Of the many projects and elements developed behind the scenes, many of them never saw the light of day. S&M was, at various points in time, almost part of this unfortunate club. While searching for some of the assets included in the previous post I was able to find some that I hadn't previously saved. I've talked about some of them, but there are MANY more examples still to look at.
Let's take a trip through memory lane, shall we?
A long running joke was that S&M could be virtually anything, as much of the early work done for it was chaotic and based more on 'vibes' than anything else.
As an example (from early 2022):
In the first vidlog, I mentioned that the project had been, at one point, reworked as a podcast. This was Weltschmerz, which would have attempted to have one foot in reality and one elsewhere. Weltschmerz would explore various stories within through the perspective of in-universe documentarians.
Some scripts were finished, but the format didn't mesh well with the concept. For another podcast I was writing and editing at the time, we actually reused some of these concepts and produced an episode based around the concept of stepping through the proverbial looking glass to see what could have been, rather than what is.
It's a fun gimmick, but for long-form content we simply lacked the resources to develop it beyond a concept and a logo.
S&M had a LOT of introductions made over time as the plot developed. For the longest time the plan was to have an animated intro, featuring the characters Kafti and Jensey (a very different version compared to the one in the release) watching as the Imperial Organ's "Lamplighters", an early concept for the state police under the colonial government, arrest an alleged dissident in a cinema.
The Lamplighters actually stuck around for quite a long time, though were ultimately scrapped due to them no longer fitting the artistic direction of S&M. More specifically, the "Umisutintasan" of the Lamplighters didn't work, especially after the original ki'in race were cut from the world.
The basic idea was to have the Imperial Body corrupting elements of Umikut'a's culture and repurposing them for the Organ, in this case taking a religious figure similar to a Zangbeto and using it for surveillance and intimidation within the colony.
Of the scrapped concepts, the Umisutintasan are definitely something I'd like to revisit at some point, so we'll see if they ever make some sort of reappearance down the road. Time will tell.
A project that got pretty far along in development before being scrapped was 'Ikitima', which had been in the works since just before November 2023.
Ikitima would be set entirely aboard a self-sustaining vessel lost somewhere in a heliocentric orbit, and focused on a man steadily losing touch with reality after the vessel's communications equipment fails.
A number of elements from it would later be adapted for content yet to be released for TME and Emirigashi. Ikitima ultimately falls into the class of projects that were simply too small to be full-fledged releases. Were it to be made now, it'd fit far more neatly within the Occidental Minutiae series–though at the time we simply lacked somewhere for it to fit in, hence the eventual creation of OM.
Another project that faced a similar issue in terms of size was 'I Really Do Care'. IRDC was the bridge between the original Mourning Coast and earliest drafts of S&M, featuring one of the last depictions of the original Kafti before he ended up in developmental limbo.
It was built off of one of the earlier Odessa Interim Project scripts, and while it featured a completed script, no assets were created for it due to the project feeling too small.
Once again, it would be the sort of project that would end up in OM were it to be worked on now.
It's probably for the best that IRDC didn't get published, as it would've prevented a lot of developments in the world that the blank slate nature of S&M and TME allowed for.
The Mouth of God eventually evolved into The Maw of Minerva, or simply The Maw.
The original concept was to have a vertical climber being assembled to probe a seemingly bottomless pit that had opened up, one that by all measure did not actually exist in that space. This was one of those Reddit short story type concepts that works well for five minutes, but the moment you put any thought into it the whole idea falls apart.
As a result, it then evolved into a cave system, one that had developed as a result of a lithotrophic biomass that had steadily ate away at the rock over millions of years.
(It's worth noting that this is prior to a LOT of rewrites for Minerva that actually fleshed out the world. Things like the "Minervan Imperium" were basically just filler concepts meant to be replaced later, and eventually were.)
(The flag of the Minervan Imperium did manage to make it into art every so often. For a placeholder it was unusually persistent. It's gone now, thankfully.)
The Maw ended up concluding rather early in development as much of the world surrounding it began to change, eventually resulting in the concept itself being cut.
There are also a lot of sketches that exist from early S&M when characters were being refined. Some were ideas for CGs that never got beyond sketches.
Others did get further along, and didn't get used for one reason or another.
A lot of the early concept work for Mourning Coast had it more familiar in terms of aesthetics, especially seen with clothing. Most designs early on were vaguely 2000s-ish, however as the project developed further, these designs became unusable, resulting in almost all of them getting scrapped.
This one ended up going unused as there never was a version 0.275 of S&M. Development collapsed before it made it that far. It's a rather unfortunate example of unused content, as this one was something I had wanted to do for quite a long time. It was inspired by one of Zelda Fitzgerald's original sketches for the cover of The Beautiful and Damned.
Another example of unused art from this era would be:
Which was during the effort to figure out how Howie and Özbey's eventual meeting would go. Following the rewrite, and a change in the directions of their characters, it no longer made sense, and thus goes entirely unused.
And of course there are then the concepts behind what is eventually seen. In this case, the main menu for S&M following the relaunch.
At first the thought was to have it follow the same framing as TME's main menu, and also feature animated elements. File size limitations and technical issues meant that this idea needed to be reworked, and so a second round produced:
Which felt like a much more manageable idea to work with. Even so, some parts, like the spotlights, didn't make it to the release version.
The first version had some issues with the perspective that I didn't like, but the benefit of having modeled the entire thing in 3D is that perspective can be changed without having to tear your hair out!
Which resulted in the final static version. Then, using the foreground as an overlay, I animated the clouds behind it and got that working in-game.
An issue that's bugged me with it since implementing it is that the foreground lost a considerable amount of fidelity due to the way that Ren'py handles webm files and resolutions, so that's something I'm still hoping to work on.
But that gets us to what eventually shipped. ^^
The main menu overall went through a number of iterations as the project evolved over the years, and luckily most have been documented.
Some experimental features failed spectacularly in testing, and failed to make it beyond the testing stage.
One of these was a mechanic in-which choices impacted the balance of powers and overall stability of the government. While it did work, the coding behind it was a nightmare that only got worse as the plot went along. It also could trap you in situations where you couldn't gain enough stability to prevent your run from getting things back on track, resulting in failure no matter your efforts. A poignant metaphor about the futility of reform? Sure. Fun to play? No.
Something else from earlier drafts that shipped would be the quote at the start.
Earlier builds of S&M (prior to even the pre-0.313 builds) featured a mechanic which ended up getting cut, though is something I may eventually work on in the future.
Each new game would pull from a collection of quotes (at the time there were more than 30) meaning that new saves would provide different glimpses into the thoughts of characters from the universe before, during, and following the events of S&M. Most (if not all) were the first-passes, and would have been refined were they to have been included.
Here are a couple just to see the sorts of things you would've had a chance of seeing:
Just some interesting details: Döma's name here was still Kekonn, rather than Kekonnen as it was prior to and following this era of development. I'm not entirely sure when it got clipped to Kekonn, but there's a brief period where it's consistently wrong in all appearances.
Even without the timestamps on the files I'm able to pin these as having been made prior to December of 2022, as it still features Armando Castillo.
Armando's rise and fall behind the scenes is rather interesting, as there was a time in-which he was one of the primary characters within S&M.
His name would be hastily changed to Armando Calviño following the impeachments against Peruvian president Pedro Castillo, before Calviño's character was eventually cut in its entirety.
This was not the first change made to S&M during its development as a result of real life controversies and geopolitical developments, though that's a story better left closed for the time being, this post is long enough as is.
I figured it'd be worthwhile to compile all of this stuff here as there aren't a lot of opportunities to include some of these more niche projects and finished pieces. Better to have them here than trapped on a drive forever.
'Til next time. ^^