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utilitymonstergirlContinuing on from the previous notes! You can follow along in the comic here.
act ii: O Superman is one of my favorite songs for when I'm feeling sad and autistic and vaguely horny about it. These closing lines made me think "these'd be a great epigraph for some kinda milSF momcon story" and then "...wait, I'm writing a milSF momcon story."
2.1: I had a lot of fun designing the fortress lobby, and I knew for a while that it’d have limbs stored in the kitchen like dried meats, possibly implying some sort of cooking minigame. The limbs also tease blood colors other than pink and green.
2.5: The introduction of [locked] speech bubbles, raising the question of whether the captive is trying to say things she hasn’t bought yet, or if Antimony has somehow kneecapped her vocabulary. Either way, it’s a fun contrast with Antimony’s French and Italian.
2.6 - 2.7: And to think at one point I was just going to have Antimony threaten her with a pistol. (My concept gave her a Luger, but that felt too Nazi-coded and I realized that the coerced cannibalism was more interesting and hotter anyway.)
2.8: I consider “she’s delicious” before settling on “you’re delicious,” because we’ve seen intra-team cannibalism but not yet autocannibalism. It just seemed more erotically violating, too. Zooming out to Sulfur at the end after such a tight focus on these two reminds us that this was all staged to impress the boss’s power on her.
2.9: I just really like drawing leaky cartoon dicks.
2.10 - 2.11: Reprising the dotted-line motif, introducing some new notation. Antimony’s correction gives away that she already knew all this, and tortured her captive purely as theater. But did she give wrong information by accident, as sabotage, or in an attempt to save their lives?
2.12: I’m happy with the bloodstain shot as a vivid example of how Antimony has members of all four teams in hand. Also, this skirmish was briefly planned to be part of a capture-the-flag game, for the dark humor of killing each other for such a juvenile goal, but that would’ve added an extra angle to the action scene I didn’t want to juggle, and killing each other for no reason at all felt dark enough as-is.
2.13: I liked using the ally and enemy symbols for the monstrous boss and her helpless captive, it's a little on the nose but I think it works.
2.14: Introducing some blood-graffiti, which doesn't seem to be bound by the chat interface's vocabulary; if you want free expression, somebody's gotta bleed. Also, the green base seems to do a brisk business in mulching its own girls.
2.15 - 2.17: Here we see Copper's skill and efficiency in shootouts, and Sulfur abandoning resource management when her only friend is hurt. I love using action scenes for characterization and worldbuilding, and hope to do more with this in the future.
2.18 - 2.20: I wanted these guys to feel like they're dropping in from their own storyline that's very much within this same world but goofier in tone, closer to the TF2 comics. Uranium here started from a design pitch of "transmasc Duke Nukem", and is introduced with that staple of classic arena shooters, the rocket jump.
2.21: This is a riff on "twerp" being a staple of tongue-in-cheek incest erotica. I wanted to introduce this chat interface in a funny context - stumbling over honorifics in a sibcon polycule - before bringing it back for a gut-punch in act 3.
2.22: We see Polonium for all of one panel before he whips out the Shinzo Abe Gun. I had fun designing him as a foil to Uranium's boisterous himbo energy - someone sneaky and covert, who's already lost a forearm but insists on pressing onward. (Also reflected in how their elements have been used to kill: huge explosions and armor-piercing rounds vs. stealthy assassinations.) The sound effect gag here was inspired by Dungeon Meshi, which uses this Japanese/romanization/translation style consistently rather than as a one-off gag. I figured that the Contraption deserved a unique sound effect in Japanese and this fit perfectly, giving this betrayal a darkly comic Meet the Spy-type feeling.
2.23: I'm so glad I could fit in Uranium masturbating as he bleeds to death. I think this disguise mechanic is genuinely neat from a gameplay perspective, too: you can blend in perfectly as long as you never bleed or show body hair, and you might get accidentally teamkilled by somebody who didn't get the memo.
2.24: At long last, somebody replaces a part. I also had fun fleshing out the relationship between the mens' and womens' teams: they mostly fight their own kind, and while they can be hired on as mercenaries they don't interfere with each others' battles too much outside of that.
2.25: The action scenes in this comic are generally short and decisive, both because I don't have much experience with bigger fight scenes and because I wanted this world to feel lonely and underpopulated. Its playerbase is small, tight-knit, and knows how to end encounters fast. So, I wanted to pull out all the stops for a page of a big raid, even if it's just being fled from. (I'm also glad I could make good on my promises to include a portal gun and an FN-P90.)
2.26 - 2.28: Now we're entering borderline-creepypasta territory, the meat wall at the end of the world. I like the combination of squishy, candy-gore characters and viscerally biological infrastructure. Just like entering the fortress, I like how this is a clean break between acts that would also plausibly need a loading screen. But is this an intentionally-built place they're entering, some hasty improvisation, or a secret third thing?
Continued and concluded here!
act ii: O Superman is one of my favorite songs for when I'm feeling sad and autistic and vaguely horny about it. These closing lines made me think "these'd be a great epigraph for some kinda milSF momcon story" and then "...wait, I'm writing a milSF momcon story."
2.1: I had a lot of fun designing the fortress lobby, and I knew for a while that it’d have limbs stored in the kitchen like dried meats, possibly implying some sort of cooking minigame. The limbs also tease blood colors other than pink and green.
2.2: And the followup, showing both male avatars and the boss’s stranglehold. “A harem of chained, hobbled players from all teams” was in the design notes for a long time.
2.3: The design of Antimony (the boss) came together pretty quickly (though she’s wearing cargo pants in the concept art, but we never see her lower body). I knew I wanted opaque eyewear for that sense of unreadable menace, and the X scar could be from an injury in the field or a failed attempt to depose her. Though we never get a direct view of her shoulder emblem, I’m glad I could show it clearly on her captive.
2.4: Originally Antimony was going to snap her fingers in panel 4, but that was too much of a pain to clearly draw, which also created a chance to show her expanded vocabulary relative to what we’ve seen so far. (Also, I thought about making the waiter here be a green-team reincarnation of Lodestone, who glares at Sulfur on her way out, but I decided against it because it messed up the pacing, Lodestone didn't really have a striking visual identity, and it'd give away the ending. The page title would've been "Dead Bitches Recognize", but there are several other Black Dresses references here already.)2.5: The introduction of [locked] speech bubbles, raising the question of whether the captive is trying to say things she hasn’t bought yet, or if Antimony has somehow kneecapped her vocabulary. Either way, it’s a fun contrast with Antimony’s French and Italian.
2.6 - 2.7: And to think at one point I was just going to have Antimony threaten her with a pistol. (My concept gave her a Luger, but that felt too Nazi-coded and I realized that the coerced cannibalism was more interesting and hotter anyway.)
2.8: I consider “she’s delicious” before settling on “you’re delicious,” because we’ve seen intra-team cannibalism but not yet autocannibalism. It just seemed more erotically violating, too. Zooming out to Sulfur at the end after such a tight focus on these two reminds us that this was all staged to impress the boss’s power on her.
2.9: I just really like drawing leaky cartoon dicks.
2.10 - 2.11: Reprising the dotted-line motif, introducing some new notation. Antimony’s correction gives away that she already knew all this, and tortured her captive purely as theater. But did she give wrong information by accident, as sabotage, or in an attempt to save their lives?
2.12: I’m happy with the bloodstain shot as a vivid example of how Antimony has members of all four teams in hand. Also, this skirmish was briefly planned to be part of a capture-the-flag game, for the dark humor of killing each other for such a juvenile goal, but that would’ve added an extra angle to the action scene I didn’t want to juggle, and killing each other for no reason at all felt dark enough as-is.
2.13: I liked using the ally and enemy symbols for the monstrous boss and her helpless captive, it's a little on the nose but I think it works.
2.14: Introducing some blood-graffiti, which doesn't seem to be bound by the chat interface's vocabulary; if you want free expression, somebody's gotta bleed. Also, the green base seems to do a brisk business in mulching its own girls.
2.15 - 2.17: Here we see Copper's skill and efficiency in shootouts, and Sulfur abandoning resource management when her only friend is hurt. I love using action scenes for characterization and worldbuilding, and hope to do more with this in the future.
2.18 - 2.20: I wanted these guys to feel like they're dropping in from their own storyline that's very much within this same world but goofier in tone, closer to the TF2 comics. Uranium here started from a design pitch of "transmasc Duke Nukem", and is introduced with that staple of classic arena shooters, the rocket jump.
2.21: This is a riff on "twerp" being a staple of tongue-in-cheek incest erotica. I wanted to introduce this chat interface in a funny context - stumbling over honorifics in a sibcon polycule - before bringing it back for a gut-punch in act 3.
2.22: We see Polonium for all of one panel before he whips out the Shinzo Abe Gun. I had fun designing him as a foil to Uranium's boisterous himbo energy - someone sneaky and covert, who's already lost a forearm but insists on pressing onward. (Also reflected in how their elements have been used to kill: huge explosions and armor-piercing rounds vs. stealthy assassinations.) The sound effect gag here was inspired by Dungeon Meshi, which uses this Japanese/romanization/translation style consistently rather than as a one-off gag. I figured that the Contraption deserved a unique sound effect in Japanese and this fit perfectly, giving this betrayal a darkly comic Meet the Spy-type feeling.
2.23: I'm so glad I could fit in Uranium masturbating as he bleeds to death. I think this disguise mechanic is genuinely neat from a gameplay perspective, too: you can blend in perfectly as long as you never bleed or show body hair, and you might get accidentally teamkilled by somebody who didn't get the memo.
2.24: At long last, somebody replaces a part. I also had fun fleshing out the relationship between the mens' and womens' teams: they mostly fight their own kind, and while they can be hired on as mercenaries they don't interfere with each others' battles too much outside of that.
2.25: The action scenes in this comic are generally short and decisive, both because I don't have much experience with bigger fight scenes and because I wanted this world to feel lonely and underpopulated. Its playerbase is small, tight-knit, and knows how to end encounters fast. So, I wanted to pull out all the stops for a page of a big raid, even if it's just being fled from. (I'm also glad I could make good on my promises to include a portal gun and an FN-P90.)
2.26 - 2.28: Now we're entering borderline-creepypasta territory, the meat wall at the end of the world. I like the combination of squishy, candy-gore characters and viscerally biological infrastructure. Just like entering the fortress, I like how this is a clean break between acts that would also plausibly need a loading screen. But is this an intentionally-built place they're entering, some hasty improvisation, or a secret third thing?
Continued and concluded here!
