Doodley Lore Part 2: Dreamtective

Hi! This is the second in a series of “lore” posts that talk about some of the projects I've done in the past. Behind the scenes for things that aren't Doodley related, basically!

You can read this first one here, although you don't really need to read it to understand this one. But it has some context for this post.

This post is about a project that I've been trying to get off the ground for a very long time now, usually titled Dreamtective.

Dreamtective has existed in various forms since about 2014. A hundred different projects of mine have come and gone, but this one always seems to stick around, always reinventing itself. And over the years, each reinvention defined new aesthetics in my personal art.

With that in mind, let’s look at each “incarnation”, no matter how much it makes me cringe.

The First Incarnation

I believe this was originally imagined as a fighting game, around 2014, but it didn’t really materialize beyond just a handful of original characters. (I had just graduated high school at this point, so it was never going to go anywhere, it was just fun to imagine.)

Without getting too deep into the specifics, one of the characters for this imaginary fighting game was Luna, and I created this very first drawing of her. (Plus a sheep spirit that fights for her.)

This drawing is nearly 10 years old, but I still kind of like it! A lot of my old art makes me cringe, but this one’s still alright. I’ve often mentioned that I’m not really a character designer, but once in a blue moon I come up with a character design I’m really attached to – Gimberly was one of those, and Luna was another.

I would go on to design a handful of other characters, but Luna kinda took over everything. She wasn’t even intended to be a main character, it just ended up that way.

This iteration was at the back of my mind for a while, but as mentioned, didn’t go anywhere. I graduated high school and went to college. But Luna kinda kept sticking around.

The Second Incarnation

Growing up, I was really into webcomics. Certain webcomics have had a profound influence on my life, or have influenced my art more than anything else, like Gunnerkrigg Court and Cucumber Quest. (One of my long-term goals for the channel is to create an extensive video essay about Gunnerkrigg Court – mostly just for me!)

With that in mind, it should be pretty obvious that I created my own webcomics as well. One of them I’ll get into in another post, but the other was Dreamtective: the second major iteration it took.

(Yes, I still really like this drawing too.)

Eons ago, webcomic publisher Hiveworks was taking pitches for both new and existing comics. The old webcomic I was working on died out for a lot of circumstances outside of my control, and I wanted to pitch something. So I revisited this idea of the fighting game, but expanded it to focus on Luna and a new concept: helping people solve their issues by entering their dreams. Very Psychonauts-esque.

The fighting game concept was still there in its DNA, but it was more shounen-esque. Students of a school that were so exceptionally good at a hobby or profession they were passionate about, it unlocked pseudo-super powers in them. Luna’s ability was being able to enter dreams.

Here’s a page that’s still okay, even if reading it makes me cringe:

That said, the actual comic ended up not being very good. It’s front loaded with a lot of exposition and the premise and setting is too disjointed from its focus. It was two very different concepts smooshed into one, since a majority of the comic focused on entering dreams.

I also think the art hasn’t aged super well compared to what I can do now, which you’ll see in the next iteration. I’m much better at communicating motion via animatics and storyboards than I am comics, so at times I find myself struggling to fit what I want in each panel.

Needless to say: didn’t make it into the Hiveworks pitch! But I ended up doing the comic on my own website anyway, and had it going for about 50 pages, which isn’t too bad I think. Eventually, my college work caught up to me and took up the majority of my time, so the comic petered out, which I think is for the better.

(Sidenote: one of the excellent comics pitched to Hiveworks at the same time, which also didn’t make it, was by the artist now known as DEMONDICE, and I’m not even sure if it’s still online anywhere. It's still very surreal seeing where she is now, especially when she appears in completely unrelated Youtube videos I watch, like meeting someone famous ten years beforehand…)

The webcomic doesn’t resemble anywhere near what I want to do with the story nowadays, but if you’re interested in it for some unholy reason, you can read it here.

Also worth mentioning that Luna was one of the first 3D characters I ever created! She was created in Blender, and I shifted to Maya when creating my thesis film Maplewood.

This was about 2017, and this is actually running in Unity if I remember correctly. There’s a very fun charm to this low poly style, I think.

The Third Incarnation

This is the “current” version of Dreamtective, around 2018 to 2020.

It’s not really that current, as most of this art is pretty ancient at this point. But I’ve been pretty laser focused on my 3D work since 2018, so without much development of my 2D art in recent years, it’s still pretty close to what I want it to be. If you read the previous “Doodley Lore” post, this should be familiar to you.

Dreamtective at this point is a game, for a few reasons.

For starters, I began to develop this art style of taking transparent 2D art and pushing it into 3D. I still think this style looks damn cool, but it has a lot of limitations, like being restricted to specific camera angles.

This limitation is gone in a detective visual novel/adventure type game, where a camera is mostly static and everything is seen from one angle. So, as part of a college project, I developed this little demo:

(For rendering nerds, there is one other major limitation: transparent textures are very difficult to display correctly, and cause major optimization issues with overdraw. But don’t worry about that.)

There isn’t much more than this little display you can zoom in and out on, but I still think it looks dope. It matched very well with Luna’s dream-entering abilities, and to me is the strongest version of the project yet. There’s an actual truth to the title “Dreamtective” now.

I also wanted to develop this art style of fully animated, pseudo-2D character portraits on each side. I had started to put together a rig of Luna:

I still really, really love how this looks and still believe it could be an extremely strong game, at least visually.

As mentioned earlier, the story is vastly different from the webcomic these days – it focuses far more on dreams and the weird and hauntingly beautiful aspects of them. There’s still a lot of optimism and happiness in the story, but it resembles more of a character study. And it’s become that type of story that your heart hurts to tell, which is not something that happens to me often.

Also, you probably recall seeing Luna in the video about Gimberly. In early 2022, I wanted to get more into making Vtubers and VRChat avatars before I had the idea of Doodley and that took over, but Luna was the first sort of “test” of that.

(It’s kind of silly at this point how many versions of Luna there are, but honestly this isn't even the tip of the iceberg.)

I haven’t done much with this avatar since, as I’ve been busy, but it was a good test of how to make a VR chat avatar, so I’m glad I did it.

So what happened after this point?

I’ve mentioned before that for the past few years, I didn’t really have a lot of time to myself. I was only doing professional work and nothing else. I started receiving consistent professional jobs right when I was about to start working on this game with a friend. And it’s very difficult to turn down a good, steady job, especially when it’s in your career path.

But! Everything about this project has never left me. It will get told in its proper form one day. I just need the right timing and avenue to do it. And I hope that the recent successes with Doodley and all the connections I’ve built over the years will allow me to realize its potential one day.

Thank you for reading! I hope this was interesting to you. Next, I’ll talk a little bit about a few of my college projects, including ones I’ve never uploaded online.

– Doodley