And so we’re inside the mines proper. I really wanted to come across an atmosphere of mystery this early on – not only for the characters but especially the audience. Most of us are so very used to what to expect from the game, so I found this an interesting time to experiment with what if at some point it suddenly and randomly changed without warning – what if we can’t trust our knowledge of what should be there.

A friend of mine somewhat recently told me that I seem to enjoy meddling with the perceptions of my audience. I don’t think she’s entirely wrong..

Getting the backdrops for this page was a little more of a bother than I expected – I had the bad luck of having a stream of people twinking alts through the mines just as I wanted to get screenshots, so I kept having to sit around waiting for bodies to despawn. That said, it was a fun page to make – it had space for some unusual and interesting visuals with the group climbing down a rope.

I know it skips a bit towards the end – it seemed a whole lot more fluid in my head, which unfortunately doesn’t always mean it works out perfectly. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how to fix it however, so I ran with it – I liked some of the camera angles it offered, still. I’m hoping to rely a little less on filler dialogue and more on filler actions/events as we progress through the mines – there’s a whole lot that has yet to happen, and much of it will simply have to come of its own.

So part of me half wants to go “Surprise!”, heh. There’ll be pages like this throughout the deadmines – just moving events along so we don’t skip too far ahead. Of course, pages like this says a few things on their own, too. This is all going somewhere, but I’m not saying exactly where just yet.

This page – like a few others throughout our impending Deadmines visit – was one I actually got the idea for months ago; it was one of the scattered visual ideas I had in mind that just needs to be peiced in somewhere and adapted. We’re entering a portion of the narrative where I’ve spent so much time thinking about how to do the flow and visuals that it feels like all I have to do is release the breaks and start down a veeery long slope in the hopes that there won’t be a sudden stop at the bottom. Of course, there’s still plenty of uncertain details to make up as I go, but that’s how it goes – here’s to hoping it’ll be smooth sailing throughout.

I know the shots of Moonbrook are a tad poor – since I got started fairly late on this page, by the time I knew what background angles I missed, it was already night in Westfall, and since these were all meant to be day shots.. it was somewhat inconvenient. So I simply had to go on what backdrops I already had and try to make the most of them. It’s a rather simple and straightforward page – I suspect there’ll be a fair bit of those coming in the near future, seeing the destination.

One of the things that always appealed to me with portraying night elves is the space for culture clash – excluding Draenei (and perhaps even while still counting them), night elves are likely the most strange and alien of the races in the Alliance. Different values, different habits, different perspectives.. it’s all something I like playing on every so often – especially with a group as oddly composed as this one.

On a completely different note – this is the first time I can recall trying to actively portray disgust. Guess that tongue is good for something after all!

Hey look, dialogue! Amazing, I can hardly believe it. Will wonders never cease, etcetera etcetera.

The last pane of this page was originally meant to look much differently – I wanted it to be a shot from the back, seeing the duo waiting placed between Te’len and Areen wandering towards them. It looked good in my head, but subsequently failed to do so when I tried to render it – Tiny became too small, the height difference between Areen and Te’len became too much a problem, and it all just failed. So I ended up picking a shot that I felt looked much better. And yes, Tiny’s actually sitting on Hani’s backpack rather than her shoulder in that pane.

Yes, it’s a filler and lighting is even a tad off in places. I was seriously considering skipping today because I really haven’t had time to prepare anything. I have the starts for a script for #152 in mind, it still needs to be fleshed out so provided things actually calm down enough, it should have grown into something substantional by sunday.

Yes, it’s a filler; I simply haven’t had the time to work on scripts lately; I’ll be busy up ’til thursday, so I can’t make any promises regarding that either – I might have time to come up with an idea, I might not. We’ll see what happens, and how well some other things manage to progress. Maybe a filler, maybe a full page.. we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, we have this, which was built entirely out of the third pane after the picture suddenly appeared in my mind.

So I took some time out of my schedule, as much to clear my head as to get this page done. No promises about sunday since that which keeps me busy remains incomplete – it depends as much on how far I get with what I’m doing as how much space I have in my mind over the weekend. Still, this is something done; I’m hoping things’ll calm down soon enough.

An interesting note on this page – only about half of the backgrounds were actual night shots; the other half were adjusted to match after the fact.