JWC Steampunk "Engineer" Cabin

Clay_Isles

Hello!
This is where we will plan for JWC's 2025 session. If you are not a leader of JWC please excuse yourself from this thread, as it will spoil the surprise of what is to come for our cabin! Thank you!

Clay_Isles

Okay, hey Allen! As I said in my form, my basic idea for this cabin was do have a sort of Hadestown aesthetic. If you haven't heard of that musical, no worries. My idea for storyline was that us leaders were the “Overseers,” of the people in camp and they were working to build this huge machine for us, and as the storyline progresses and they write more words they learn that one (or both of us) are evil and using the machine for bad. If they reach the right word goal, then they overthrow us but if not then we “win” essentially. Not fully sure how I like this idea yet but it's what I have so far.

What are your ideas? Nothing is set in stone so feel free to share and shoot down mine I won't mind haha. Also how do you feel about having an in-cabin currency or something similar?

Clay_Isles

Here's a checklist of things we need to get done:

decide plot
cabin intro
leader intros
thumbnail
im sure there's more i just cant think of it atm–
Camper PFPs
Cabin Aesthetic Set
Cabin color scheme

Last edited by Clay_Isles (Nov. 19, 2024 05:54:10)

-alternity

The basic plot sounds good—we definitely have to get the tone right from the start to make sure we’re not portrayed as slave drivers or something lol.
How do you think we should plan on making that revelation? (For example, intercepted letters, progress reports, etc..) Also, I think that you should be the evil one, at least at first (we could have a twist) just because you know you’re the oppressor obviously /j.
The way they win sounds good, though I’ve never been in a cabin that actually finished its plot lol.

I like the idea of cabin currency, but only if you think we’ll be able to maintain it. If not we probably should just use words overall as currency, if that makes sense. Related to currency, we could make it so that there is either a list of challenges or daily challenges, and completing the challenge gives you currency/extra words.
For rewards (like banners and pfps), we can either do person by person or cabin-wide awards. I’m thinking we could do something where everyone starts with the pfps (or they earn them at a very low price), and then as they personally progress they get different things added to the pfp.
Another thing: what will we name the cabin and wc studio (assuming you want it to be a studio)?

Also, you can add the following to the to-do list:

Camper PFPs
Cabin Aesthetic Set
Cabin color scheme

Last edited by -alternity (Nov. 19, 2024 05:23:10)

Clay_Isles

Oooh thats a good point about the slave thing Dx. Perhaps the campers were invited to come work on this machine? I am totally down for being the evil one haha. As for them winning, I do want the plot to be achievable so we could potentially set the winning goal based on what our campers goal is. For example if all of our campers wc goals for the month added up to 30,000 then we could say once all our campers hit 18,000 words they would make it to the end.

I agree with the cabin currency about maintaining it. I want it to actually matter and not just be something that gets lost in the mix of things. Perhaps that can also go towards the plot? I think that would be the only way I would want to truly have currency.

I always liked the idea of pfps being free or relatively cheap since I feel like they boost cabin morale. I think cabin-wide prizes would be fun especially if that is included with plot.

For cabin name, I actually wasn't completely sure. Obviously we have “Engineer” as our nickname, but as for the actual cabin name I'll have to do some brainstorming once its not so late at night for me haha. For the WC studio do we want two separate groups? Or just one that we could trade off each week?

-alternity

Yeah—I definitely think we should make the goal pretty achievable, like you said, probably around 50-60% of the campers’ total word goals. Also, we probably won’t be telling them the goal until maybe 1/3 of the way through, so we can adjust if we need to lol.

As far as currency goes, I’ll think about that, and how we can tie in currency with the plot.

For rewards, I was just thinking up some names:
“ID Badge” — PFP
“(Camp, Team, or Cabin) Flag” — Banner
Idrk what other rewards we can offer people—I’ll see if I can do some digging on that though, and just look at past cabins and their incentives.

For the WC studio, we can alternate hosts, but I don’t think we need to—speaking of, are we going to be using Google Sheets for that? That usually works pretty well, and it allows us to quickly tabulate statistics. (Plus, I could have that automatically update numbers in the WC studio).

As for the plotttt I have a short idea here:

A whirring fills the room as a projector warms up. You take your seat, your pulse strong with anticipation. Near the front of the room, a figure silhouetted by the light stands.
“Welcome, candidates, to the future.”

Clay_Isles

Oh my goshhhh I love your little plot excerpt!

The prizes are great, I can start on making a base idea for the profile pictures and see what you think

For the WC studio, I've actually never used google sheets for this, so I don't fully know what that looks like. That sounds super practical and easy though so we definitely should!

Also, where do you think this should exactly take place? I was thinking about an underground lair or something. I ask just because I think it would help brainstorm some cabin names/wc studio names.

To update the campers on the plot I was thinking I could have a forum with the plot for bigger things, but for smaller things I was just thinking of writing “Report Updates” from us Overseers talking about how their progress is coming, along with some extra lore.

-alternity

I can’t wait to see the pfps lol—do you have a secret account or something? That’s something I was thinking about—how will we deliver the merch? I can use imgur to put stuff on the forums if we need to.

Sheets will make it so we can simultaneously add words, and we don’t have to worry about transferring and stuff. (Although, I wouldn’t mind being host bc I can set up a script to update it

)

I was imagining it underground, or at least with that ‘concrete canyon’ feeling. The sky isn’t really visible, except for occasional patches of the grey clouds.

Yeah that sounds good, and like I mentioned before we might be able to post pfps and stuff in the forums, so we could do it there.

Clay_Isles

I have an alt that no one follows so I'll post my sample ones there and tell you when they are out. Just for reference how do you want /you/ to look like? As for how the campers get them, I can just have a project where they “order” them and then I can put their pfp in a sprite. Most people have ways to take that and turn it into a profile picture from there unless you have a better idea?

Sheets sound awesome!

Yesss exactly what I was thinking! Adding to that vibe, I think it should feel very techy and maybe a tad bit dystopian. I think that can feed into the plot too, perhaps the campers believe the machine they are building is to help the city they live in. Or something along those lines, I'm not attached to anything specific as long as I can bend it to my evil will heheh /j

Sounds like we're putting most things into forums hehe. Let's hope they don't go down like they did beginning of November haha.

Last edited by Clay_Isles (Nov. 21, 2024 04:13:36)

-alternity

Ok good. My face is roughly the following: dark brown almond shaped eyes with heavy eyebrows, the right one of which has a vertical scar. Rectangular gun-metal framed glasses, with separate nose pads if that makes sense. Slightly upturned, rounded nose. Full lips (but not too much). More angular jawline, with hogher cheek bones. I keep my hair around 2in long on top, with a fade on the sides. Also my skin tone is darker than Caucasian but a little lighter than Indian if you could do that

For pfp delivery, that sounds good, as long as you export to like 200x200 it should be fine (as far as making it high quality goes lol).

Techs is good, but still steampunk (obvs). Oooh ok I just remembered a plot to something else—citadel maybe? There is a secret weapon that

wait if you haven’t watched citadel um spoiler alert

……………. Ok so there is a secret weapon that works by going into the water supply and giving the bad guys the ability to find/id/k’ll anyone they want who drinks the water. We could use that type of machine, except we lead the campers into believing that the machine purifies the water… maybe there is some sort of plague going on? Idk if that would fit into steampunk tech tho…
We could also make a variation of this, where the air of the city is getting so polluted everyone is dying, so it’s the workers’ job to build an air purifier. TL;DR the machine is evil idk how yet lol

Another story idea lol: the betrayal scene goes something like this: I send one of those daily reports (or maybe the campers find a journal entry?) in which I talk about some anomaly that I had like briefly mentioned before. I say that I’m going to ask claya about it today… the letter or whatever is dated for yesterday, and I had gone missing, along with a few other campers (aka the inevitable inactive ones lol)

Oh and my contingency plan for the forums is just screenshotting everything; we can use the comments of your secret profile or a random studio for continued planning, and we can make announcements in the cabin studio obvs.

Last edited by -alternity (Nov. 21, 2024 05:06:10)

Clay_Isles

I’m loving the secret weapon idea. Especially since this is steampunk and for that I always envision big factories and such, I think pollution is a great idea for why they are building the machine. I forget which show its from but there is an episode in this mystery adventure show where people are suddenly dy!ng all at the same time and they were trying to figure out why, and basically the villains had released these spores that when activated by a specific signal, it would cause the person to have a heart malfunction and d!e. Not saying we want our machine to k!ll people but it could be a similar concept where we say it’s cleaning the air/water but it’s actually releasing this thing that makes it so i can control people maybe? Trying to find something that’s on the bridge of evil without being too dark and angsty for scratch haha. But I feel like we are on the right track for sure.

I also love the report/journal entry thing so let’s definitely do that. Once we finalize plot I’d like to see if we can pre-write or at least pre-outline our ideas for the reports so when we do come around to writing them and mentioning campers and stuff it won’t be so overwhelming since there will be a clear outline of where we need to go.

Also scratch profile pictures max at 500x500 pixels so that’s how the canvas im creating them in procreate is sized. So I can get max pixels and quality haha.

Clay_Isles

Oh! And also, what are we thinking for color scheme? Obviously since it’s steampunk I figure we want rusty oranges or something similar, but I would also love to have a bit of darkish teal as an accent color just to make things pop, unless we want it to feel very dingy and muted. What do you envision?

-alternity

Clay_Isles wrote:
Oh! And also, what are we thinking for color scheme? Obviously since it’s steampunk I figure we want rusty oranges or something similar, but I would also love to have a bit of darkish teal as an accent color just to make things pop, unless we want it to feel very dingy and muted. What do you envision?

Everything you just said I love hehe I love dusty orange and teal….
What are you thinking for tn design? I have a free collaborative graphic design program called FlGMA that works super well, and that I use all the time. It requires an email to sign in, but that’s all. If you feel comfortable with that, I can set it up + share the link with you. That would make it really easy to decide on colors lol.

Also, 500x500 is good, but the issue is that Scratch will automatically resize the image if any side is longer than 360 pixels. That’s why I was thinking 300 px. For that, I’d say keep making it on a 500px canvas but then resize it using ezgif or something.

A plot outline will be priceless lol.

Clay_Isles

Rewriting this comment because scratch bot said im using bad language (couldn't find it but oh well) (i think it was me saying the design software name since once I removed it it let me post it… strange…)

I'll definitely look at said design software! The dusty orange and teal I think will be such a fun color scheme. As for design I'm thinking gears are our main design motif, but beyond that I haven't thought too much about it haha.

I'll make sure to figure something out for the pfps before I export them. They're coming along slowly because of school and work haha.

Outlines are so amazing I can't function without them anymore.

Last edited by Clay_Isles (Nov. 23, 2024 03:48:11)

-alternity

Oops yeah they decided a while ago they don’t like f*gma ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so now we have to censor it lol
I probably should’ve told you that oops

Also as for the pfps if you don’t think you’ll be able to make portraits we can do something like the HiFi cabin, where we just put a stylized letter lol

Clay_Isles

Well I’m making a template kind of like a profile picture creator so the only thing I’ll actually have to draw for people is the hair + changing some colors. Once it’s done it’ll be super easy to whip a bunch out. But if it does go downhill we should definitely keep the letter idea in mind

-alternity

Ok sweet

-alternity

Also, whenever you want to check out the link here it is: https://www.(f’gma)(dot)com/design/9V59LJ9f3BFsA0YMQRxLgV/JWC-25?t=Tw0zxXOiDiitxmaG-1

-alternity

Bump

Clay_Isles

invited you to the cabin studio! If you don't mind I'm going to try and do a basic outline for plot and write the intro to our cabin, then you can let me know what you think

Also, the l!nk you put says it isn't working… it might just be my end but maybe try it again?

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