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!
On choosing eternity and the 'return' in adventure genre:
If you've read quite a bit of children's and young adult literature, or been familiar with the adventure novel, and especially if you've studied these genres, there's a structure to it that you may be familiar with.
Whether it's something like your Robinson Crusoes or all the way to stuff like Wizard of Oz which may seem closer in comparison to Deltarune's genre (more in the Wonderland territory) these works have never been as simple as what they seem on the surface, of a heroic character going through hardships in a different world and being victorious/learning a lesson. They have elements throughout of a rhetorical nation and identity-building that makes one aspect of the structure very important: The Return.
The protagonists will often start in a familiar place, importantly something homely, something that is for the Family, and something that represents the nation on a microcosmic level. From there they are thrown into a different land: it is exotic and it is challenging but ultimately it is there just to build character for these protagonists. Ultimately they have to leave it behind and remember, as Dorothy does, that "there is no place like home". And these are elements less subtle in a book like Robinson Crusoe for eg where the "other" world is more clearly representing all of the "uncivilized" world against which the image of the Home, of the Nation, of the civilised world is created. Similarly with Wizard of Oz starting at the Homestead - a symbol of American domestic life that Dorothy very clearly shows to be "boring" but ultimately is the place she must return to. That is ultimately always what the adventurer, the protagonist is working towards: to return.
The thing that drives the heroes forward within the dark worlds in Deltarune each time is the need to close the Dark Fountains: to return home. Home is the base around which the adventure must be: the home is Real. The home is what you really are. The home is civilised world.
The land of the adventure? Yeah that's where most of the story is happening, but it's not real. It's the Other, the Exotic, the Uncivilised, the world that you enter and get to play around in and decide the fate of and then you return, leaving all those high stakes behind. The world that is real is defined against the unreal.
And traditionally, as I'm sure you see here, this structure to the adventure novel has had quite oriental and colonialist implications, there is a horde of literature that talks about this, about how this 'other' world often taking elements from other cultures is denigrated to a two-dimensional level of just serving the adventurer's purpose (like the Darkners serve the Lightner's purpose) before being put down against something better and more Real - the Home, and in this case literally named Hometown, the Light World.
Deltarune takes the adventure novel trope and really names and shames it for what it is: the othering and exoticising of a world that's meant to serve you and have no interiority of its own beyond that and not be seen as real. And though Ralsei, knowing the "rules" of this world, bows down to the trope (like Friday in Robinson Crusoe the noble savage, like the Scarecrow and the Lion and the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz furthering Dorothy's purposes) Susie does not see it as common-sensical.
Susie cannot take it on face value as just "how things are". So when Susie says she doesn't want the story to end, it's more than just holding on the fantasy.
She is rejecting the adventure novel structure.
She is rejecting the return.
She is saying fuck the expectation to let this other world and these other people burn just because they're not "real" enough, fuck this subservience and closing it up to back home.
Others have pointed out that Toby is unlikely to just repeat some old tired "too much escapism is bad" trope, that isn't where the story here seems to be going. And I think it's particularly about placing the story in a tradition of this kind of trope and structure and then ripping that expectation out from it and challenging the vantage point from which you view worlds that you just enter to "have adventures" in.
Just like Undertale challenged the idea of a world you enter where you view all residents without interiority and use and kill them for your gains because they're nothing more than NPCs in a game.
Deltarune challenges the idea of creating an "other" that it is acceptable to not give interiority to, that it is acceptable to treat as less than, that it is acceptable to leave behind after you get all the development for yourself you could get out of it. When Susie chooses eternity she rejects that quiet acceptance of the other as something to be cast aside.
And if nothing else I hope this will be the kind of rejection that can stick with people when they engage with the adventure genre and see its historical issues with this quiet colonial attitude that carries on to this day.
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
kaledo-art
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
jbbartram-illu
