Mayuventure talk thread (Art of Domination, Refugeville, From The Sands)

Wow, those feet look completely different.

YEP! At the time when I first drew Vora, I was more focused on making the feet look 'unique' without actually considering how would they even work.

And thanks for the compliments, guys! Still working on more sprites for future updates.

I want to talk a bit about the inspiration behind Art of Domination, and what got me to start in the first place. Back then I was obsessed with a videogame called Tom Clancy's EndWar. While gameplay-wise it didn't have a lot of depth, the units themselves were given unique callsigns and voices, and as they gained more experience they became more confident when in combat. They were also not afraid to tell you if they believe your order was a bad idea, and if they were losing badly they'd be begging you to give them the order to retreat.

It got me to thinking about strategy games, and how frequently they don't humanize your units. At the time, I think the only other games that do that are the Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, where again units will scream at you if they're losing badly. So, I wanted to make a strategy game hybridized with a story, one where the units you command were not unthinking machines (with the obvious exception of drones).

Alongside this, I was reading numerous articles and reports about fanatical militant groups, and how they exploit shock and disbelief through committing acts of appalling violence to stun their targets. I also spent a lot of time researching genocide and how people could be convinced into ignoring the basic fact that their targets are human beings. I've dealt with people like that in real life, and found it frustrating when I see people complain that a character 'behaves implausibly' when they commit atrocities for extremely petty/flimsy reasons.

And so the story's antagonists were born: An organized military force that does not care at all about humane treatment towards their targets, civilian or otherwise. By the end of this story, our villains would have committed so many atrocities that their war crimes trial would take decades to finish due to the sheer amount of work required to gather every single piece of evidence.

I also wanted to explore the idea of a 'justified' alien invasion. Planet-117 was invaded because their local government kidnapped people from a Saramis Alliance colony, and refused to even look at the evidence. The Human Federation allowed the invasion and annexation because that planet was also not going according to Earth's plans. To Earth, giving Planet-117 to a friendly alien nation that would later be willing to trade sounded like a better option than having it under a hostile human government that wasn't giving much of anything in return.

Put all these together, whisk it for a bit, and that's how Art of Domination started. My only regret is that I wish I didn't let my ego get in the way of updating it faster; early on I disliked the notion of re-using drawings because of a weird sense of pride and irrational fear of being branded 'lazy'.