Behind the Scenes with blitzdoughnuts

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What LUDICRITAL Could've Been

LUDICRITAL has had a bumpy history. It started around late 2023 as a project to make a webcomic about workplace stress, specifically by showing the deteriorated mental states it could bring among a diverse cast of people. It was going fairly until I formatted my hard drive on accident while messing with Linux Mint. This was the start of what I'd say is an interesting journey.

First thing I wanna mention, LUDICRITAL was originally going to be made in OpenToonz before I decided to switch it over to GIMP. I think the reason why I switched was because either I didn't want to manually draw all letters (with a MOUSE, mind you), or because I felt more comfortable drawing in GIMP. I think it's the former. OpenToonz was where I also made some LUDICRITAL initial sketches, and where I made both the prototype logo (I think I may have drawn it to say "LUDICRIUM" or something) and Lukifer's design in his pose as seen in the Character Sheets. I remember it was on a gray background, too.

I managed to recover some files of importance from the Windows partition of my hard drive, basically the only reason why I have that malicious crap on it in the first place, all of which are only low-resolution, GIMP-generated thumbnails.

This here is all I could recover so far of LUDICRITAL's Act 1 title page. You may notice how the 4 main patients are given a brief view, directly above the hospital in a puppet-y manner. This was also not the final product of what I made, of course. The actual old title page was supposed to look something like this:

Of course this isn't EXACTLY it, I didn't put in the effort to, say, redraw the LUDICRITAL logo, or redraw the building to more closely resemble the old building, but this is somewhat close to how I remember it. Gives off "grafix desing is my passon" vibes, eh? I'm not sure myself if I wanted LUDICRITAL to be about as zany as Sparklecare--probably not due to how I still am working off the script and storyline I recovered, which is more grounded compared to Sparklecare--but I'll admit that the Sparklecare adoration is even more prominent here.

Here's one that's a lot more interesting to look at! This page generally has a lot going on in it visually, and the old version definitely has noticeable changes. While I did structure the final page vety similarly to it, as shown below the WIP image, both of them have major differences in perspective and presentation. Let me try listing them.

• The final page seems a lot "softer" in comparison to the old one.
• Lukifer's "HOLY SHIT" face feels much less powerful.
• A change in perspective is employed for almost all panels, hiding Harold in the middle panel and giving Richie less emphasis in the bottom two.
• An interesting case of LUDICRITAL's artstyle changing mid-comic; the old one has Lukifer's eyes do a more exaggerated O_o, his eyes in the bottom two are more ovular than circular, and his body shape seems slimmer.
• In the bottom two panels, Lukifer's left arm is posted back in shock in the old one, while the new one simply has his arms always to the sides.

Using this as a retrospective, I feel like the old one may have fit the sharper, more "mix of emo and cartoon" style. Then we have the page 2 pages before it.

The new one is a better use of "spending a whole page watching Lukifer enter the hospital's staff locker room" than the new one; at the very least, it not only presents the route Lukifer went to get to it, but also serves as a nice inbetween for the next page's events. Not much for me to say about it otherwise.

Wake to Development Hell

Wake to Hell has some old stuff, too. I came into developing the game with no idea of what it was supposed to be at all.

Proto-Terror

Wake to Hell had a prototype as a GameMaker Studio 2 game using some copyrighted content, namely the Big Jim aka Jim Storer song "Hangover" and some Pizza Tower assets. In this prototype, you would walk outside of your house into a hellish landscape, then into a garage containing a phone. You could pick up the phone and it would lead to some on-the-other-line sounds playing. likening to a hectic murder. The player's expression changes accordingly. The prototype also gave the ability to hop on top of stuff by jumping, and to "attack", only to end up tripping on your face in a slight leap.

I recovered footage of the prototype, although it uses proprietary assets: SEE IT HERE. It's gzipped because I don't want non-free shit taking up a lot of the space on the site.

I believe this prototype is where I got the old jumping idea from when I began developing the game on SDL2. It can probably be theorized that Wake to Hell wasn't supposed to have thoroughly flat ground, and the rooms would have different geometry, which was ultimately scrapped.

Pre-Lukifer

I first started Wake to Hell as a little experiment to see how well I could get a game working with C and SDL2, mainly from the miniscule knowledge and major influence I got from drummyfish's Anarch. Judging by the presence of an odd-looking, unfinished Lukifer sprite in the assets, I imagine I was planning to use Lukifer in this game, but I didn't really have any player sprites, so I used an idle and walk sprite from Libre Tower (the SDL2 port didn't exist back then) and Pizza Tower. Funnily enough, I used the "hurt" sprites for them; Peppino's hurt walk, and the Libre Tower player's hurt idle equivalent, which wasn't too dissimilar. The only thing you can really do in this version is move around.

This version of the game is actually able to be found here (liberated version) and here (original, non-free media version).

From this, I can infer the following:

• The art was supposed to use a 1x1 brush, as opposed to a 2x2 brush.
• Lukifer was planned to be in the game since the very start, according to the shoddily drawn sprite of Lukifer in the assets.

Scraps

There's also some scraps from the game's development. A problematic one in particular was the old WTH.S3M file that was included in the source code until the Copyright Exodus. It was a modified version of Jim Storer's Hangover with a different melody.

WTH.S3M

An old placeholder-ish music track, an edit of Jim Storer's Hangover. It was removed from game builds somewhere in develpment, and later purged in the Copyright Exodus due to its nonfree nature. The replacement melody I came up with eventually served as a base for Lucid Nightmares.

Old Lukifer sprites

The very first sprite in Lukifer's .ase file is an early sprite of Lukifer's idle. It never got out of 1 frame, and it has quite a few differences with the actually used iteration of Lukifer's idle. Compared to v0.2.0's idle sprites, Lukifer's coat is lighter, his ears arch out at the top instead of drooping flat, his coat's overhang doesn't curl, his shoes seem taller, and his coat buttons are more spherical.

There's also a scrapped idle animation where Lukifer turns to look into the camera, but instead of having a blank expression, he looks impatiently. It's also one frame shorter than v0.2.0's equivalent idle animation.

IMAGE: The old idle1.png
IMAGE: The v0.2.0 idle1.png

Old misc. sprites

The old bg.png sprite was the first unique sprite made for the game, and the first application of the palette I made, also orignating from school. It's incredibly rough and undetailed.

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