Comic Sketches: August - October 2022

Hello, lovely readers! Your favorite dynamic duo is back again to bring you the rest of the Murrit crafting section commentary. That's right, this time we're FINALLY finishing it and catching up with the comic for good! Ain't that great news?

Apologies for the delay, I had some time constraints due to not one, but two different trips happening in quick succession at the end of the month. January kind of is like that. Lots of places to go, lots of people to visit.

Anyway. Last time, we stopped right before the behemoth of an undertaking that was the body pillow crafting page. We absolutely did not expect it to be as hairy as it ended up being in practice, but hey, we are very good at nearly flying too close to the sun. Worked out in the end, though!

VICTORIA: The dread beast itself.

The horror you and Austin birthed with your hands.

VICTORIA: Austin drove himself mad about the character blurbs and I definitely followed suit with these pulls. Like, the cost for the Heather Mason pillow is randomized, since Silent Hill 2 has a bunch of puzzles with solutions that are randomized at the start of the game. It's insane.

Let's look at some examples in order to fully appreciate the derangement happening here:

VICTORIA: It's all commented in the source code for the page still, so if someone cares to dig, they can see all of them. Another technical note that I really enjoyed putting in is that if you stop the music using the speaker in the top left, the Might As Well Kick It stops moving with it.

Cute as fuck.

VICTORIA: I have very little to say about specific picks, but I think it's kind of fun to try and scattershot character expressions like this. It's a good way to sort of sketch out an idea for a character. Reminds me of how booktok will sell you books with like... "it's X plus Y", but fun and self-aware in a way that bookstore comparisons really aren't. And it's great when you get that curve-ball pick that really draws the whole thing together. Sure, Jentha is sort of playing up the anxious anime girl stereotype, but she's not really herself until you get that Lucy with the football vibe in there, y'know.

Those characters were mostly lifted from the kin onions that we made for fun a while back, which made the picking process way easier. The blurb writing itself? Not so much. Me and Austin suffered for that. It took us many days to get everything squared away and we nearly gave up and cut our losses halfway through, but we valiantly prevailed in the end. Overall, I'd say it was maybe a little worse than naming all those goddamn crafting materials in Murrit's inventory a few pages ago.

VICTORIA: If only I had known how difficult it would be... but we do these things not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Or whatever it is JFK says. Also, after looking through Serpaz's pillows again, the animated Elaine and Murrit calling Pinkie Pie a "cotton candy bimbo" absolutely took me out.

I do love how we packed these silly pages full of juicy info to the best of our abilities! There's a lot of stuff that's just there for the jokes, but also a very fair amount that is actually relevant and elucidating. I'm pretty sure I already mentioned this in the former commentary post, but all of this being relayed to the reader through the veneer of Murrit's running commentary adds a lot of charm to the whole thing, methinks.

VICTORIA: Yeah, it's a surprisingly dense page. Lots to chew on, if you're prone to the same patterns of thought that led to making this. For example: what could CHEDDAR WHIZZY mean for the rest of Murrit's character arc? The world may never know.

It's actually the linchpin the entire thing rests on, staring the readers in the face the whole time. Oh, and as a final bonus, here's the translated binary from Data's bodypillow.

There is fear to be found in free will.

All actions have consequences. Even the ones you know nothing about.

Ominous!

VICTORIA: Delicious, though. I do so love me some cryptic horseshit.

VICTORIA: Oh my god it's Niles next.

What is even there to say about Niles.

VICTORIA: Actually, it's pretty funny, the moment that we decided on the body pillows interactive Austin was like "he HAS to keep the Niles pillow, it's just too good".

It really is quite the amazing artifact. And I hope all of our readers can feel the absolute contempt coming off of Murrit in waves as they get up to their Niles related shenanigans. He really does despise Calder so much (not in the sexy way).

VICTORIA: A position we could all stand to take more frequently, tbh. The pull quote for the pillow is pretty funny too. I've never seen Frasier, but a line like this? Once in a lifetime.

And we're now running up against a brief crafting sequence. Not much to comment on any specific panels there, since at this point the mechanics have been pretty solidly explained and Murrit is more just futzing around for funny reasons. We DID manage to sneak in another one of those classic "Thief of Time = Murrit wasting everyone's time" bits, though!

VICTORIA: Here's an alternate version of the plastics panel where they looked globbier, before Kohi came in with insane plastics knowledge.

What learning about 3D printing does to someone.

I love this panel so much that I just decided to upload the whole thing as a gif. Look at it. It's beautiful! Victoria really went above and beyond with the animation for no reason.

VICTORIA: Honestly, I've been having an absolute blast making animated panels! CSP having easy animation tools for real awoke something in me, and the panel being a perfect loop is also a very good joke on its own. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting shit to change, etc, etc.

Watch out, everyone. There are thematic echoes hidden everywhere in Vast Error, it's dangerous out there.

Time for another round of concept art! Gaze upon the beauty that is the 5 O'Clock Somewhere. It truly is a shame that we couldn't stick with it because it's such a perfect messy storm of Jimmy Buffet-esque trappings. Alas, it would fucking kill the art team to have to draw that over and over again.

VICTORIA: The sacrifices we make for art.

Murrit is particularly hard to design for in that respect, but I think we can talk more about that later when we get to the wardrobe interactive. Watch this space.

Fun fact, our original idea was to actually have an interactive page where you could use the Hulkdusters for some SWEET PILLOW-PUNCHING ACTION. Unfortunately, we had to scrap that due to time constraints.

VICTORIA: It also just didn't have the narrative justification, since each new weapon is consumed when crafting it up the ladder and the fun part to me was doing the comparisons. It was gonna be batshit, though. Like, the wax wings were fully melted when I decided hm, there should be unique animations based on how good you are at timing your hits. Which would also be an accessibility issue, but c'est la vie. Sometimes you gotta kill your darlings 😔

Pouring one out for this unrealized page.

VICTORIA: Extremely funny that Murrit has what is basically an S-grade weapon and just makes it worse because it's not funny enough, even though it's already very funny. Queen of committing to the bit.

The thing that makes Murrit's asshole tendencies such a uniquely specific flavor is that she's not exempt from it herself and is fully aware of it. Totally unnecessary and willing self-sabotage on a conscious level, strictly for the jokes.

VICTORIA: I would love to see how Murrit acts when not under the pressure of moving a narrative. I need to study him.

Unfortunately, they are one of the main characters of the universe. This is a bit tangential, but I don't think people fully grasp yet just how much Murrit is a Vriska.

VICTORIA: No literally like. It's insane how all the comparisons are to Dave. It's kind of like how Arcjec has that Breath player-y trait of being easy to be friends with, even when you're the worst, but he still draws the Karkat comparisons. It's just not what the characters are! It's a cool character construction to me too, starting with whatever existing archetype then shifting them into being their own thing. That's solid writing foundations there.

The red herring archetype!

VICTORIA: Yeah, it's like bait. Haha, you fell for the old Karkat routine, what a chump.

VICTORIA: This up there is the exact thing I am talking about. You start at the start and then take it away, or something. The themes run deep.

The Bart fist is wise.

VICTORIA: It's really resonant, for the modern era. I sure hope Murrit uses its power responsibly.

VICTORIA: Ah, fuck.

There goes Niles...

VICTORIA: I originally posited the name "DENTAL PLAN" for this, and I stand by it being a good name. But "Morning of 4 Ft. 2" is an Austin pull and I trust them to be more informed on The Simpsons than me.

Oh yeah, I have no idea what either of those phrases are referencing. This is really not part of my area of expertise when it comes to Vast Error, I get completely lost in the sauce of American pop culture pulls.

VICTORIA: Dental plan was a like... I don't know if it's more correct to call it a meme or a YTP source, if that's a line people even care about drawing. It comes from a season 4 episode, there's sort of a call and response of "dental plan" and "Lisa needs braces" that got used in a lot of remixes. It's got a fun rhythm to it. And I believe Morning of 4 Ft. 2 refers to Summer of 4 foot 2, but you'd have to ask Austin why that pull got used specifically, I'm a very fairweather Simpsons fan.

Ah, my absolute favoritest log of this whole thing! This segment has been such a win for the Taz-Murrit friendship truthers. I know you're out there, all five of you.

VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm accounted for. I remember doing some kind of math on how I came to the number 453 for the amount of sand Taz hands over, but I don't remember what it was now... a mystery for the ages if there ever was one.

I just adore how Taz has her usual bluster at first but then her main complaint is "I don't want to just take something from you without making it an exchange". This just in: the soft spot is mutual!

VICTORIA: Literally love wins. 

VICTORIA: The single gilded shard is also very funny of her. It reminds me of how DMs will give their players electrum pieces if they do something stupid. It's technically valuable, so you don't want to get rid of it, but it really offsets all your math if you're measuring in gold pieces, so it's as much a burden as it is worth having.

I am very sure that Murrit deserves that minor inconvenience. And hey, we finally got to Taz and Arcjec's big debut in their fancy new clothes!

In case you folks missed it when I posted these bad boys on twitter, here are the fruits of my labor. I've been really frothing at the mouth for the opportunity to bust out new looks for the whole cast, because they're such a fun way to display the progression of time and art style development in one fell swoop! 

The earlier designs of Vast Error fell intentionally in line with a more Alternian aesthetic sensibility, but as the world of Repiton fleshed itself out, those restrictions stopped being necessary - we can see that characters introduced later down the comic's run don't really stick to the whole "mostly black and white" minimalist convention, and like... there's no reason for them to! Repitonians are much more fashion conscious than their Homestuck counterparts. 

Anyway, I loved designing these new fits for Tazjec. We tried to strike a good balance between their old looks and something a little more elaborate that was still easy to draw (very important when you're making a comic!) and I think we nailed that on both those fronts. I'm so proud of Arcjec for finally putting some effort into his outfit. Also, both palettes still featuring greys/blacks is merely a coincidental byproduct of their goth-ish sensibilities, it won't necessarily be the case for every single outfit update the main cast ends up sporting. Just so you know.

Oh shit look at that, we have storyboards again! It's been a second. Since Victoria was already headlining the visuals for pretty much this whole section, she also went ahead and took care of the little strip you see above this paragraph AND the following sketches too.

VICTORIA: I think it's VERY fucking funny that the item trading mechanic is just using Metatron as a go-between, by the way.

Go grandpa go!

VICTORIA: It's fun to imagine Metatron as a trade broker in this sense. Taz and Murrit had already agreed to it, but I'm picturing a scene where like, Calder or someone is offering a dogshit resource trade and Metatron is there to mediate it with funny sitcom antics or whatever.

It's been pointed out to hell and back at this point, but I do so love the explicit sibling resemblance we snuck into this panel with Arcjec's expression of pure disgust.

As a last concept goodie for this scene, here's a sketch Victoria made while we were trying to figure out what this portion of Arcjec's planet would end up looking like! This kind of doubles as a neat preview of what you might end up seeing realized as that famed upcoming walkaround game, which WILL still happen at some nebulous point in the future. 

Please note the very important write-ups scattered all over the image. 

Ah, at last. Here we are, the crown jewel of the crafting segment.

VICTORIA: This is the moment where Vast Error became art.

The sound effects in this page really help in selling the whole thing. It's got a lot of small touches that make it seem very solid and real if you stop and pay attention, I love it.

VICTORIA: If I had all the time in the world, I would've loved to have made more bespoke SFXs. Throw in a little jingle for when you're equipping the lead chain, a little sample of 5 O'Clock Somewhere or Kokomo for the items that are referential to 5 O'Clock Somewhere or Kokomo respectively...

You really do have game designer brain.

VICTORIA: It is a blessing and a curse. Dress-up games are kind of a lost art, like. They used to be all over the place, since they're relatively easy to make in Flash, and because of that, I imagine a lot of Flash developers made their first money off selling a dress-up game to a Flash dump site for twenty five bucks. But then Flash... wasn't anymore. And it's sad! It's for real sad.

Time to look at more concept art so we stop feeling sad about the death of an entire generation of interactive/animated digital content! These are the last remaining few of the huge batch Victoria made for this section, so you have now officially seen it all. And of course, we'd be remiss not to include at least one outfit referential toward Murrit's crime dads of yore! Perhaps this is a look into an alternate future? There HAS been a lot of hubbub about those dang probabilities lately.

I think this is a good opportunity to go back to that earlier thing I mentioned about Murrit being hard to design for. I mean, I don't think it's that difficult to figure out the why of it. This is a character that tries, very intentionally, to run against every sane visual design convention that makes Thing Look Good. Murrit just spent several pages coming up with outfits that have horrible, clashing color schemes, patterns that are a pain in the ass to reproduce in a serial medium - especially one with such simplified stylization - and just generally do not have any overarching cohesion between them. It was for sure a challenge coming up with something that wouldn't make the art team want to tear their hair off while still staying true to the character, but I think we struck a good balance in the end.

VICTORIA: Honestly? The Disk Driver coming before the Retrogauntlet that it's meant to fit into is kind of hilarious. Classic gamer's thing. Many such cases of a child coming downstairs on Yulepassing morning to find a Game Boy player accessory for the Nintendo Gamecube they don't have. It's such a common story from my increasingly distant youth, but I don't know how common it is today, mostly because peripherals don't really exist in the same way they did back then. Nobody's using their joycons to test for insulin like they could with the GLUCOBOY add-on for the Game Boy Advance.

Yeah kids these days just don't get it. They don't know about the GLUCOBOY ADVANCE.

VICTORIA: Driver is also one of my favorite like, intense title words. It's like BUSTER or ACCEL-. Slap that in your title and you're off to the races.

VICTORIA: I believe the SimpCDs were Xam's idea. They wanted something ranged for Murrit that wasn't also explosive, and I think this is a really good one. The donut pattern is such a classic Simpsons thing and it's just good fun. Also, these things are probably VERY DANGEROUS. CDs spin at a really, really high rate - the number I'm seeing around is something like 23,000 RPM. They will probably flay you alive if you catch them wrong.

Jesus Christ, I didn't know that. "Thing that can shoot CDs" seems a lot more threatening as a weapon all of a sudden.

VICTORIA: As demonstrated here. 

RIP.

VICTORIA: Poor Niles. He might have had it coming to him. I haven't seen Frasier, but given the ontological origins of the Niles pillow, it's a safe bet.

VICTORIA: The Alfogram is fucking impeccable. I'd like to think this is a real contender for the worst thing anyone's ever made and put in their webcomic. 

Honestly, it might be up there.

VICTORIA: I pitched a bit where the Alfogram is just inexplicably in random places, kind of like the way Big the Cat is in random places in the PC port of Sonic Adventure 2. Imagine Arcjec and Taz overlooking the cliffside and at the bottom, they hear the lurid sounds of ALF on VHS. 

I'm imagining it. I don't like it.

VICTORIA: Revisiting the blown out hollow of the school block after Jentha wrecked it with lasers. Alf is there. Horrifying.

And here is our final batch of storyboards, penned once again by (you guessed it) Victoria, though we split the following sketches between several folks! Namely Eph, who happens to be our newest addition to the comic team, Ciro and Heather. It truly takes a village to raise a webcomic.

VICTORIA: Obviously this is too much. "Loathsome melmacian abomination" is such a beautiful phrase. It has a cellar door-like quality to it, where it just so elegantly captures the emotion at hand. 

The emotion in question being "really hating Murrit's guts", which I'm sure a lot of people can relate to.

VICTORIA: I am always vying in the writer chats to get more scenes for consorts, and Tee Hanos is one of the procedurally generated consorts ever. The "ruinator" is also a pretty funny title to give Murrit.

They DO have a tendency to ruin things for fun, profit or simply the heck of it. 

VICTORIA: Boy, consorts sure do love the decapitation motif. Austin might have more to say about this. But it's so hard to take him seriously, he's a little purple cyborg platypus named after Thanos, who is a joke to me. He's just kind of adorable. 

It truly is so hard to take in this extremely round specimen's gravitas. Hey, maybe that's why Murrit's been straight up ignoring him so far! Simply too ball-shaped and fuzzy. 

Oh, and for obvious reasons, we don't have a sketch of the very next panel. (It's just a minor edit of an earlier one.)

VICTORIA: I haven't been around long but I love it when things just work out in ways that are both thematically relevant and not especially labor intensive. It's like I was saying in the Q&A, reusing stuff is great.

VICTORIA: The Retrogauntlet is ludicrously expensive. My game designer brain has said that even the UI "Grade S" flashes up in a beautiful, gradated gold, the item slot it occupies gilded by its power. This thing is So Bad......

You people BETTER appreciate all the deep thought that Victoria's brain put into this. Really take a good whiff of all the delicious details scattered throughout the whole thing. Hmmmm.

VICTORIA: It is basically a power glove with a VHS dock. And I think the VHS motif really sets it apart from the weathered tradition of musical instruments as time-traveling devices. Actually, hey, was that a Zelda reference? Was that a reference to the Ocarina of Time when Homestuck characters had time-travel devices that were also musical instruments? Eddie you can cut this if you want. But I'm gonna be thinking on this one. 

I did not cut it and now I am also thinking about it. Did we just discover a brand new entry on the gargantuan list of pop culture references found in Homestuck? Who can say!

VICTORIA: I actually made bespoke sprites for the Retrogauntlet instead of just the one we see in this panel. A lot of sprite mode stuff gets away with being flipped, but this thing is capital-I Important. Who knows, maybe which arm the Retrogauntlet is on can matter in the future? I do not know if it will matter in the future. 

(It will probably not matter in the future.)

VICTORIA: Oh shit, I got for real spooked by the link swap. God, that's cool. Not to toot our own horn, but this is objectively very cool to do. 

I think everyone reading this can agree that the link swap is, objectively, a SUPREMELY cool thing to do. Messing with the site CSS in general is one of my favorite types of visual fuckery to pull off, which is great because Vast Error likes to do that fairly often!

VICTORIA: As we switch probabilities, I want to draw attention to the minor things. The core palette for The Game has changed. The warmer tones it uses in the main probability are swapped out for this cooler blue-grey, and title fonts are no longer orange, but blue. The buttons and toolbars have also had their gradients removed - in this probability, The Game uses a flat, modern UI, the worst fate of all. And I'll leave the Mimesis talk to the person whose discord nickname is "mimesis replyguy" in at least one place.

My deepest affections are being put on blast!!! Anyway, I could go on about Mimesis for ages, but they're really more of a looming background presence in this particular scene. And isn't that just so interesting? Their introduction into the narrative was a sudden, bombastic turn filled to bursting with meandering shenanigans, and so far, most of their scenes have had a certain forceful quality to it, like they're elbowing their way into the story. Not here, though. Their name isn't even mentioned directly, and though they seemed to have a HUGE influence on our beloved Alt!Murrit's trajectory, they're more or less glossed over in a single paragraph.

Maybe they don't feel the need to draw all the spotlight when a branch of their home turf is about to have a devastatingly huge impact on the true timeline, which is sure to cause all sorts of ripples down the line. Can't really stick to the sidelines after that, even if they wanted to!

VICTORIA: I want to talk about the Duodechaxiom item design now, because this thing is so fucking cool. Its core ingredients are: 

• The Rubik's Cube that Murrit used to reconfigure the set of traps on the path to the Hentai Dungeon 
• The launchpad that is used to apply video effects to her collection of cringe compilations
• The Viewmaster that Defrauding Dealer was given by the cherub, only to get baited by Mimesis through it in I2S1
• One (1) S-grade time fractal

And it is a device that allows Murrit to traverse probabilities. It's kind of a beautiful feat of continuity and coherence for the Vast Error experience, a beautiful tie back to itself after the incoherent mess of crafting whatever the fuck for pages and pages. Genuinely? Very proud of it. 

VICTORIA: Seeing all this trash drawn out is really making me realize how much trash there actually is. The Niles pillow, the stack of SimpsCD, the Ahegao Hoodie, the Alfogram... I think it's something like 25-30 new objects? For comparison, Rose's alchemy session where she makes the classic magnetic wodka only barely cracks 10. It feels like a breeze, though. That's honestly one of the things that gets me. This segment has comprised most of the time I've worked on this comic and it's so quick to read through, lmao.

This is what it feels like, to brush up against the famed "webcomic time". Reading through this kind of story serially as opposed to archivally might as well be a wholly different beast when it comes to pacing, but that's also part of the magic. All of you guys are getting a limited edition experience! Isn't that neat?

VICTORIA: The money shot of all the new alchemy stuff is so good, every time. You'd think it Christmas AND your birthday. 

Maybe even New Year's as a bonus? I know we don't exchange presents on New Year's, but goddamn that is a LOT of stuff and it's the thought that counts. We need at least three separate special dates to hold all this gear!!!

VICTORIA: The goof of the alternate probability having a sprite mode with arms that display by default is so understated that I wonder if people realized it was even a joke. But it is! There's other stuff too, like Niles being resewn with yellow string instead of purple, but the one I'm the most fond of is the way the line weight changes on the landing terminal. Alt!Murrit's art style is very inspired by a specific sequence of Hussnasty panels from Act 5 Act 2 (but NOT the ones you're thinking of, dear reader) and this kind of scribbly, grainy look suits that. Also, Alt!Murrit's decided to remake an Ellsee pillow over the Calder one that the main probability shows.

A marked improvement in body pillow choice, in my humble opinion. Away with you, conservative fish-man!

VICTORIA: It's here that we get the big payoff for all this horseshit: the shot from the end of Alt!Murrit's journey, of endless dead static, mirrored in the shot that starts it, brimming with infinite possibility. It's beautiful. It's poetic. It's really, really labor-efficient. 

I'm also a huge fan of the dialogue in this page. It's pretty short and to the point, but it drives all the Themes™ home so elegantly and with such banger lines. theres a lot of me to go around indeed, Alt!Murrit. What a way to go.

VICTORIA: God, everyone did so fucking good here. Truly, truly. The choice to have probabilities depicted with a shift in art styles is so inspired, both as a storytelling device and as a chance to get the team to flex.

VICTORIA: These panels fucking slap. The minor differences, the way the poses are emphasized differently by the art styles, the way the Psychedelic Hail Mary kind of bleeds into the Time symbol while the rest of Alt!Murrit's fit contrasts with it heavily... it's so fuckin' choice.

Solidly agreed. I think they look VERY good as a set, and they're a great way to close off this segment as everyone waits for the upcoming animation to be completed. Speaking of, sorry for leaving everyone on a middle-of-sentence cliffhanger for several months! I promise it's going to read real good once this thing is out.

And with that, we are officially DONE with the commentary backlog! Wow. Took me almost a whole year but we did it, Joe. As far as the Patreon goes, this means that February will be featuring a Snowbound Blood devpost instead of the main comic, as there is currently no more comic to comment on, so you guys have that to look forward to this month!

Don't count on that being the case for long, however. There's things cooking in the oven, and they're all very close to being done.

Catch you all next time!

- Eddie & Victoria