The Ìkaron Seed

From the Latin Ìkaros, better known as Icarus.

Often times in life we will experience something once, something grand and magnificent, that we will never experience again. Not because it does not exist, but because it is no longer available to us. For example, driving someone else's car with heated seats in the dead of winter is enjoyable, but then you return to driving your own car that only manages to heat up by the time you reach your destination. One might say you would be better off not having experienced the luxury of heated seats in the first place. But the feeling isn't congruent with that logic. Rather, you find yourself longing for heated seats and cursing the worthlessness of your unheated seats. Something that once was an annoyance (in this case, a cold bum) is now a cause of frustration.

All metaphors aside, I see this concept in Untitled. The seed grows in a man who comes to know the Eternal Brother, or perhaps one of the many angels. (Side note. Angels the wives of the Eternal Brother; the mothers of the First Sons whose deaths caused the Eternal Brother to return to the Earth? Might get a little weird with the "expressive storytelling" later. A matter to discuss.) So, a man receives the Ìkaron Seed and begins to separate from the world. First he seeks comfort in his fellow man, but grows weary of their insignificance and of their impurity. The man escapes civilization and attempts to surround himself in pure, untainted earth, be this in caves or forests or even the unending oceans. But the man cannot escape civilization; it exists in him. So the man finally attempts to separate himself from the World; transcending to a place not known to the world. The World itself reaches a twisting spire of earth skyward after the transcendent man. Civilized man knows only stories of these remote spires, and knows less about what lies at the top of them.

Men can only see the physical result of the Ìkaron Seed. They see their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents afflicted with this seed abandon all earthly relations never to be seen again. The Ìkaron Seed is seen as a terrible curse by many in civilized society. They understand the effects to be the afflicted's desire to escape civil duties.

Perhaps the Ìkaron Seed refers to the name of the Eternal Brother, possibly one of many. For it would make sense that one who stands before Ìkaron might be infected with his seed.

That's all for now. We had better start laying some solid story out of these assets.

He created the World of his flesh...

The text reads:

"He created the Earth of his flesh; the rocks ans stones of his body, the rivers and oceans of his blood, and finally the air of his very breath. He then created all manners of life, grand and small, of plants and beasts and men. He breathed life into all that was created.
Satisfied, he turned to rest, and the world turned with him. All that he created slept sound that very first night.
Upon day, the world awoke and so did he. All that was left of him was the weight of a man. So he awoke and walked amongst all that he created; not God, the Lord, or Heavenly Father, but the Eternal Brother of Man.
For many years he walked amongst the people he had created. But a great sorrow grew inside him as he began to outlive his children.
That which he created, he was not. For a thousand days he stood unmoved, arms stretched out to the sun. Many thought he longed for that which he did not create. He returned to the Earth, whole once again."

I'll be honest. After re-reading it, I don't like it. It kinda flows like cinder blocks out of a cement mixer. I'm going to work at it.

Things I do like: "Eternal Brother of Man" and that he becomes a tree and some people take this as a sign of him longing to escape the world he created.

Hopefully I'll have a better draft up soon. I'm seeing something like this as backstory text rather than actual scripture.

Untitled

A page from my sketchbook.
I really need to not draw things like this right before I go to bed. I don't know how I'll sleep. E.T. scares the shit out of me.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and best wishes from everyone on the Vectorevolution team to all of our reader.

Thanks Zack. You rock.

Climbing

Okay, fuck it. Here we go. I just finished posting on my buddy Zack's blog about Resident Evil inventories. So while I'm in a "people are idiots" kind of mood, I'm here to talk about climbing.

How hard is it? You hit a ledge with an angle between 150 and 270 degrees with 20% of your character's height above the angle and your character grabs onto the ledge (maybe while you hold B or something). With the same angles and 50% of your character's height above the angle your character will toss a leg up and pull themselves up. With 75%, the character simply takes a high step.
From 20% of your character's height being over an angle to the angle being 20% of your character's height above the top of the character, and within the angle range of 175 to 255, the character's arms with reach out to the ledge and the character will grapple the ledge appropriately.

Sounds complicated, doesn't it? I'll draw you some pictures.

See? When you look at it, it totally makes a little bit more sense. Okay, so maybe it's a little hard to describe, but I'm sick and tired of being expected to believe characters do not have basic human mobility.

Think about it. They almost always run forever, tirelessly. They can carry a dozen guns and access any one of them in often less than a second. They can smash traffic barriers in one swing of a crowbar. They fall and get shot and run into things and get hit with things and never ever get tired or weary or dead. This is a gameplay thing. Nobody wants to play a game where you need to catch your breath after running for a minute because you're wearing body armour and carrying a machine gun and 100 rounds of ammo. That would suck. But out of all the inhuman tasks we expect from our character, why don't we care that a six foot wall might as well be the Great Wall of China?

Counterpoint. Yeah, you do jump awful high. This is to compensate for your inability to climb. Some games allow you to jump as high as seven or eight feet in the air (unassisted). Well, I'm a six foot man with arms. That means that things over six feet, over seven feet, and over eight feet I can reach while standing comfortably. Things that are nine and even ten feet up, I can reach jumping. So, should we make the jumping standard 10 feet? No! I can't see anything past an 8 foot wall. I don't want to be able to jump up, have my shins say "umm, no fucking way, dude. There's a wall," and still be able to see, shoot, and kill everything on the other side before landing gracefully on the ground again.

So, why does this bother me so god damn much? Because so much time and energy is spent on making sure that the trees look good and the water shimmers and the light glows and the world is vast and expansive and the whole world is yours to see and explore and experience so long as there isn't a four foot tall rock in your way. Because heaven forbid anyone would actually climb rocks. It's unheard of. The bottom line is that too much time and energy is spent making things look good when no one has really taken the time to make it feel good.

Maybe this is why I liked playing Spiderman 2 so much. Sure, the graphics weren't stellar, the storyline was pretty quick, the 'sandbox' world quickly boiled down to "kill these robots," but there was never a time where Spiderman felt like a bounding box. I never felt like I was trapped, even on an island with nothing but ocean around it and no ability to swim. I was okay, because that made the game function. And you cannot argue that games function by not letting you pass objects that you can see over, but somehow cannot climb on top of. That's not acceptable limitation. That's just being lazy.

Okay, okay, business

Okay, so I read Hellboy the other day and it came across as a very real story for several reasons. These reasons I think each apply to one, if not more, of our projects.

Hellboy is not an extreme character. He is rational, but gets mad. But getting mad doesn't mean he loses all rational thought. Part of his brain is always thinking. Untitled needs this kind of middle ground character. Not pathetic, not God, not painfully average, not a prophecy... a protagonist that you actually like right from the get-go.

The story integrates and manipulates history. In fact, a grade school education would supply you with all the historical knowledge you need to follow what they allude to. Things aren't stated unless the story wouldn't make sense without it. In other words, being clever isn't overt. I think that's what I need to focus on when I write FbfM. Yeah, I've thought everything out, but I don't need to explain everything in detail, so long as everything is consistent.

Finally, Hellboy is the protagonist, but you love and appreciate Liz and Abe. They're all important, powerful, capable, and useful in their own ways. The protagonist just happens to be Hellboy. These secontagonists, or possibly cotagonists, are exactly what Untitled needs. Like this guy: The man with the long sided face.

So there are just a few things I noticed that I want to make sure we do. Also, I want to doodle more. This little guy is pretty fun.

Oh, also, I totally made up the words "secontagonist" and "cotagonist," although I think "cotagonist" should actually be a word... "Contagonist" is a word (sort of), but you heard it here first!

Cotagonist, (noun), \kō-ˈta-gə-nist\ - A character that is of equal importance to a story, but is not the protagonist.

When God closes a door...

No wonder it's so fucking cold.