THE squiddle project (ART DESPERATELY NEEDED)

[Mythee]

Hey guys.
Look at a Squiddle.
Do you see any symbols on there?

No. xD I don't. You are correct. I think that in trying to stick to tradition, we've somehow deviated from canon instead.

A suggestion.
How about they all just have a different color scheme to identify themselves?
You can have some basic solid-colored ones, but then some of them could have two colors.
Maybe they could all have the same distribution of colors (AKA everyone has the same markings, but not one squiddle will have the same combination of two colors) orrr maybe several different extremely simple markings would be available, further increasing people's freedom (AKA there could be a red-blue spotted and a red-blue stripedtentacles.) Here, example!

[Edo Nagori]

Love the color scheme thing! Makes the squiddles more interesting.

I also agree with changing word to Words.

[Mythee]

Hurrah for keeping it as Words. xD
2-colored squiddle votes: 2? ovo

[Reecer6]

2-Colored Squiddles sound great. But you know this means we must have at least 1 joke Squiddle, Sollux being the joke.

[Mythee]

xD. That'd be an awesome indirect cameo. Genius!

[Reecer6]

Errr
Somebody deleted a post. It was about symbols on the Squiddles' houses but I don't know why they deleted it. It was a good idea too!

[BlueRaffeKin]

I don't get exactly what you mean by the tavros squiddle, but here is another colour concept, this time with two colours per squiddle. The upper squares are base colour, and the lower squares are eye+pattern colour.

@reecer. I deleted that, because I posted it before I realised that the conversation had moved on from symbols and we probably weren't going to use them.

It was that maybe you should mark the symbols on the houses rather then the actual characters. And that this might lead to a problem with more then one squiddle per house but if they were different colours then it would work.

[Mythee]

The symbols on a house idea is great, actually. ovo And I'm glad your tablet still works.

There are some repeats of color combinations in there but with top and bottom colors reversed. Is one of them primary color and another one secondary? Though I still believe that we should only have only one of each color combination, regardless of primary/secondary. In which case, anything from here is pretty much possible...

....Ignore the inviting call of customization and let the needless complexity of this system attract your attention instead


So this is pretty much as complicated as making 48 custom squiddles could get.
Through doing this I figured out that
Seriously
ONLY having the "fill" coloration option is a really good idea

xDD

[RotationalBasis]

How about they write in the same colour as they ink, which is the same colour as their eyes as well? The rest of their body is the secondary colour. If we did that it would give us three primary/twelve secondary, or six primary/eight secondary colours, resulting in fourty-eight colour combinations. Patterns would be an alternative, in which case we could differentiate using fewer colours.

Also if they don't wear their symbols (ie. you don't see them all the time), then it seems silly to come up with 48 originals when the greek alphabet is right there to provide.

[Mythee]

Yeah! Only eye color and body color sounds like a GREAT idea. OvO

[RotationalBasis]

I suppose you have to decide at what point you stop being faithful to the canon description of the squiddles. After all, not only have they been shown in only about ten different coulours, all with black eyes and identical body features, they've also been depicted as playing totem-tennis with children and fighting off giraffe-beetle pirates. Not exactly easy to conflate with a 48 chain session.

[BlueRaffeKin]

@mythee.

Yes, One is primary and one is the colour that the eyes will be. I'm thinking of trying to make /another/ palette which is neater and has no repeats. I don't know what I was thinking with including some with white eyes...

Something like this?

Base colour options= ████████
Eye colour options= ██████

That was certainly quicker then putting every single option in an image file...


I actually quite like the identical body features, Not that we're going to have black eyes.

[RotationalBasis]

@mythee.

Yes, One is primary and one is the colour that the eyes will be. I'm thinking of trying to make /another/ palette which is neater and has no repeats. I don't know what I was thinking with including some with white eyes...

Something like this?

Base colour options= ████████
Eye colour options= ██████

That was certainly quicker then putting every single option in an image file...

I quite like the look of that palette (maybe those base colours are a little too pastel, but frankly I was imagining pastel colours myself). Add to that some variability in character design - either through patterns or through body-shape - and we should get 48 distinguished characters.

Having said that, character variability isn't the be all and end all; if we have twelve or so Johns, Karkats and Vriskas, and then 36 Nepetas, Crumplehats and FedoraFreaks, no-one in particular will be paying particular attention to what distinguished one from the other.

Chromatic analysis under spoiler:

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Very similar to BlueRaffe's suggestion, if we take the the six tertiary colours (that is, the ones with multiple colours in their name - eg. Blue Green, Yellow Orange) at a saturation of 6 plus black and white, those would make good Base colours. The remaining primary and secondary colours at a saturation of 2 would make good eye-colours, being dark enough and easily standing out against the tertiary colours.

That's basically what BlueRaffe did, I just stuck it to a colour wheel.

[Mythee]

We don't need to minimize our color options like this, though. Isn't it all right to have more variability since it is possible? And squiddles canonly have bright body colors as well.

[BlueRaffeKin]

I...other.

Yeah, we'll have to make them easily distinguishable from each other in personality, as well. We still need to create a list of all the medium-area aspects and strife specibi too.

... If we want to do those things by making lists.

If we make the personalities too complicated we sort of have a higher risk of making them far too simular. They should probably each only have one or two interests and one main basis for the character (possibly a hidden trait in some of the characters).
Should we make a list of those as well?

We've made a list of roles and aspects for titles, so it couldn't hurt.

I like the Idea that squiddle romance is based off of friendship rather then love. It also seems to make sense that squiddles would not have a clear gender most of the time. (they all look almost exactly identical!)

or maybe I'm being stupid.

[RotationalBasis]

No, you're right.

What I was kind of saying is that it's unlikely all Squiddles will share the spotlight equally. I mean, even in the twelve-player troll chain there are players that fade into the background a little, and regardless of Hussie's intentions the story inexorably settled on only a few of the trolls who particularly influenced the plot. The others are mostly eye-candy, and a means to an end. It just seemed to me that the Squiddle session was even more likely to end up with an imbalance of characters, and so the characterisation of some of them is allowed to be a little limited.

And Mythee, using a colour-wheel actually maximises the variability of characters (particularly when using multiple colours), and the above example still has fourteen different colours totalling 48 combinations, but I see your point, and was just posing a suggestion.

Having said that, colour alone most definitely will not distinguish different characters (as you say), but it certainly creates a good template on which to add clothes and body features (crowns, eyelashes, dimples, skirts etc.). Here is what the example colour-scheme I suggested above would look like.

[BlueRaffeKin]

@mythee I'm pretty sure that squiddles are supposed to be at least a little bit pastel. I kind of overdid it, but oh well. It's not like it's hard to change at this point.

@rotationalbasis Oh, that's what you meant. That will be a problem won't it. There is not really a sure way to prevent that.

[Tren]

I'd like to mention that some Squiddles can look alike, but as long as you add little details and have contrasting personalities, it should all be fine.

...Back to Text/Word/Words, I prefer Word to Words.
You don't have a Knight of Times, or an Heir of Breaths, why would you have a Knight of Words as opposed to a Knight of Word?
Removing the 's' adds the kind of mystical bullshit I expect from s____.

[ectoBiologist]

i think the squiddles would look a lot better if they always had completely black eyes, as that's how it's been shown in canon and it looks kind of meh-ish otherwise.

edit: perhaps you could create some sort of random generator for the titles and classes, give each person that's interested in making a squiddle or some squiddles a list of the titles that they have been assigned, and then have them essentially design the squiddle based roughly around that title

[Edo Nagori]

That plan sounds pretty good, assuming we can fine a random generator that will match up the classes and aspects. I'd also be interested in making a few squiddles.

Also, after all of the squiddles have been made, we could talk about the relationships the squiddles have with each other.

[killerCephalopod]

Random ideas:

There needs to be a rainbow squiddle. It is completely necessary. Possibly a brony, or at least the squid equivalent of this. Seahorse... bro?

Two need to be twins. The same color, different personalities. Confused with each other very often which sets both of them off frequently.

I like the black eye idea too. I mean colored eyes would be ok if they were dark blue or something, but imagine a squiddle with yellow or red or lime green eyes... O.o

[Gordon]

I always imagined the real squiddles would look different than our cutesy bastardization of them. But I think they should all look individual in some way, otherwise why should we care about them? It's only 52. Thats not too bad I think. Here I just made 8 individual ones in about 5 minutes. I'm sure if I had a few hours I could make 52 that looks distinct.


edit: whoops forgot the picture derp.

[Mythee]

@Gordon: Fffff they look so cute. xD The yellow one is best! I think it'd be cool to have some individualization like that, yeah. Maybe we could just use one color per squiddle and black eyes, and similar squiddles could simply have a different body structure. To simplify animation it would probably be best to keep to, say, two or three different kinds of body structure.

@Raffe: Lookie!

The green and the magenta squiddle in this official image are not pastel colored, but brightly colored. So it's canonical to have non-pastel Squiddles too. You're right about most of them seeming pastel though. o-o;; But if memory serves the original tangle buddies depicted were bright green and bright orange, also.

@Cephalopod: Right. Rainbow squiddle must happen. xD Maybe there could be a pastel rainbow squiddle and a bright-but-hopefully-not-eyebleedy rainbow squiddle and they can be seabronies. All about My Little Seapony. Great idea thurr man.

@ Tren: Most people have stated that they prefer Words, but I don't know if they would feel as strongly opposed to Word as you do to Words so maybe we can change it if nobody minds? ovo

@Ecto In my next post I will randomly generate a list for us using Gaiatools Randomizer and save it under the name "THE squiddle project" (thread title). The order in which the numbers 1-48 are listed (each representing the aspects who each have an assigned number in the latest list) will be the order in which they are paired with the Classes, which will remain in their initial order, thus keeping the list alphabetical.

And this post will not be edited.

Falsification-proof, yay!

[Mythee]

And here we have The page!

Arranging the aspects in that order yields...

Titles (That WILL PROBABLY NOT BE USED because I haven't replaced some of the classes yet and am just doing this to demonstrate that it can be done xD)

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Ace of Ground
Aide
 of Peace
Bard of Roads
Beast of Flow
Boss of Speed
Bride of Life
Chief of Health
Child of Space
Coach of Rock
Count of Gaze
Dame of Doubt
Dean of Strife
Duke
 of Void
Foe
 of Grit
Gent
 of Wit
Groom of Rot
Guard of Doom
Heir of Force
Host of Mass
Judge of Blood
Knave of Touch
Knight
 of Depth
Lord of Sound
Mage
 of Death
Maid of Words
Monk of Calm
Page
 of Waves
Pawn of Sky
Priest of Heart
Prince
 of Strength
Queen of Thought
Rogue of Rage
Rook of Breath
Sage
 of Flight
Scout of Joy
Scribe of Law
Seer
 of Psyche
Serf of Hope
Sleuth of Time
Smith of Light
Son of Luck
Spy of Mind
Squire of Doors
Stray of War
Sylph of Voice
Thief of Earth
Thug of Beasts
Witch of Sin

[Gordon]

even if we do stick to one shape there are a LOT of ways to customise besides that.