Backstage Pass #33 (Patreon)

On this edition of Backstage Pass, I’ll be talking about…

One of the Shadow Realms of my computer files! Okay I know this one sounds weird right off the bat.

On my computer are a variety of folders with goofy names. Among these are "Shadow Realm" folders, which are folders that I dump old files into when I'm done looking at them forever. I'm always hesitant to delete files because sometimes years later I find some value in old concepts- or they're just fun to go through. So let's dive into the shadow realm of OBT's chapter 1 folder! This will be a surprise for me just as much as it is for you.

So right off the bat it looks like we're dealing with a bunch of old page scraps. More specifically, the page scraps of my first go at rewriting Chapter 1 of OBT. I forgot there was an attempt at this even before the currently public rewrite.

And… What's this??

Okay a shadow realm within a shadow realm. Very poggers. There's only one file in here it seems:

There’s just a fully completed page here?? I forgot about this, this is crazy. Though looking at it, I can see why this page was redone. Malachi’s redesign happened! Here’s the updated page for comparison:

The previous page also seems to be before I rewrote Malachi in Chapter 1 to be a bit more bratty like he is with the rest of the story, as evidenced by seeming less nervous and more defensive about his appearances in the latter page. It also looks like I reused a lot of the composition and backgrounds from the first go on this page- I guess I didn’t want to redo much of it!

Going back to the main shadow realm, other notable things in this folder are one (1) partially sketched page. What’s interesting about this is Maelstrom’s dialogue here being the same as the final version- I’ll explain why this is interesting later.

And the final page for comparison:

Largely similar, though a lot more centering of the subject in the panels to signify importance.

The rest of this shadow realm seems to be cut or changed dialogue. This was from a time when I used to write dialogue directly on pages rather than scripting in a document- which just wasn’t a very effective way for me to go about doing things. Though I did find this, which is interesting!

I completely forgot that for a while, Maelstrom was planned to be unable to speak common like my first approach at chapter 1. As a result Malachi also would have been unable to understand her. I later changed this because I thought it'd be funny if she could more properly talk to Malachi.

And that's about it for this shadow realm! There's plenty of others, but I'll go through them in due time. It's interesting looking through things I otherwise would have deleted- it makes me glad I didn't!