DEVELOPMENT OF CHAPTER 6 - austerity of grandeur
----
And so, Chapter 6 finally came to its end...
Before I go deep into my regular post-chapter thoughts and developments, allow me to personally describe what Chapter 6 achieved to be as a summary in just a couple of words:
FAILED SUCCESS
Despite the fact that the Chapter is completed where I am extremely satisfied with, there are too many of nagging things about the Chapter that truly dragged it down as far I am concerned. The success lies in the fact that I fully delivered the complete Chapter in unique format that I always wanted to try and did so with satisfaction. I always wanted to try my hands on developing a faster-paced, action-packed Chapter that would push my capabilities into direction where I never went to before. In the tense situations where our heroes has to venture through the maddeningly warped debris to save the Of Empathy ship is the kind of story I wanted to tackle for a long time. I was honestly pushed to my utmost capabilities to deliver the story with hosts of different locations and characters to create a huge sense of tense progression and I felt extremely accomplished from what I did with the Chapter.
I am also satisfied with a new set of characters to work with, mainly everyone's favorite poetry-speaking spider and everyone's reviled blasted-to-bits douche. I did works with supporting characters, such as with Kelen, Daniel, Elouf, and Engineer, but I felt it is time to truly expand the cast of characters to join our heroes in racing against time to save their ship. Now Ener and Maddox aren't truly alone anymore and that's a huge development from just a simple first Chapter that only shown just three characters. As for the settings of the Of Empathy within the Light Void, I went beyond what I thought was capable with this peculiar environment. The settings in this Chapter is my absolute favorite yet with host of truly gnarled wreckages of the ship floating in the blight that is the Light Void. I am eager to see what kind of settings could be produced for the next Chapters.
As much as I enjoyed doing the Chapter with huge satisfactions, there are some nagging flaws that must be addressed:
Firstly, this Chapter WENT ON TOO DAMN LONG (time-wise in 4-5 months D:).
It is purely the faults of mine with lot of stuffs going on in my life, constantly interfering with my drawing routines and my thought-process of how to best develop the next scenes. Doing the faster-paced action-filled Chapter for first time in the series didn't really helps as I often had to stop and think about the how to create scenes with appropriate amounts of plot development, pacing, and apparent realism. The time-limit also put a lot of pressure as I have to figure out how to make the story goes as quick and smooth as possible without going down to 0:00 and triggers a true Game Over. Gladly that didn't happens, though we did have a couple of close calls. Let me say that this sort of destruction-countdown-for-story-intensity WON'T BE USED EVER AGAIN for rest of the series, for our own sakes. Originally I would do this again if this Chapter went well. Since that wasn't the case, I will have to throw it out for good. Although, I did enjoy doing fast-paced action and would like to do that again sometime down the road, just that it won't be as extreme as this Chapter.
Also, I read some of your complaint about Maddox's constant bitching.
In some case, I will have to agree since his reactions was quite off putting and seemly out-of-character. I won't say which one, but I know where your criticisms are directed. When I first wrote how he would reacts, I thought it was fitting. Then it got repetitive and tedious and for that, I wish I could go back and alter some of that so that he would reacts to certain events with more respect toward others with less-stressed tone. Some of his other frantic reaction scenes are just the way I intended and would leave it as that. Some scenes are also dragged out, like Loeb's standoff in the CORE, but that was intentional. Other scenes such as the one where he was properly introduced in the COOLANT CHAMBER was overwritten with expositions just to extend the drama. I would like to polish that up and cut down on the dialogues. Also, again I apologize if my English is difficult to understand as I am trying my best to make their dialogues as clear as possible, especially with Ka-Ley's poetry dialect. At least Maddox is there to interpret
That pretty much summed up what I felt about this Chapter.
But is it my best Chapter yet? In my opinion, yes it is. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed this Chapter too, even if it took 4-5 months to complete it (2-3 months just to finish the ending D:)
Now the Chapter's development!
Interestingly, I came up with an idea for Chapter 6 that it should be different from other 5 chapters in the sense that it should be much faster with extremely dire situation that should be resolved as fast as possible. I always wanted to do this for a long long time because for most of 5 chapters, our heroes been stuck in very limited sections of the
Of Empathy where they can explore, interact with characters and stuffs, and become exposed to some important plot expositions. I decided that the best way to do with faster-paced story for Chapter 6 is to have our heroes travel across many different sections of the ship and through the Light Void to reach their destination. You can see the results of that in the Chapter. As for the story, I originally had the CORE to be mysteriously become destabilized where our heroes has to twice race through the wreckages of the ship to fix it. I decided to cut that idea into the first half or third of the story because having that throughout the entire Chapter felt too cheap. There would have to be a REASON why the CORE is destabilizing.
And so the idea for Chapter 6's villain was born into our hated douche, Loeb.
Much about the Light Void for future Chapters were already written, but using Loeb would add few more to what the Light Void and the
Of Empathy might actually be and why they're there in the first place. I thought about what this villainous character should be like and suddenly I thought back to Chapter 4 when that poor unnamed sap sacrificed himself in that explosion in attempt to kill off that Iranch the Tentagib. He would be the perfect villain for this chapter where he's trying to destroy the whole ship just to escape from the ship's sadism and their supposed immortalities. Like Doctor Dodd and Ulom, I had lot of enjoyment doing such a deranged unstable character, yet I never did his sort of character before, being borderline urging-for-attention type. Even if he's such a douche and a huge bother, I enjoyed doing him.
Loeb's not the only one I immensely enjoyed developing… the one I felt stoles the show is our favorite poetry-speaking spider, Ka-Ley.
If you noticed in my preliminary sketches, there is no traces of anything spider! That because I originally had the Chapter to be tackled only by our two heroes. Then I thought about it carefully… Our heroes doing all the dirty works wouldn't be fair so others should join the quest to stabilize the CORE. Also, the CORE is located in the Engineering section. You would have to possess a myriad of engineering skills and knowledge to properly interface with anything in that Section. Since neither Ener nor Maddox possesses any sort of skills required to interface with CORE's control panel, I had to introduce an Engineer character who would helps them.
Enters Ka-Ley the Arachnid!
I briefly introduced her in Chapter 5 with another group of survivors / explorers trying to get their way through the ship. That way, she would later serves her purpose in Chapter 6 and thus, formally introducing Ka-Ley as a fully developed character. It was during Chapter 5 when I had a funny thought that an adorable-looking spider could be an Shakespeare-style poet with artistic approach toward life. That idea struck hard and I stuck with it ever since with lot of zany dialogues from Ka-Ley being the most creative pieces I ever written (being proud and arrogant to say, at least
) I have to say (with bit of regret) that Ka-Ley is a more perfect foil to Ener and Maddox than Elouf could ever hopes to be. Now that Elouf is back, I hope to develop him properly in the next Chapter.
About the next Chapter, I can confirm two things:
- Chapter 7 will returns to the roots that made Chapter 1-5 fun to explore and interact at your own pace. We won't be engaged in fast paced actions anytime soon, you can take a deep breath and sigh in relief 
- The A' L L U K I N, who or whatever that is and why it is related to the Situation… will be fully revealed in Chapter 7.
Can't wait for it.
I don't have the kind of time and willpower to hoard every single posts and pages and keep them in format that can be read and edited easily.