As usual my behind the scenes is behind on the times, but it eventually finds its way into your laps! Herein will be the usual jumble of how plans took form or ideas that got rejected, so let's dive right into it!
SINTENDO PLOT
The Nintendo related plot was the first of the year, and I spent some time pondering which video game girls to include! Originally I considered all of the Nintendo girls being handheld but Gamecube's design and attitude were too fun to leave out, but otherwise it was mostly a matter of finding character designs that meshed with my plans. Switch though was hard to pick, I wanted her in since it felt like Nintendo would demand a Switch girl since they're a living hardware company but so many designs exist out there. The pictured girl above was the original plan and I even airbrushed the single fangs her original images had in preparation, but then I found the design we have now that felt less silly and more grounded and she ended up a more cynical rather than bubbly character. To be fair, Virtual Boy already had all the bubbles so it lead to a more rounded group of personalities!
In the original ideas for the plot the whole GBC/Genesis angle still existed but I wasn't sure how things were going to play out. I considered the girls opening up an arcade of their own to compete with the Sega girls and then wanted to think of a way that it would make sense that the reasonable Hard Girls would be able to lose the arcade to the Nintendo girls. Mega Drive saying in RP they literally have no reason to compete was always part of the plan but then I needed something to make them. Like many ideas I had, the original concept was just Nintendo had their own hard girls causing trouble now, but eventually when I needed a real reason to provoke this conflict in a way that wouldn't smear Nintendo, Sintendo swung in and saved the day! It took even longer for me to conceive of Vodka Drunkenski being in charge of Sintendo as a way of salvaging my old scrapped plan to RP a sympathetic Soda Popinski, but as said elsewhere I originally planned a meaner Vodka who would have punched Mega at the end of the plot before GBC smacked him back for doing so.
I guess a fair bit of technically scrapped content would be the paths not picked in Smash Run, but one scene I did have planned for the plot in general was 3DS would come across Saturn in the maze and try to beat her up. After Saturn was down though she'd start kicking her around and rubbing in the victory before Dreamcast shows up and stabs 3DS through while saying she doesn't get to treat Saturn that way. 3DS would say Dreamcast treats Saturn that way and we'd get a bit of an early look at Dreamcast's complicated way of treating people close to her due to a bad upbringing, but this was back when the girls were meaner and soon Dreamcast got her development elsewhere so the moment wasn't required here. You might remember a similar idea being mentioned for a Mid-Brawl moment.
DOGA AND BRUME STUFF
Gonna keep things moving quick! No reason to say "I thought of this stuff and then used it" after all! Doga's ConjureArms store was mostly a collaboration between me and Pitohui where we messaged each other back and forth and hashed out ideas that way so it's not like it was all my ideas. If he wants to say any possible ideas he scrapped for it in the comments I encourage him to do so, but otherwise one thing that I had planned before I approached him was the idea that Doga was more of a professional grifter rather than a salesman with few scruples.
In the original version of the plot we'd still have Doga and the Rental Shop go head to head in a little contest with no fighting, but why we were doing it changed. Originally I considered that Saturn went and hired Doga when she heard of a guy who was great at advertising, only to hear he suddenly opened up a competing shop. Near the end of the plot we'd get a scene similar to Doga coming to make a deal with Ravio, but instead of just trying to get a cut of Ravio's sales, it would turn out that Doga has a business plan where he makes competing businesses strictly to fail and drive up interest in the products of the person hiring him. He'd eventually bow out gracefully and hand over his things to the guy who hired him and then move on to do a similar PR scam with some other business, but in RP Doga was a guy legit trying to run his shop and saw an opportunity to maybe save him some risk. Basically, Doga's original version was him throwing the competition as part of a grift he though Saturn was in on but she had no idea she hired an elaborate scammer, but I whittled it down to a more traditional contest before I came to Pitohui so it wouldn't be so convoluted.
As many know Doga comes from the Skyrim RP briefly run on the forum and thus he doesn't fit the normal naming conventions for a Brume. In fact, his name is taken from a Final Fantasy III character with a cool theme, and similarly Katy got her name from the veterinarian kids game she came from. For other Brume though, their naming conventions all come from a singular source...
Maya Angelou.
Why Maya Angelou? Well originally Maya's name was something else that started with M but had an appropriate meaning but I didn't like it and swapped it to Maya which means a bunch of things in a bunch of languages but can mean things like Illusion or Magic as well as having a name similar to a 3D modeling software so it all felt sort of adjacent to the magic camera. However, when I started to need to give more lore on her species when she got to chatting in RP I went from having loose ideas to needing to solidify them. We saw me make the name Brume in chat from brumation but when I needed a name for Maya's rival in a hurry I thought it would be cute to have her be Angela, and then we heard about a good girl still working at the Blue Tongue named Lulu. Maya Angela Lulu.
A silly naming convention at first evolved into something more as I needed more Brume names, and you can't really stretch just Maya Angelou into a bunch more. Her middle name is Annie though so Maya's sister? Ani. Her last name at birth was Johnson, so flip it and you have Nojj at the end there. Garrute? Maya is short for Margueritte, so corrupt the ending there and you got his name. Again you can only stretch a single name so far so I started to incorporate some family members belonging to the famous poet. Vivian "Baxter" Johnson was her mother, so Rockwall Security got Bex out of that middle part, Vyva out of Vivian, and Bail from her father's name, Bailey. The words for grandparents in the native Brume tongue and other little things in their lives like the Iyya were all again corruptions of these bases, and actually, I think I might recommend this method to other people looking to invent a culture or tongue. Less so taking a famous lady's name and twisting it around to make new words but selecting a small batch of terms that you construct new words out of to make your language and naming conventions. It leads to certain sounds reappearing or being absent in different measures because you're restricting yourself into evolving from a core batch.
As for the Brume Conspiracy plot, it was actually more meant to be Act 1 of the broader Agaman History stuff I was doing rather than a truly separate thing, hence its connections to the start of the Soul of Agama investigation. Naturally, the original plan was the Brume were in on it and Garrute was too and everything was bad :V Really though, the initial idea was that the erasure of history was done way back when the Brume rediscovered the city and in the present no one was actually destroying any new history, they were just burdened with the secret of knowing their ancestors did such an awful thing. There wasn't really a good ending for this concept, we just learn this information and then decide if we tell the world and hide it but Maya would push hard for telling the world anyway so it didn't seem to have much of a path. Instead this concept was sort of contained only to Ani and we did get to examine its angles with stuff like the Marlow drama that evolved from it so that was probably the best way to realize that concept.
Instead, I don't remember when exactly but someone said they were certain Brume and Alruthine were connected since I was again doing humanoid lizards for some reason, and I began to conceive of ways to make that a true connection. It actually ended up making the Alruthine make even more sense as they learned to imitate Brume but it also gave me a possible twist villain that wasn't just Garrute being a secret bad guy. I actually was super thankful Chao just independently came up with the idea of pursuing the Brume-Alruthine connection with Cirral without any prompting, but it also might have made my hints come off more as background detail to answer that then the intended route of them being clues. I do like to sprinkle lore around with no purpose besides fleshing things out though so again it might have just been people thinking I'm doing that, but I do think that time in chat I was trying to heavily prompt people was necessary to avoid a burbling anti-Brume settlement as we were only seeing what the villain wanted us to see.
As mentioned in chat as well, the canal-running Brume we never met was a scrapped concept because I've wanted to sort of do a plot on the canals but not involving boats for our time here in Agama. Never coalesced into much and I decided to just make it sound like more people were in on the secret by saying such a member existed without needing to implicate a big group of characters who would feel the plot's fall out.
SOUL OF AGAMA
Sonho, the blind dream mage whose name literally means dream, came from an attempt to collaborate with Harpy. But to explain that we need to go even further back and discuss Krysquils!
In early plot teasers I mentioned characters used the phrase "By the Soul of Agama!" and then dropped it because it didn't sound very natural, but back then the Soul of Agama was not the big emotionless machine we'd face beneath the city. The Soul of Agama was still beneath the city though, but it was actually the life forces of a bunch of mages swirling around a giant Krysquil. The Krysquil was a mutated abomination made by molding together DNA of other magical creatures into one big living engine of functionally infinite magic, but having it be a living creature made its destructive potential too strong so people used Life Magic to chain it below the city. Agama was abandoned either as a result of a rampage from the giant Krysquil or because everyone had to contribute their life energy to containing it. The idea of Ancient Agamans being accessible even after the city's abandonment came from I think an idle musing from maybe Harpy about an idea where Ancient Agamans sidestepped into some other dimension rather than meeting an unfortunate end, and my mind twisted that into having them stuck in permanent limbo as their souls restrained a massive magical beast!
Well, when we found the giant Krysquil it would be able to speak with its magic. While it might be agreeable not to destroy the world or whatever, it would have spent centuries stewing in its hatred for those who imprisoned it and refuse to budge on killing them if they freed it. If some compromise could have been found it could have helped Kobbers out in future events but we also were slated to probably put it down either with a big fight or some trick and then the life magic would revive all the people in stasis. Eventually a big magical hedgehog seemed less and less interesting to me and less likely to just work in general, but some ideas were being shifted around and reconfigured. We did get the event with Vida still though, a way of stoking mystery and having the Agaman scientists work up to using the lives of humans for fuel. Vida the chimera was originally intended to be more of a vertically oriented creature with no real functional limbs, moving on magic and likely to be invisible for much of the fight with the challenge even being to pin it down. It was always going to be a white many-eyed thing and thus that influenced the appearance of Zoey's pets when they were drawn so they could be components of it. Alli the alteration pet is actually not meant to have a standard form due to its powers meaning it can transform a lot but she was also a source for some of Vida's more unusual features so I don't feel bad for including them.
Criador, again a name that just means Creator, has a bit more of a story, and we'll get back to Sonho soon I promise!
