The Secret History of a Certain Snake

Hello there, it's Lone Wanderer again. Another character post so soon? We can't believe it ourselves either!

Old Anthro Snake

In the old version of the game there were a few characters which ended up getting cut. If you checked the changelog or remembered the details of old Identity, you may have noticed that among these were the girl in the bathroom, the shadow demons in the corridor, the hanged man in the old cliff route and... the sssnake man!

You were only able to see his own scene if you met some very specific conditions; I myself even missed it in my countless playthroughs to test the old game.

He was first added with version a.03 (Nov. 1st, 2017) where he entered the VIP elevator with you. In a.09 (May 2nd, 2018) he got his actual first scene; he's celebrated his first birthday already and yet you don't even really know him.

He is an anthro snake (with plantigrade legs even), talksss like thisss, saves you from some shadow demons and tells you that you are not yet ripe and patient enough for him to tell you everything.

No, really. I do mean everything. Internally his characterization was that he was a "McGuffin". Remember that conflict between groups of interest I only briefly mentioned in Corvolin's post? The snake was one of the main driving forces of this conflict, so much so that he makes a civil war happen between different groups of the old folktails and some other ones.

This exposition teller didn't open up to you because he doesn't know if you're on his side; he was a bad guy who wanted to make sure you're also bad with him.

But really, the more I analyzed him, the less interesting he became; he didn't even have a name. This anthro snake internally was just called the "Shadow Prophet" and it felt like he was entirely designed to tick off a list of things to do in a story rather than being a character who drives the plot his own way.

When I first tried my hand at this character I wanted to give him some motivation as to why he would be doing all this stuff in the first place. I was thinking of somebody who was unhealthily obsessed with the supernatural; a paranormal investigator like you see in some ghost stories who is decried being wrong and crazy but then actually they get validated in their obsessive views by either seeing a ghost or saving somebody.

My perspective on it was that this snake wasn't actually quite right, and would never have seen any validation for his beliefs about the ghosts and whatnot that may have appeared in the old story; he was rather coincidentally right about some things which is what would have drawn you to him to find answers.

But we felt this wasn't good enough, so we decided to just start completely anew with him.

New Snek

In the story he hasn't been introduced yet, but his name is Karago. This name is a mutation of one that I had given a monster in another story I had been writing on for years. This other character is a basilisk with pitch-black scales; our Karago is a colourful snake.

The first time we started talking about him, Blue Bishop (half-jokingly) suggested to make him into a big love tube. We both loved that idea so much that we stuck with it. He is very large and might be one of our biggest characters; from head to tail he currently reaches around 16ft (close to 5m).

Karago sets another record; he is also our only perpetually nude non-spirit character. Unlike Garreth, he wears nothing to cover himself up. Despite that, we will probably not draw too much attention to it in the story; for him it's more out of convenience given that he has to slither on the floor to move. He isn't one to show off his body in a way like Garreth does.

Both of his bands (the flowers and dragon) are symbols he proudly wears. They sprung from a suggestion we gave Rauch to create a dragon tattoo or something similar to adorn his body. Overall it was a challenge for Rauch to design a visually distinct snake character, however we think he's done an amazing job.

The band on his tail changed a lot:

The very first one is the fleur-de-lis which was Rauch's idea entirely. With that visual added we realized that Karago may be a bit too bland by just being a snake without clothes.

This idea is something we loved but it is a bit unergonomic. Realistically it would be easy for this adornment to get stuck everywhere due to slithering movements.

We brainstormed further and tried altering the shape. The bottom left one just removed parts of the fleur-de-lis but also gave it a hook. The top right one was extrapolated through an adornment you would find on spikes on fences or railings. It is more functional but not really pretty and Rauch added the fleur-de-lis in the first place to accentuate the regal nature of the snake; this didn't really look all that elegant or royal.

The final one we stuck with is based on Kovle's black rose. His rose is a symbol for his family; Karago isn't related to Kovle but there is something that ties them together, so in a way this is foreshadowing of something that will be talked about in the future.

This slithery fellow also doesn't hiss anymore in normal speak. This is a trope that a lot of writers do with snake characters and we didn't really like it given that it would make him feel samey. Another disadvantage is that at least I personally feel like it breaks the flow of reading by pulling too much focus on the s's. At the same time I wondered if a hissing snake wouldn't try to overcome this and try to speak like everyone else. He will probably still hiss but that will be outside his normal speech. Given his social standing he will probably be very articulate.

Outside his manners of speaking there is more to the snake's personality, but you may be able to discern some hints to it with his facial expressions on the sheet.

He won't see a whole lot of screen time until a bit later into the story, but we also have a finished sprite for him:

Folsky's amazing work may get added into the game soon as well, given that you do actually see Karago in the current version of the game; just like before he does briefly show up at the VIP elevator at the start of the game.

Closing Words

With this post, you have now seen every dateable main character and this is the last "secret history" post that introduces a new character while also talking about its past.

Future character design posts will be titled just as such. We may release more posts talking about a character's past, but from now they will be separate.