zfetagransza (which, again, can alternate between the two forms at any time, except it doesn't really "take orders from anyone" to do so).

I haven't really worked out the significance of this yet but I'm leaning toward them being leader/protector figures. I'm also leaning toward every population of Observers having them though not sure whether that means one or one of each.

And the granszata! I don't think there's much more to say about them than I said in the blockquotes.

And... I guess this counts? It's from a dream I had, in which "Hughes" was my pet, but it wasn't the actual character, just a bird I'd named that. Oddly, though, I thought it was him, and thought it should be able to talk, but then I realised, nope, it wasn't, and was completely disappointed with it for not being a talking Corvus albus. (Talk about high expectations.)

So... finally, Nassak and Pantéras! After you've repeatedly seen me post random things about them, finally you have some idea what they look like.

I think the theme of this page turned into "people with darkish skin and weird noses" halfway through... first you have Nassak, obviously, but then I decided the queen should have slightly brownish skin and a weird nose too. And then, because she had darkish skin and a weird nose, Pantéras ended up with them too. Though the weird nose looks less ugly on Pantéras and that was half-intentional.

(I kind of don't like the name Ravenna but it was just what randomly popped into my head and I can't think of anything else. XD)

By the way, the "ad" in her name means "to". They have this system in Fulvopardia where they don't care what gender the monarch is, and if you are somehow audacious and Willful enough to worm your way up to the unmarried monarch and have them accept you, you can marry them and become "ad-Volitio". (I can only guess a bunch of people have failed and a handful have just been killed through the years and different reigns though, so it's kind of scary. :p) Then, both monarchs have about equal status though the second one nominally is less important and gets less say in things; of course, they can and usually do power through that "limitation" to the point it practically doesn't exist. This is the monarchy of Will after all.

I am guessing this has probably saved the monarchy since they don't have anywhere near as much in the way of inbreeding problems.

And... that's it. Wow. For some reason I didn't have a lot of scraps this past month and a half, I guess because a bunch of them got merged into other posts. Well, see you next time.

Okay, another mechanic update! Finally, after thinking about it confusedly for a long time, I decided to add another "column" to my already pretty well expanded mystery being chart, and also to give the "columns" a name: attitudes.

In light of this, it's time for another brief flashback.

This was my very first attempt to draw all the mystery beings on one page, back when I was still in the process of designing the first eight and just wanted them to look as distinct from each other as possible. At this time there were nothing but Directed and Undirected mystery beings.

From left to right, top to bottom, for the filled-in spaces:

Instigator, Seuwayote, Equivocator,
Nebuliser, Cloud leijonœrn, Adumbrator,
Synergiser,
Observer ("pet"), Carp Concurrent and Eternituga, Perpetuator and Eventuator,
Conductor, Shoushi,
Ostentator, Hlardraho,
Insulator, Veriasaurus, Carp Divergent and Transitor (I moved the Carp Divergent to Incongruity-Lost in the new chart),
Postulator, Ahalatl.

...And this was my second (plus the somewhat messy text table I made first), when I added what I now call "attitudes" as a mechanic. At this time, "Directed", "Gathered", "Hardened", and "Lost" existed, but I hadn't thought of the name "attitudes" yet or really quite figured out how they related to each other.

So, fast-forward to now.

Now, attitudes are very much a thing. What they are is ways a person or other being can express an attribute, ranging from Directed (extreme direction) to Scrambled (extreme indirection), with complete neutrality in the middle. That last part is what I just added, just so you know, and that one is Inception: a blank slate, and the attitude everybody without any reason to have a bias any other way starts out in. (In the beginning, I thought everybody would start out mildly Directed, or as I'd now call it, Gathered, but I think this makes more sense.) One of the main reasons I added this was because I wasn't sure where Hardened should go, as it was kind of between Directed and Undirected, but not exactly completely neutral either. Inception clears this issue up though by being a "more neutral neutral".

So. Here's a table of all the mystery beings I have either designed or concepted already. I'm probably going to be coming back and filling this in as I finish the rest, and after it's finished I'll put it in the guidebook with brief summaries of what I've already told you about each of the mystery beings. Then finally everything will be in one place! Edit: Instead I just copied it into the guidebook and started editing it there, so this one will probably pretty quickly be out of date.

(Starred ones have a concept but haven't been drawn yet. Question marks mean I haven't even made a concept yet.)

So, I tried out Epic Pets recently, and I was pleasantly surprised with it. I loved the designs for the lightning cat and the later forms of the earth (?) jackaldog, as well as the textures and interface.

But at the same time, it troubled me that this would mean I'd be getting into yet another nonlibre fandom that would have to remain separate from my original work, and which by putting restricted ideas in my head would limit my creativity.

Then I suddenly got an idea. What if when I revisit Tenkai—my old, kind of vague monstergame idea—I make it a libre monsterpet game? I'm not sure what licence I'd use, but definitely NOT anything more restrictive than the CC-BY-SA or the GPL.

Do you know what that would mean?

It would mean something that's like Pokémon or Monster Farm, or indeed, Epic Pets, but which you could freely use the mons from in ANYTHING (anything), even commercially, as long as you were comfortable releasing it under the same licence as Tenkai. And you wouldn't even have to label your fanmons "fan art" when posting on deviantART or something, unless you wanted to, of course. We're talking open source culture here.

No more risk of takedowns. No more "well it's technically illegal" or "well they haven't come after us yet so we don't know" or "well it's a grey area..." bullshit. Everything. You. Made. Would. Be. Lawful. Period.

Currently I'm toying with various concepts for how to make the game interesting and different, because even though it's kind of supposed to be a "libre alternative to existing things", I still don't want it to just be more of the same. One thing I'm experimenting with is the idea of giving each creature a completely different kind of control system. For instance, among the creatures I have concepted up so far, the "Sonata Snake" would be controlled by playing notes with the keyboard, and maybe, like, depending on what the other monster was doing in battle it would give you a note and you have to play a particular chord to evade, or another one to block, or another one to grab it and constrict it. And if you played particular sequences of notes/chords or something, you might be able to do awesome combos. Another, the "Cutlark" (I'm not sure whether I like that name or not) might rely on using quick reflexes and careful timing to slash and evade with the cursor. I've always kind of liked monsterpet games, but at the same time often felt like they're too much about luck and monotonously spamming the same attack. And at the same time, recently I've really gotten into games like Robot Unicorn Attack and the Flappy Bird imitators (I guess you might call those arcade games?) and I kind of like their fluid, continuous pacing, and how simple and intuitive the controls feel. I feel like if I could combine those two experiences (cool monsters in an interesting world and a fluid and intuitive, relaxing yet challenging control interface) it would be a really interesting game.

Rough concepts for Cutlark, Sonata snake, and the logo.

Initially I wanted to make the new Tenkai a Stablehand spinoff and give each of the monsterpets the ability to "archetype" to any attribute at any time, with their abilities and strategy changing a little, but... I don't know about the status of that now. I think it would go a long way toward making the game more interesting, giving each individual monsterpet more individual character (I may not have mentioned this before, but in Stablehand, I see each character as being more able to use each attribute as they get "better" at it, with each person's ability to get "better" at each attribute different, and that would come into play in Tenkai too), and making especially multiplayer type things potentially more unpredictable and interesting. On the other hand, though, I'm not sure how well Stablehand attributes and the kind of creatures I'm actually creating for the new Tenkai would play together. The stuff I created for the "old" Tenkai definitely seems like it would fit though, and there's a good chance I'll recycle it back in, so... I'm not sure this isn't going to happen either.

(Another thing I thought about for a brief moment, if Tenkai does turn out to be some kind of Stablehand spinoff, is mystery beings as monster companions. It would be kind of weird because they're sentient and can even talk, albeit in their own language, but then again... I guess that didn't really stop Digimon.)

So... yeah. Those are my plans for Tenkai right now. It will probably take a lot of time for them to really materialise into anything, but I thought I should share them with you.