Post by Alioth Sol in Fanart Thread!

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"This time, ours bunny hero, turn the wrong corner and ended up ambushed by a group of hyenas. The next thing Mezz saw, was a basement in the Gutter repurposed for storing "live goods". An underground filled with others unlucky creatures like him, bought and sold like a livestock, he had just the time to get up on his knees when tow figures approached him from the darkness, one clearly a hyena, the other one a well dressed and groomed figure, probably from the Towers. They stopped three steps from him and then they start to talk to each others."

This piece was a bit of a challenge for me, especially nailing the prospective and the proportion of the room vs Mezz. As usual, if you have any suggestion for improving my art skills , or pointing out my errors, feal free to do it.

Edit: I Correct a grammar error and ad an easter egg that i forget to add :^]

bitshiftgames7 days ago (1 edit)

This is great! Chain to the floor especially is under-used, glad to see it. And I love that expression on Mezz.

I will say that canonically, the towerfolk MOSTLY don't go to the Gutter, both because they think it's beneath them (literally and figuratively), and because they have...quite a bit to entertain them in their own little world. They're a very insular bunch. That said, it isn't unthinkable a few might venture to the Gutter occasionally, or send representatives, if for no other reason than that the "subjects" they had on hand were too damaged or...genetically compromised to be useful. Did you know IRL that most lab rats come from a very narrow genetic makeup, which potentially throws into question countless studies done on them, as their responses to various drugs might not be reflective of the species in general?

Regardless though, I give HUGE kudos to you for even bothering to read through all my goofy lore, let alone make a pic with it. Much appreciated. Do you have a Twitter/FA etc? Totally fine to "promote" here as long as you're doing it connected to fanart you did.

Also: "But this one wouldn't stop talking." Yeah. Yeah that's about right.

Alioth Sol7 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Thankyou, based on your previous suggestion, I tried to give more importance to expressions, sound like i improved a bit.

That's a interesting lore piece about towerfolks. From my interpretation of the lore, the tower dwellers are a mix of XVIII century French aristocracy and cyberpunk trust found babies, whit they corresponding court and servants. I assumed that sometimes for business or boredom they go out "in the mud" for a bit of fun. Well i hope to reed more about the CS world building.

About the lab rats... i did not know that... and i consider myself a science nerd. Biochemistry is not my field of knowing, mine is physical chemistry (thermodinamics, material properties, etc) but I'll never expected to learn this information here from all the places, however knowledge is knowledge no meter were is coming from.

Btw, shame, shame, shame for everyone who do not read the lore.

bitshiftgames6 days ago (1 edit)

Oooh, you're the one that did that cool pose with the staff too! Excellent. Yes, I'd definitely say you're improving.

As for the Towerfolk, the various groups I ended up doing or planning to do in large part had to do with assets that were available, tilesets, music etc, overlapping with themes I was interested in. So the Gutter is a chance to explore all the fun sleazy "slum" stuff that's out there, chapter 3 will be a bunch of oooOOOooo spooky stuff, and the Tower will be a chance to get into the sci-fi stuff in a more focused way. Not aristocracy so much as unregulated hypercapitalism, science run amok, a lot of backstabbing etc. A bit Bioshock, but without the fancy aspirations of Objectivism. Maybe more the practical reality of what that city became, rather than Ryan's grand ambitions for it. BUT, that's a long way off. Gotta get 3 out first.

Ha, and I don't mind either way, I don't blame people if they just want to stick to the basics and enjoy a porn game. I'm just a NEEERD so I like having some backdrop for all this.

Oh and easter egg? The tag number maybe? Doesn't immediately jog any memory, although it does remind me of the nonsensical resolutions some of the images end up at sometimes when I'm being sloppy.

Alioth Sol6 days ago

More a hidden message to decipher that a easter egg but you got it right, for see it better i suggest to open the imagen in another bowser page, the compression is a little bit odd and blur the fine text. Anyway before i forgot again, I should thank you for the possibility to "publicize" my socials, but i don't have any (at least public) for now, it's just my hobby and at the moment I'm content to share my work only here, but thanks again for the opportunity

bitshiftgames6 days ago

Understood on the socials then, no worries.

And interesting. "319720IT".

-It is not a valid actual cattle tag ID, as convention places the letter FIRST, and only one letter, not two.

-It is the same number of characters as "Bitshift", and ends in the same character. This might be the encoded string, but how do we get there?

-It cannot be ASCII encoding, as the "IT" would be nonsensical: ASCII is denoted in hex, and i and t don't exist in hex. It's also much too short if we're aiming for "bitshift".

-The obvious joke would be to use some kind of shift cypher (hur hur), but the combination of letters and numbers, and the fact that the "t" at the end appears to be unencoded (or at least "drop through") throw wrenches in this. At the very least, it's not a SIMPLE shift cypher, where we're just shifting everything x characters in the alphabet.

-Discarding "bitshift", if we convert the numbers into letters assuming a = 0, that gives dbjhca. If we then multiple-shift in sequence 1, 3, 25 every two characters, this gives "cagedb", which added back on to the letters gives "cagedbit". Which is somewhat sensical give Mezz's new decoration, but I only have moderate confidence this is the intended string; this feels less like a decoding and more like I'm practicing numerology.

That's my guess so far though.

Alioth Sol5 days ago(+1)

You give too much credit, is simpler. In tis form : 3 19 7 20 IT, is more decipherable.

P.S. IT as acronym of Italian

corbinbelasco5 days ago(+1)

I thought it could have been numbers to letters but didn't think it was significant at first. Comes out to CS:GT, Cruel Serenade: Gutter Trash

Alioth Sol5 days ago

Yep you got it, bravo

bitshiftgames5 days ago

Ooh, that makes sense then, looks like Corbin got it. Ha, very much over-complicated it. Missed opportunity to not do a shift cypher though. And also...Italian?! Because you're Italian? I think that was what threw me off the most.

Alioth Sol5 days ago(+1)

Now, now, let it be some mystery, some speculation behind the significance of the hidden message.

bitshiftgames5 days ago

Ha, fair enough. And again, thanks for the art. Very fun piece.

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