Haven: Act 2 starts!
Kim: IT’S HERE!!! SHE’S HERE!!!! The first of the Delta kids!!!
Chumi, excited to dive into Act 2!: The long awaited…. Ly’lac of the Final Applause! Please clap everyone!! We were so excited to introduce her, literal years of anticipation!!
Floral: We’ve waited so long for our girl…. So glad everyone gets to enjoy her now.
Kim: These first few updates of Act 2 were a collaborative effort between a good handful of the artists working together at once. BIIIG shoutout to Floral and Haven for spearheading a majority of the sprite panels for Ly’lac’s introduction too.
I’m so glad we get to bring back more sprite panels because honestly it is so fun watching them get made and seeing our artists essentially playing dollhouse with them LMAO.
Anyway, let’s get to it! You guys are probably all curious how ~Nymphs~ came to be… And we’ll get into it just a little bit in this commentary, BUT! We want to wait until we show the rest of the Nymphs first before we do so there’s no spoilers. 😉
First thing’s first – let’s talk about the beginnings of 𝓛𝔂'𝓵𝓪𝓬…
Ly’lac concept art by Andi “Strovi”
Chumi: THE FIRST LY’LAC!! She is adorable.
Haven: This is a pre-Ly’lac Ly’lac, this is Nymph No.1 before there were any actual solidified nymph characters. But to me this is the first Ly’lac.
Kim: Ly’lac was the first of our nymphs to be made too, of course! She was essentially our guinea pig since she was essentially our idea of The Most Base Nymph everyone would be introduced to. And as you can tell, she has gone through a LOT of changes since then!
Andi: This was mainly the trial period of trying to see what a nymph would even read like. Skin color, shapes and I guess just general vibes. I wasn’t trying to make anything too neat but to just put something down. Colors were really random but the purple was definitely inspired by Rose’s association with it. I was also inspired by Rose’s skirt during the wizard era. But that was all really, nothing deep about it other than tinkering.
Ly’lac concept art by Haven
Chumi: Now make her… PINK.
Andi: Her red accent era.
Haven: This was done after she was named, hence why she’s lilac colored now. Her smile faded away , she has the same swag but carries herself a little less confidently, her skin was made to be darker. Our baby Ly’lac is starting to show itself. Wrt the red accent, a design motif I wanted early on was for them to each have an accent color that was the main color of another nymph.
Ly’lac concept art by Haven
Haven: Overall era begins, as we wrote more and her vibe became clear I realized she should be wearing something a little more blue collar, a little sloppier. The beta design was like very #TEEN which would maybe fit better for a kid like Vrissy, but with the overalls and the socks with sandals it's more clear that she values her own comfort over anything else. She wants something easy.
Kim: Around this time is when we started slowly getting a more solid idea of where her personality was heading.
Chumi: I feel like this draft is really when present-day Ly’lac starts to shine through. Her iconic overalls and muted purple are featured for the first time!
Kim: As you can see, it’s interesting to compare how her outfit has become a bit more reflective of herself now, compared to her last look!
Floral: I totally forgot about the red socks…. Amazing… stupendous.
Miles: I remember the call we were in when this design dropped... oh! Memories... :,) She’s come such a long way, but as has been said, this feels like the beginning of when she really started crystallizing conceptually.
Ly’lac concept art by Haven
Haven: All New All Different Ly’lac. She’s sharper, she’s cooler, she’s edgier, she’s more skull-like which funnily enough makes her resemble roses squid shirt more than when she was round. Anyway, I love her. She's like a delicious ink filled gusher. This head shape actually came from a different design I drew up for a wholly separate nymph. (You’ll see her one day and go waaaaait is that...? No, it couldn’t be... wait no it has to be. ...right? And I'll laugh and you’ll smile unless that nymph's design is so completely different by then this won’t mean anything.)
Chumi: We have landed at current Ly’lac…. Our hexagonal girl…
Kim: It was at this point Haven proposed the Nymphs would have some more distinct shape language between each other! BIG props to Haven because he really put a lot of love and thought into designing the Nymphs, and I can’t wait for you guys to see the rest of them.
Ly’lac final sprite evolution
Chumi: A FULL GIF OF HER EVOLUTION… We spent a good few hours going back and forth, fine-tuning her head and face.
Andi: I started some of the hairs with the brighter outline color just to try something different, but I think ultimately it was more optimal if all lines were black and much easier to animate for.
Kim: I remember us talking a loooong time ago we initially liked the idea of the lighter outlines for the heads because it gave the Nymph mantles an illusion of “glowing” and kinda made ‘em feel more like jelly… We were originally thinking something along the lines of deepsea creatures that would seemingly “glow-in-the-dark.” Though, I think as we moved forward, the bright lines seemed to be more distracting than otherwise.
Andi: To me it was less distracting and more of an extra thing to focus on design wise because balancing the visual intake of the sprites takes more priority and it is more economical to illustrate. Again, most of this was experimental. You can tell our inbetweens were figuring out what worked and what didnt. We think a lot about these sprites! We try really hard to make them feel seamless within the world of Homestuck. It’d be jarring if they felt like… something akin to a fanmade sprite with little flairs and other overdetailed work.
Ly’lac exploration sketches by Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: My first time drawing Ly’lac of the Final Rendition… To me, the biggest things to note were her hexagonal head and tired eyes. She is so charming…
Ly’lac exploration sketches by Kim Quach
KIM: Ah, yes… My first attempts at trying to draw Ly’lac’s proper design too. I feel like you can tell my hand was still not used to getting her shapes down just right yet.
You can also see in these sketches this was also back when we were concepting the nymph mantles to be more, um… heavier? LOL.
Ly’lac exploration sketches by Andi “Strovi”
Andi: Wait, aww I forgot about these.
Chumi: Her adorableness….
Ly’lac Reclusehollow sketches by Haven
Haven: Ly’lac’s house! In our notes it was repeatedly referred to as a castle but our final design looks more like a wizards tower. It looks like a burgeoning sprout emerging from the sea. A similar shape appears on Ly’lac’s face when she uses magic! The surrounding area is a field of spikes in a candy colored sea. Visually it brings to mind the long-term nuclear waste warning marker “Landscape of Thorns”. In some of my older notes her house was going to look like a nuclear cooling tower.
Chumi: The shape sure is something!
Kim: What a peculiar shape it is in…
Environment exploration sketches by Andi “Strovi”
Andi: We did this environmental stuff a lot during an art meeting. It was really fun to imagine what the home of our first nymph would be like. It also helps to be able to visualize this for future panels.
Haven: Andi did such a good job on these, they really brought Deltritus to life for me.
Environment color exploration by Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: I wanted to try some crazy colors here since Deltritus is a very colorful planet and I was drawing inspiration from coral reefs! Still fond of the very last one.
Inspiration Boards by Floral
Chumi: What’s been pretty helpful for us is putting together inspiration boards for each place we want to design. It helps us keep in mind a general theme to aim for. Ly’lac’s neighborhood is, among other things, inspired by cliffs, reefs, and retirement homes LMAO.
Environment exploration sketches by Floral
Chumi: We ended up leaning more towards the greens and purples for her environment. Ly’lac fits in much more and her desaturated purple doesn’t stand out so much compared to some of the crazy colors I was fiddling with. We also got some funny underwater plants from Floral! So much of our environmental visdev is thanks to her!
Andi: I was a big fan of a lot of these colors. It was really hard to choose!
Kim: These colors are so tasteyyy. The more muted rocks and ground was the way to go – that way, when we get to see all the beautiful colorful coral and underwater fauna outside her house, they’ll pop all the more!
And, Floral did such a good job trying to establish the design and shape language for the Nymph’s! Or, well, you’re only seeing a small glimpse of Ly’lac’s neighborhood so far (so there’s still more of the Nymph’s world you’ve yet to see!), but I think you can already sorta tell there’s a pattern being established here. Once we eventually get around to seeing more neighborhoods, you’ll probably get a stronger idea of that soon enough. 😉
Environment color exploration by Haven and Floral
Environment exploration sketches by Floral
Floral: I had sooo much fun with building Ly’lacs underwater world. While some of Deltritus' surface was already defined before we began the project, this was completely new ground.
And it felt appropriate to contrast Ly’lac’s personality with this bright and vibrant natural world. Tidepools were a major inspiration for this direction naturally. We also wanted their buildings to feel less constructed and more a part of the landscape.
Kim: I still remember it was after a trip with some friends visiting some local tidepools, I proposed how cute it would be if one of the Nymphs could live near some tidepools. How there’s so much interesting wildlife scuttling about… the visual of Nymphs foraging for sea urchins to snack on… a Nymph being at the inbetween of both land and sea…! So many ideas to work with!
Meemaw and environment exploration sketches by Haven
Haven: It’s Meemaw!!! YEAHHH!!! I love meemaw, she’s old as balls. I designed her alongside a slew of other older nymph designs that they’re telling me I can’t show here
Floral: I fell in love with Meemaw the moment Haven pitched her, she perfectly encapsulated a truly old person.
This ancient ball.
Kim: Meemaw has not changed the moment she was made. She was made perfect as is.
Chumi: Ol’ Meemaw...
Exploration sketches by Haven
Haven: Ly’lac was gonna have a pet snail à la gary from spongebob. It didn’t survive. Iirc one of the jokes about it was that this was like her 3rd or 4th pet snail but when they die she just names the new one the same thing as the last one, she’d get upset that the new one didn’t remember things the previous ones did or that they weren’t as well trained despite them not being the same.
Kim: I still think it looks baller asf. I will miss it…
Exploration sketches by Haven
Haven: Squidmom! The eldritch princess has been reborn as a real mother! Do you remember how she used to ignore you? Now Ly’lac will do the same! Please take care of her all the same.
Exploration sketches by Andi “Strovi”
Andi: Early on, I had pitched the idea of how they sleep. They’d be essentially the equivalent of the troll’s sopor slime sack bed things. I figured since they were creatures of the arcane, they could sleep in orbs, meditating or “connecting” to certain dream planes. But that was just workshopping. I think we decided to let them just sleep normally. I thought it’d be cool if they were LITERAL dream bubbles.
Kim: Waaay back in early concepts, we had the idea that Nymph beds would essentially be a water orb they would float in while they slept. Almost like….. some kind of… dream bubble…. of sorts………..
Exploration sketches by Haven
Haven: A beautiful family.
Chumi: THEIR BEADY EYES ARE SO CUTE…. The Caretaker is such a jolly lady.
Floral: Their nymphly charm.
Chumi: Enough concept stuff…. Let’s get into discussing the update panels!
Thumbnail and Final art by Floral
Floral: We open to the world of Ly’lac with this giant barrier and relief sculptures carved into the natural stone.
When conceiving this community we really wanted to make them feel symbiotic with the environment around them.
We also established some of the shape language we’d be using to differentiate the two species, which we’ll show in more detail later. But that is why you see the leaning into more fluid and pointed shapes with the neighborhood than the earlier concepts.
Haven: This was so good. Floral is such a master at setting the tone.
Thumbnails by Floral
Floral: The original opening sequence, we originally thought that Ly’lac would cover her name plate with her hands and throw it into the goo. In the end I’m glad we went with the slime boop. It still feels like she threw it lol.
Environmental Sketches and Final Room by Haven and Floral
Haven: Ly’lac’s room! Covered in slime and just kind of generally trashy, you immediately get the impression she’s someone who doesn’t take care of herself very well. The general vibe in here in is like a dungeon or a sepulchre of some kind. Her plants are dead or dying, her dresser is shaped like a coffin, weapons strewn about, slime lazily slopped about and placed in protective circles around the places she spends the most time, online or in bed. The screen has been hung in a way that every time she goes online it’s like she's looking at another world through a noose. The feng shui here is absolutely terrible. The screen is also facing the window so you know she has trouble seeing it with the glare. Ugh, UGH just awful. I love it.
Floral: Fell in love with Ly’lac’s room. We spent a few different art jams piecing every part of it together, Haven taking care of the bulk of it. The noose around the computer, the dead garden and the slime we set our hearts on.
Ly’lac Sketches by Haven
Chumi: The team all played Yume2kki together! I forget if this drawing was inspired by that, or if we were inspired by the drawing to play together. Either way, super cute!!!! It was my first time playing anything Yume Nikki related.
Andi: And I’m so glad we did! I love Yume Nikki/2kki and that whole fangame scene. Seeing these nymph-tsukis was really cute. Go watch Yume Nikki videos by
gobou RIGHT NEOWWWWWWWWWWW.
Haven: Ly’lac to me is like a YNFG protagonist, I gave her Madotsuki’s rug as a shout to that.
Thumbnails by Floral
Panel 805 by Kim Quach
Chumi: SHE THREW UP…. SO SAD… I remember people making notes that Ly’lac was supposed to be embarrassed but unable to look away from the mess she made.
Kim: Her head and body shape is directly peeled from the “Rose: Writhe like a flagellum and puke on your bed.” panel LOL. Like God, like creation…
Thumbnails by Floral
Panel 802 by Haven
Haven: Our Ly’lac has bloomed. The blossom looks a little scary.
Chumi: We were all charmed by how many fanarts the arm-growing panel inspired! Thank you all, by the way!
Thumbnails by Floral
Floral: Most of these thumbnails are first passes done during the writer’s meetings, months ago. It’s fun looking back on them because so many things change but also something’s are rendered exactly as they were first envisioned which is always fun.
Posters by Floral
Haven: These still make me laugh so hard. The little “Fish” at the ends of Catdog.
Panels by Kim Quach
Kim: Me going hard drawing this beautiful mechanical lotus only for it to explode in the next page.
Thumbnails by Floral
Set icons by Haven and Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: Some Sets! The eyes changed from historically-accurate to little dots to reflect how other Denizen icons also have very simple dot eyes as well.
Haven: It’s quite cute.
Icon ideas by Haven
Haven: Nymph app design is seemingly all focused on anonymity (anonymphity? Damn that could’ve been a good ass name for a program they used.) It’s also all comically antiquated. Ly’lac’s naglink icon doesn’t appear because I couldn't fit it into the program in a way that looked good but I designed it anyway.
Kim: The upper right Naglink icons where they looks like ancient slabs fucking kill me. They are so terrifying LMAO. Though, while funny, it was kind of hard to make adaptable.
When we started veering towards the route of Naglink looking more like early internet program icons, oh, my heart fell in love.
Discord inspired naglinks by Andi “Strovi”
Haven: Even though we didn’t use these I still think they were soooooooo sick.
Andi: I thought like, hmm maybe naglink could be like their modern equivalent of discord but then I was told that we don’t want that. So I said alright that's cool too, I’ll shut my bitch ass up.
BUT I WENT EVEN FURTHER FOR CHA.OS…..
Chumi: I think cha.OS looks AMAZING!!!! UI design isn’t my forte, so I was so impressed by the final product, as well as the animations.
Andi: Yup!! And here is the part where I got utterly obsessed with designing cha.OS for an entire week
I’ve got a personal interest in the old web. Particularly stuff from the 2000s. Well, I mean I grew up through it. Not like I wasn’t there lol. I’m a ‘97 kid. An old head if you will. So I felt a little more qualified to really touch on these design choices.
A bit earlier, though, a few chat client ideas were suggestions to be a pesterchum designed version of discord before we settled on cha.OS being the client.
Haven: Andi is just godlike at this shit. I think I saw someone made a mockup of Cha.OS in the discord? Very cool, I wish it was real.
Pesterchum Discord inspired client idea by Kim Quach
Andi: I thought this concept was actually pretty cute. It reads nicely, it’s familiar and it’s simple!
Later however, we were updated that we didn’t really want to lean in too hard into this and try something a bit more unique. So no discord.
I actually kind of agreed with this ultimately, just because we don’t really know how well certain things will age. Discord is pretty contemporary, there wouldn’t be much charm just because there’s already a demographic actively using it as the product starts to turn into corpo-slop. Plus, cha.OS was a unique product designed by one of our characters. We don’t want to be too derivative.
There’s been an uptick in interest in these early web sorts of things within the younger crowd anyhow, so I figured why not lean into that? And much of pesterchum was based on a period of old web as well. This time, I wanted it to feel a little more…. Aero.
Let me share what I used as a base.
There were a few ideas I was thinking of basing it off, all of them sort of have this transparent effect save for the last one. I did really want to stray away from perfect pixels to more of a graphic design thing. I think evolving chat clients for this new act in the story was important. A lot of people our age who are mid-late twenties did witness how Windows evolved over time. My earliest Windows memory was Windows XP. So I wanted to reflect that aging process with our chat clients as well. In a sort of real-time meta sense.
Andi: There was a lot of experimenting, a lot of bar shifting, a lot of mocking up to make something feel like a client a user would actually use. I can’t say I'm much of an expert in UX/UI design, but I thought I did okay. I did see some attempts to make this chat client real and I saw some PRETTY GOOD ONES! It made me really happy because I put a lot of thought into it and I was glad to see it could translate decently.
Another mock up. We start getting a little more solid here. If you weren’t around for some old web stuff, you may have noticed some familiarity regarding user lists and channels. It might remind you of Discord!
Discord is actually derived from another old chat client entirely, if you can believe that.
It was called IRC.
I was glad to see many have caught this inspiration.
My spouse actually gave me a tip about this idea because he used to frequent these chat spaces back in the day. There was a lot you can do with these clients as they were extremely versatile. They were more programmer oriented, and not exactly user friendly. Hence why most of us were using Skype during that time instead lol.
And so it was done!
I did have a lot of fun designing cha.OS. Including ascii was 100% nessecary.
I made this gif in after effects because I really wanted to sell the “instilling” process. There were a few installing gif scenes in OG homestuck that I really think enhanced the immersion and anticipation starting this new adventure. So I hope that is reflected in this one here. TC is a mysterious one. I wonder what sights they have to show you….
Thumbnail of Panel 819 by Haven
Haven: First appearance of Ly’lac’s iconic -_- face.
Sketch of Panel 819 by Haven
Final of Panel 819 by Kim Quach
Kim: I can hardly take any credit for this one, Haven captures Ly’lac so well in the sketch I didn’t even need to do much for this one but slapping color over it. LOL
Sketches of Panel 827 by Haven
Final of Panel 827 by Kim Quach
Haven: The best girl has appeared. There’s not really anything else I can say at this time LOL.
Floral: UWAAAAAAH such a cute Ly’lac. Oh how perfect she is.
Kim: The writers conveyed that they wanted AA to look ~ominous~ for this panel. She kinda be aura farming tf out of this panel too… and for what reason…
Thumbnails by Floral
Thumbnails by Floral
Panel 832 by Kim Quach
Kim: While drawing all the characters Super Cool and Epic in Guardian Mode was fun back in the Candy timeline, I really do love drawing these semi-sprite sized panels too. She looks so baby here...
Thumbnails by Floral
Panel 833 by Kim Quach
Thumbnails by Floral
Floral: Again I do all of these as fast as possible LMAO But seeing this sequence come to life was so fun.
Chumi: And that’s it for the commentary, see you in the next one!! Ly’lac say bye!