Page Commentary No. 24

Gunwild: I like writing silly reveals.

Psu: It might be hard to believe but I'm PRETTY SURE that I never did concept art of the Vanaa looking anything BUT like funny little goobers."

Gunwild: I think this page actually differed from the concept art a bit in that you tried to vary their head shapes more, in terms of whether they would be round or egg-shaped.

Psu: Yeah, by a few pages in it became the norm that the Prince had a taller egg shaped head. Other higher ranking vanaa tend towards egg shaped heads like Clulu later in the series and especially King who's related to the Prince anyway. Otherwise most of their heads are that pleasing and friendly oval shape. But getting variety into these designs was tricky, and at this page I hadn't really gotten to designing a lot of Vanaa so I was still inventing new things about them as the story charged on. You can see that these collars are the higher up collars that went away in later pages.

Gunwild: They were probably just tense about making a good first impression for visitors!

Psu: You've gone all rigid!

Psu: I know we both discussed this pretty early on when coming up with the plot in this story, but it was a bunch of fun thinking up the design of this room and the design of the control systems. The sensor panels and the floor panel and the way the whole room is 360 degree view screens to the outside of the ship. A lot of these things we planned to use in the story later so getting them right was important right here.

Psu: That even extends to the fact that Talps is one of those kinds of vanaa who form a "mouth."

Psu: What was the reasoning you came up with for that again?

Gunwild: Well, this is a rare occasion when characters are talking in the background and we actually know what they're saying but it's not shown. She is a nice person, and she immediately saw Kettlehead was nervous (as shown in panel 2) and wanted to make him feel more at ease. So she decided to try forming a mouth to talk to him, and asked if she was doing it right.

Gunwild: And they hit it off from there.

Psu: I didn't remember that!

Psu: That's secret stuff for you patreons. Getting your money's worth!

Gunwild: I'll probably wind up saying this again, but the iridescent inside of Prince Gleb's shell is so cool.

Psu: I don't know how much we figured out of their evolution at that time but I was clearly deisgning Gleb's mantle like a shell which have these beautiful iridescent sheens. However we make it clear later that historically the Vanaa never had shells of their own but were hunter gatherers and taking them. And one can imagine that the strongest vanaa had the best shells!

Gunwild: Also you like the beach.

Psu: When are we getting the beach episode, gun?

Gunwild: The first story ended with them on a beach! We should have a hot springs episode.

Psu: We can't let our Patrons down. (So we're not gonna promise that!)