Stablehand: Aethereal trio revamp

I kind of got around to revamping these guys, at least partially. I decided that all three of them should have projection-wings to make things consistent, but that all three of the wings should have different styles in order to keep them different from each other.

I still have a little work to do on SH's wings; I think for his overall style I will be leaning a more toward the top picture and kind of like the way I drew the wings there, but I feel like the wings in the bottom picture "fit" better. So maybe they'll end up being a combination of the two or something.

Aiyalam's wings were a pretty random, ad-hoc choice, but I think I'm sticking with that decision.

Stablehand: Synergiser & Seuwayote + a little more about mystery beings

At top is the Seuwayote, and at bottom is the Synergiser! Or a rather rough version of it, anyway. The Seuwayote is probably not totally final either. But at least I can tell you about it now.

The Seuwayote (Say-ooh-wa-yo-tay) is like a coyote of shadow. Though individuals' colours can vary, every Seuwayote's body is split into two distinct colours which are usually fairly unsaturated. Usually, this split is symmetrical, but some Seuwayotes' colours seem to be able to shift such that more of their body is the light colour or more of their body is the dark colour, or even such that they are only the light colour or the dark colour. It's not really known how or why this happens, or even whether Seuwayotes do it at will, but people suspect they can. Their bodies are extremely mutable and seem to be able to change as quickly and freely as a shadow, and also seem to camouflage well in shadows, allowing them to accomplish otherwise near-impossible feats like weaving around closed doors. They're often curious, but almost never attack anyone, or even make a single sound. When they do, though, their call is said to be extremely eerie and otherworldly.

Also, every Seuwayote has a hat, and it's literally inseparable from that hat. If the hat gets blown away in the wind, the Seuwayote will disappear and reappear from inside it, wherever it ends up. Destroying the hat may or may not destroy the Seuwayote itself, since sometimes they have never reappeared after the hat was destroyed, but others, they've just reappeared from the shadows and sprouted new hats out of their heads.

I already told you about the Synergiser, and I've edited this picture into that post for a little more chronological sanity too.

Oh, and here are better drawings of the "main" eight mystery beings' feet. My goal was to make them all "different", so none of them would look quite the same.

This posed slight problems for creating a number system for them, until I realised that if each one is different each digit could represent a different mystery being and they could just use base eight. (If you haven't guessed what the theme is among all of them now that I've accidentally given you a huge hint here, I'll be pretty surprised.)

By the way, "heterogeneous" in the diagram means that their surface has various pigments and textures like "normal" animals, like patterned fur or scales, and "homogeneous" means their surface mostly just has a single texture that doesn't really look much like any you'd find on a "normal" animal, though the colour may vary a little.

Stablehand scrap update: 9/04~11/11

Quick Wyvera thing and a dream I had.

I may or may not use the “griffin” in Stablehand, I dunno.

A couple of... um... well, let's just say that when I fail to design a mystery being right the first time, this is what happens.

I drew the Insulator (which was supposed to be Yanha) before making the sculpture, so the proportions are a bit off still, but they're overall closer to what I wanted than in than the initial drawing.

A very quick attempt to draw the Observer’s colour palette between classes!

Basically, the entire thing is mostly a deep greenish blue. The head horns, spikes, and ears have subtle light blue on the end and both the ears and the rest of the forehead section are a little lighter than the rest of the body. The patagium is close to the light blue colour but a little darker and greener, and the “boss” (upright) form has a V-shaped marking across its chest that is a sign of dominance and absent in the quadrupedal form.

The creature’s four “eyes”, which are not supposed to look super eye-like but are kind of shiny and gem-like, glow brightly, and they’d glow even more brightly when the creature is experiencing strong emotion of any kind. The “eyes” could probably turn different colours, but they don’t really have a standardised code of using any paticular colours to communicate.

1. Even though the Stablehand universe has dragons, winged equids, griffins, and other similar animals, there are no winged cats. However, after one person set up a hoax to try to "prove" the existence of this animal (which the hoax artist called a cœlailurus), they've nonetheless become embedded in Grævonian and world culture.

   A number of people treat the cœlailurus as a cryptid and keep insisting it exists somewhere, but most just mockingly use as an example of something really improbable, kind of like people in this world talk about flying pigs. Hence, when they hear a really weird idea, people tend to say things like "well isn't that a fine cœlailurus you have?" and "that's totally pardwings".

   I'm not sure how you'd pronounced the letter "œ" when spelling things out, but for now I'm going with "way". Especially because that could lead to some pretty funny chatspeak/meme-type stuff. I mean:

   "No œ!"
   "Yes œ!"

   etc.

2. I had a suspicion the "get out of here" thing had been done like a million times, but I still couldn't get over it for some reason and had to draw it.

   (Of course, since it was about 23:00 then, I was finding almost everything funnier than it should have been...)

   Somehow as I was doing that, I about two-thirds accomplished the revamp of Stolen Heart I'd wanted to do.

I rewrote the Stablehand about page finally.

The thing was, even though I thought I had a pretty nice page describing what kind of story it was going to be, nobody seemed to care about that, and everybody instead kept asking me what kind of medium it would be told in. So, I rewrote that page to very concretely explain what kind of medium the story would be told in and what existing media it was most similar to, while still touching on details of what the story is about and what my goals are for it.

I feel like it's lacking something now, but I don't really want to add any more words to the page than it already has, and I'm done with rewriting it for like two weeks. So I think I'll just leave it.

Stablehand: "Will I live to face another day?" Remix

I finally got around to remixing Stolen Heart's theme. There were two reasons I did it: first, the GM guitar and saxophone I picked sounded HORRIBLE in TiMidity, which is supposed to be a "real" synthesiser, and I couldn't seem to find a version of the MSGS wavetable soundfont I was using where that wasn't the case. Second, the guitar really wasn't the way I wanted it to sound. It took me the longest time to figure out that what I wanted were grace notes, but while I was searching for a guitar that would sound like I was playing grace notes (:p) I found a much better-sounding lead guitar anyway, plus some pretty good background guitars. So I just basically remixed the entire thing.

I think it sounds much better now, so this is the one I'm putting on the Internet Archive page, but I'll leave the old link up on tindeck for now.

(Lyrics are still here.)

This video is no longer available: The Day One Garry's Incident Incident

Watch this video if you like video games, Let's Plays, YouTube reviews, or regularly create ANYTHING.

It's extremely important that everybody understands the consequences of sites like Youtube giving in to pressure from IP industries and allowing them to take ANYTHING down off the site without fear of anything happening to them, even if they use notices that make absolutely no sense and abuse the DMCA for censorship reasons. You could make something under fair use, NOT infringing copyright, and get your account closed under a copyright law, with potentially no way to argue the fact you have NOT violated the law.

I can't stress this enough. This is really damn important to be aware of if you don't want to be senselessly prevented from sharing audiovisual content on the internet. Youtube is the worst but you may not even be safe on other sites. Things are seriously screwed up.

Watch the video. TotalBiscuit says things more clearly, probably.

→ Reblog this on tumblr if you want, however much good that may do...

Stablehand: Nebulisers and Synergisers

Well, these two are the last of the "main" eight "mystery species". Of course, there are a lot more now... there are going to be at least twenty-seven when I get them all done. Can you guess why?

If not, the method behind this madness is coming in the next post or two.

---

Nebulisers are very furtive beings with light, fluffy fur that resembles drifting cumulus clouds. They are usually light, faded colours or hazy neutral colours like blues and greys, and fairly quiet. They also seem to prefer misty and/or extremely high-altitude places.

For some reason, they do not like to be seen by other beings, particularly if they're not other mystery beings, and seem to be able to somehow transform into a broad, diffuse haze or a bunch of thick, opaque clouds if they think someone has seen them. This is usually fairly effective at confusing and disorienting the other individual until it goes away.

Because of this, not much is known about them.

(Sorry this pic is so rough and unpolished; this thing was really hard to design. There'll be a more final picture coming later.)

Synergisers are strange plant/robot/sea monster hybrids that almost always have at least one pair of Carp Concurrent circling around them but very rarely more than two pairs (the carp can also sometimes come in groups of three instead of two). The carp seem to have a strange symbiosis with the Synergiser in which their speed varies according to the Synergiser's energy level; when the Synergiser is asleep, the carp move very slowly, and when the Synergiser is swimming quickly, the carp also quicken.

Synergisers appear to somehow be able to use the rotating carp as power generators, and also to spread out their fins like plant leaves to do something similar to photosynthesis, and this seems to be enough to sustain them. They do not even have mouths, but they do appear to have something similar to a blowhole that they use to make sounds, and an excretory system.