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Replaceable Parts is finally done! Now that I've given people time to mull it over themselves, here are some additional design notes:
Cover: The composition is loosely based on the cover of the first Halo, and the aim of the overall tone was "something that'd give me confusing thoughts if I saw it at GameStop at the right age." I'm very happy with the bloodstain-bra.
act i: This was originally a normal epigraph page, but I had the idea to make it a loading screen when I split the comic into acts. I'm glad I did, to quickly set up the layers of the characters' world, the game-qua-game, and the story itself. The quote is from the first chapter of Cunt Toward Enemy, a delightful story of bomb-defusal yaoi.
1.1 - 1.4: My original notes called for some sort of biomatter printer, like the Westworld intro, but I pared it back since I didn't want the sequence to drag on too long or overexplain how these bodies are made. I'm happy with the gooey, biomechanical process that culminates in the reveal of inhuman hair and skin tones.
1.5: The first of several first-person shots with glitch effects, which are another fun way to convey confusion or overstimulation for robots.
1.6: Making a mockery of consent was another fun way to establish this world's tone. The currency symbol is aqua regia, which I like as an anti-gold.
1.7 - 1.8: The original notes described this room as a well-stocked armory, but I changed it to this point-buy system to make the game unfair in the sense of "winners stay winning" and not "you can walk out of the spawn room with napalm on your first run." (also I just didn't wanna draw all that right off the bat.)
1.9 - 1.10: I’m fascinated by the way that game maps do or don’t disguise their own nature - it’s eerie when a normal-looking plaza happens to have perfectly-balanced sight lines and chokepoints. Then there are Halo-type maps with gestures towards a broader world but still not feeling like any plausible infrastructure. And then my favorites, levels that do nothing to disguise their nature as strategically-interesting murder playgrounds. Decoration is either nonexistent or jarringly-used props from more cohesive levels. That’s what I’m trying to evoke here - an endless sprawl with no purpose beyond murder-play.
1.11: Some of Procreate's brushes are obviously repeating stamps if you're not careful with how you use them, which sometimes annoys me, but works well here to make the bloodstains feel like game textures.
1.12 - 1.17: And here we go, the core mechanic. The tooltip is taken verbatim from my original notes, and I knew I wanted drawn-out pacing and loving detail on this first sequence of erotic cannibalism so that I can shortcut it in the future when necessary.
1.18: I had originally planned for this comic to have no dialogue, with the only text being game tooltips and menus, but I feared that the interpersonal beats just wouldn’t land clearly enough. I’m very happy with this Dark Souls-y set of preset words and phrases, I haven’t written much in this clipped style and there are fun worldbuilding opportunities with what can and can’t be directly said. (Also, “expressing nuance and love in a language built only for planning violence” felt like a nice parallel to reclaiming slurs.)
1.19 - 1.21: I enjoyed writing Copper as a supportive-yet-teasing big-sister figure to Sulfur. Giving characters cosmetic items and storage space marks them as more experienced; Sulfur only gets one belt, lifted from a friendly corpse.
1.22: I like isometric perspective for being crisp, elegant, and physically impossible to achieve in real life. It works well for maps of unreal spaces, and I'm happy with how the panels are embedded within the structures.
1.23: Thanks for teaching me this in Exordia, Seth Dickinson.
1.24: Establishing that eating teammates is possible (and sometimes the right move), which gets revisited in each act to follow.
1.25 - 1.26: It’s fun to just go wild with scenery shots, featuring three-point perspective on the base; I’m sparing with when I use it, generally saving it for big striking vistas.
That's all I have for Act 1. My notes on Act 2 are over here!
Cover: The composition is loosely based on the cover of the first Halo, and the aim of the overall tone was "something that'd give me confusing thoughts if I saw it at GameStop at the right age." I'm very happy with the bloodstain-bra.
act i: This was originally a normal epigraph page, but I had the idea to make it a loading screen when I split the comic into acts. I'm glad I did, to quickly set up the layers of the characters' world, the game-qua-game, and the story itself. The quote is from the first chapter of Cunt Toward Enemy, a delightful story of bomb-defusal yaoi.
1.1 - 1.4: My original notes called for some sort of biomatter printer, like the Westworld intro, but I pared it back since I didn't want the sequence to drag on too long or overexplain how these bodies are made. I'm happy with the gooey, biomechanical process that culminates in the reveal of inhuman hair and skin tones.
1.5: The first of several first-person shots with glitch effects, which are another fun way to convey confusion or overstimulation for robots.
1.6: Making a mockery of consent was another fun way to establish this world's tone. The currency symbol is aqua regia, which I like as an anti-gold.
1.7 - 1.8: The original notes described this room as a well-stocked armory, but I changed it to this point-buy system to make the game unfair in the sense of "winners stay winning" and not "you can walk out of the spawn room with napalm on your first run." (also I just didn't wanna draw all that right off the bat.)
1.9 - 1.10: I’m fascinated by the way that game maps do or don’t disguise their own nature - it’s eerie when a normal-looking plaza happens to have perfectly-balanced sight lines and chokepoints. Then there are Halo-type maps with gestures towards a broader world but still not feeling like any plausible infrastructure. And then my favorites, levels that do nothing to disguise their nature as strategically-interesting murder playgrounds. Decoration is either nonexistent or jarringly-used props from more cohesive levels. That’s what I’m trying to evoke here - an endless sprawl with no purpose beyond murder-play.
1.11: Some of Procreate's brushes are obviously repeating stamps if you're not careful with how you use them, which sometimes annoys me, but works well here to make the bloodstains feel like game textures.
1.12 - 1.17: And here we go, the core mechanic. The tooltip is taken verbatim from my original notes, and I knew I wanted drawn-out pacing and loving detail on this first sequence of erotic cannibalism so that I can shortcut it in the future when necessary.
1.18: I had originally planned for this comic to have no dialogue, with the only text being game tooltips and menus, but I feared that the interpersonal beats just wouldn’t land clearly enough. I’m very happy with this Dark Souls-y set of preset words and phrases, I haven’t written much in this clipped style and there are fun worldbuilding opportunities with what can and can’t be directly said. (Also, “expressing nuance and love in a language built only for planning violence” felt like a nice parallel to reclaiming slurs.)
1.19 - 1.21: I enjoyed writing Copper as a supportive-yet-teasing big-sister figure to Sulfur. Giving characters cosmetic items and storage space marks them as more experienced; Sulfur only gets one belt, lifted from a friendly corpse.
1.22: I like isometric perspective for being crisp, elegant, and physically impossible to achieve in real life. It works well for maps of unreal spaces, and I'm happy with how the panels are embedded within the structures.
1.23: Thanks for teaching me this in Exordia, Seth Dickinson.
1.24: Establishing that eating teammates is possible (and sometimes the right move), which gets revisited in each act to follow.
1.25 - 1.26: It’s fun to just go wild with scenery shots, featuring three-point perspective on the base; I’m sparing with when I use it, generally saving it for big striking vistas.
That's all I have for Act 1. My notes on Act 2 are over here!
