Hey everyone,
Last week's comics focused on the Riftborn civilization, seen through the eyes of an Academy away team as they encountered a strange wreck in outer space, and started investigating. As we've done before, we thought you might be interested in learning more about the backstory and the production side.
Very early in the process of drafting the story for the comics, it became obvious that there would be significant difficulties from a technical point of view. We knew we wanted to show the Riftborn's control over time in the story, but how could we do that in a medium that essentially is unmoving images on paper? It's a hurdle we already encountered when depicting the Riftborn ingame, in the loading screen image that is theirs as well as in their quest art. Here however, the whole story was going to revolve around frozen time, so imagine the difficulty of the task!
Thankfully Arkel knew of an artist who was renowned for his out-of-the-box thinking and skill with composition, so we sent him a script leaving him a lot of freedom in the way he would show the story, with one condition: make it work!
Preliminary cover sketch, eventually dropped in favor of something less cartoony
As for the story itself, if representing frozen time wasn't enough of a challenge, introducing a story from the point of view of the Riftborn was clearly not ideal: the Riftborn are a very odd extra-dimensional species with very little in common with, say, most humanoid species, even when it comes to basic points of reference. A story told from their side would be very odd: how can there be linear storytelling if time itself isn't linear? Thus we decided to stage the meeting of a foreign group, and what best to represent all other species of the galaxy than heroes from the Academy? A trio made for a good number, as it allowed a modicum of plot exposure (a lore dump monologue would be tedious to read) and a bit of banter on the side among characters who are possibly friends, or at the very least familiar with one another. A trio of our most "vanilla" Endless Space 2 species, a Sophon, a Raian and a Lumeris to round out the team seemed only sensible. While the heroes themselves were part of the Academy and integral to the game, their particular identities are not central to the story: they're the central, "normal" element, and naming them would have only provided a feeling of "hey look, everything's connected!" which was perhaps a bit on the nose.
Asaroenni Dzulmaran
Cravers study
The Cravers were selected as antagonist to add some tension to the story, necessary if we wanted to avoid the feeling of "discourse on time from people prancing about in space" that Slowhands mentioned earlier last week. Nothing to add drama and tension like 2-meters tall murder machines. This allowed us to sidestep the impending Kubrick moment and deliver a tight story fitting around its twist ending like a snug glove. Twist ending, or twist beginning? It's all a matter of perspective...
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We hope you enjoyed this brief look at a very time-consuming operation! Next comics in two weeks. It's very close to perfection...
