hour 1 of shift: i love helping people and making people happy yay yay yay later today i am gonna go home and have fun and eat a tasty meal and work on my projects and
hour 6: if youu go to the store and buy groceriers you are a piece of shit
hour 8: if i wad 1 apples tall i could live off of one apple for a week... oh but it would rot away... no.... i hate the rot i hate the apple
In cartoon comedys for grown ups and adults there was alwwys a little sad fellow or other getting torment and torture over and over for the amusement of the fans, well I dint fucking laugh
It's been just over a year since Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 released! I did the 3D work, which mostly means Tenna 📺 I figured it's been long enough to share some "behind the scenes" stuff, starting with a look at the Maya file for his static poses...
I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ✨ Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!
I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!
(lots more after the Read More cut...!)
Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍
There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.
When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.
These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.
Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…
Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.
Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄
I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?
After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.
As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️
This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.
Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.
Say it with him, folks!!
For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.
Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.
I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?
Phew!! That's a lot of Tenna. I hope it was fun to look through my posts! Oh, one more thing - the Fangamer Mr. Tenna Figurine just straight up uses the 3D model I made, which I think is really funny and cool and nice. Check it out if you want! Thanks for reading!
one of my favorite little bits of extra-curricular deltarune text comes from one of the newsletters (linked above - quote is towards the bottom) relating to Seam's design and musing that perhaps the keep's tail was torn off by "cruel and loving hands."
its a line that has stuck with me since reading it and i think about it often. Cruel and loving. the love is there, but importantly, so is the cruelty. and whos cruel and loving hands were they?
some further musings / analysis below! its kind of mush as im not very good at putting this kind of thing together but hopefully its interesting enough
Deltarune is a game about many things, but cruelty is perhaps one if its central themes.
There's the more outright, obvious cruelty brought on by the prophecy and the tragedy it brings, but i think even more importantly and impactfully a lot of the cruelty showcased in deltarune is incredibly subtle - there's a cruelty in casualness, and a cruelty to thoughtlessness. And oftentimes cruelty can come from the people that care for you (or Should care for you) the most. When play stops being fun and becomes violence.
Through the very start of the game, before we get into the meat of things in the dark worlds, we see almost immediately the cruelty characters offer to one another. Susie, although healing and becoming better, is probably the most obvious example as a bully. But many of the other kids are bullies too (many of them in fact targeting Susie, such as Snowy, Catti, Berdly, and Monster Teen). Even Kris is known to have a mean streak. And it's not like any of these kids are irredeemably evil, or even doing these things by complete intention to Be a bully. It's something that happens when behaviors go unchecked, when children go unsupported by the adults in the systems around them, and what happens when the cycle of cruelty perpetuates itself without intervention
as for darkner's role in this....
Darkners as a whole are a group that is. Doomed. Badly. every single one of them is doomed to suffer by forces beyond them because they are objects. tools. toys. Many of which are incredibly fragile or small, easy to lose, replaceable. Once they've been used up, they're tossed away. Why should it matter when we know items can be replaced when broken? When there's something better or cheaper or faster to use? Lightners don't think twice about it because they (minus Susie and Kris and Maybe? Noelle and Berdly) literally do not know of their existence.
The classroom on the right in the school is abandoned not because the lightners took issue with the darkners there, but because Gerson Boom passed away and they couldn't fill his vacancy, leaving the classroom as is and leaving in its wake a dark world left abandoned and to its own devices. The library's dark world is one of the ones that is least abandoned as it is a public space, but even so Queen and her denizens get a taste of what being left behind is like when the internet goes out. Tenna after chapter 3 is tossed out by Toriel, not because she hates him, but because she does not know he exists - and he is an object that has seemingly passed his expiration date.
Objects made of paper are easy to rip, easy to stain, easy to crease and lose (i remember reading this post by @/duskwingmoth pointing out Card Kingdom as a group being doomed due to being marked, having missing cards, and generally being unfit for playing any normal card game. and its a post that been making me go bonkers i think about it a lot).
Lines of code are easy to mess with and easy to destroy and while you can fix something like a laptop, but once its met its servicing and warranty date, what then?
While technology used to be built to last, newer technology comes with a manufactured service date to keep you buying new things. And older technology that Was built to last stops getting parts made, stops being serviceable.
Its another cycle of cruelty perpetuated by systems that are failing in all the ways that matter, by people at the very top who are careless and spare no thought to anybody below their rung.
i think a lot of people struggle with or feel uncomfortable with having a role in deltarune's narrative as an invading, intrusive, and sometimes violent force in these character's lives. i dont believe deltarune is straight up saying "You are a bad person" for playing the game. at the end of the day, deltarune is a work of fiction that is a conversation about narrative structures and the audience's role in that said structure. it is a game created to be played, to be watched and engaged with.
This being said, though, it is very obvious that even within friendlier playthroughs that our presense is an Unwelcome one specifically by Kris (our wonderful and unwilling protagonist) who is probably the Biggest victim of our purveyence of their life. and i think thats very very intersting. We are placed into a position of power over these characters.
Our cruel and loving hands are a part of what has kept this story going, our longing for answers and a hope for a kind end for these characters that we enjoy and love. But when will it need to stop? When do you let go in order to prevent whatever you're holding from breaking?
me knowing full well diego realistically won't get much time to shine in the first episode premiere tomorrow: guys it's HIS day! make way for a very special princess and his bestie!! 🧡🏇
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