Tantalus Prism Post-Mortem & Concept Art

First, Play The Game! This page will have a shitload of spoilers!

Alright! Howdy everyone! Uh, this is my first post-mortem on? Anything actually? So, forgive me if it's a little odd or weird. Let's frontload with some bonus things about the final draft!

Cecily's Blazons! (also her pronouns are both she & it, like they both work)

  • Butterfly weed: picked for its victorian meaning of 'Let me go' or 'Just leave me'
  • The Boar: How she sees herself, you get it. It's also looking away from the stars/sparkles bc its a 'loathesome thing', listen, you get it.
  • The Clover: Her magic or 'desire' affinity! It never displays itself here but if it did, her magic would be something with discretion and secrets. Within the magic system of this world, the clover is a symbol of trust or fraternity.
  • The Tower: Figured it'd speak for itself also, not even just as Cecily sees itself but also bc it does… kinda… destroy everything on accident… (but also its ok sweetie, it needed to happen)
  • Utensils: Its position as cook!

Agnes's Blazons!

  • Nigella/Love-in-the-Mist: Blooming in adversity! Also the Demeter/Persephone connection
  • The Stag: In heraldry, the Stag can mean that its bearer will not attack unless provoked. It's also hinting at Agnes's more masc leaning desires/nature, she's very likely going to go at Least futch after this.
  • The Spade: Agnes's magic affinity is, like her mother's, the spade. Symbolic of lust here and specifically possession. If Agnes's magic were to display in this story, it would likely operate off locks & keys, a more physical kind of possession than Avelina's psychological one.
  • The Wheel of Fortune: Kinda self explanatory, symbolizes change, decisive moments, upheaval, you get it.
  • Crown: Also her position!

Other Misc Symbols!

  • the frames have either thistles, spades, clovers, or leaves on them to have affinity with the characters involved and also the agony present in the situation.
  • HOWEVER, the purple/lilac/pale rose is actually Avelina's. Symbolizing luxury, enchantement, and also the paleness of it is for purity, hence why it's on the doll. Honestly the whole bit with the doll is that it's what Avelina wants of her daughter, so it's decked in her colors, her flower, her blessing, her rules about modesty-- a wedding dress designed with no groom in mind. (Or maybe Agnes becomes her own groom? Write your answer in the comments below!)
  • Names: Cecily was taken for its meaning of blindness, common name interpretation being 'blind to one's own beauty'. Agnes was for purity and Avelina was for desirability or 'desired'. Mearle on the other hand means 'blackbird' which, he's a music teacher so it seemed to work. I also have always loved alliterations, so any time I get the chance to use them, I probably will.

All that out of the way, I guess we'll start at the beginning!
Going into this jam, my primary focus was trying to iron out the writing as much as possible. I consider myself kind of untested as far as my writing goes? I do it… okay? I think? I just don't know because the only people I've run my writing by have been really close friends kjdsfh. But yeah, the most important thing to me here was the story since I knew that this project would both live and die on it– and also it was gonna be the hardest thing for me to just bang out like I can do with art. So that's probably what most of this post-mort'll be about: writing.

WEEK BEFORE & FIRST WEEK:

As my patrons probably know, I actually had a handful of projects I was figuring I would try for this jam! But when the theme ended up being psychosexual trauma, I kinda just sat there for a few days, combing through my options and realizing that none of them were really… in a place to fully develop that kind of angle? At least not yet even if they do have the potential. I would end up stewing on this for about week into the production time while talking things over with my wife & dev partner, Fay– not really hitting on an idea that even kinda felt like a win until about 9-10 days in.

FIRST IDEA: THE MAGE AND THE DOLL

The first draft was pretty different from the eventual final story! Honestly It was just something I had jotted down while trying to stretch this idea of 'what kind of toxicity do I have experience with' (the answer to that at the time being the duality between repressive self-erasure and like.. ego death in wish fulfillment?). It consisted of a self-obsessed Royal (not a queen yet, she was just like a Lady), her daughter that she was highly possessive of, and a Doll– but the character that eventually became Cecily was actually some kind of magic tutor of sorts? One that the princess would pursue, but (he, at the time) wasn't allowed to reciprocate, and had to create the doll to eventually bypass. It had a like.. "hot for teacher meets alluring secret/black vow" kind of vibe? (And honestly that did kind of carry forward in how Cecily and Agnes both think about Music Mentor Mearle in the final version). But there were a lot of problems with the setup-- primarily the lack of teeth.

From jump we knew that we liked the Princess and Queen (they did become officially princess and queen at that point) since my partner wanted to explore that kind of isolating pressure of just not being able to engage with anything other than what was allowed to you (and STILL being criticized for it). However this tutor character was kind of leaning more on my experience of plurality, actually?

My previous uh– I hesitate to call it a game, its more of a proof of concept– Gemisys, is also exploring this dynamic of not feeling welcome in a space that one of your.. co-pilots navigates with complete and shameless ease, meanwhile all you can do is watch. It's.. something I'm still kind of unwinding. But like--! To be honest! That inexperince kept showing up in the drafts! Like I didn't know enough of what I wanted to say or think about.
Things kind of struggled to feel definitively.. gross or? helpless? enough? It almost felt more like if they could just escape the queen then it'd be fine? Sure maybe a little weird, but fine. Which didn't feel like that should be the case in a truly toxic situation. My partner and I kept passing takes back and forth on it like 'the princess should be worse' or 'I'm just not sure this is enough' or 'What's the tutor's Deal, really?'. The princess killing the queen was also on the table really early when we were bouncing the idea to one of our friends and when the topic came up about there not being enough teeth, she was like 'hmmm idk, do murder' and then I sat on it like, wait no, that totally works.

All in all, we fell off this draft pretty quick, but some things carried through– specifically Cecily's penchant for being able to keep secrets from the queen, for the princess. That became a lynchpin in its character pretty quick. A couple other things came through here, like what if the tutor doesn't make the doll and its more of a found thing? What if it's a fey ploy (this stuck also). The fantasy world this takes place in is one I've been labbing for a few years now, where the fey realm has burst forth from a couple key locations and is now ravenously consuming the natural world it's growing into, changing it into something else.

In dialogue with this 'changing things', I have a specific fixation with dolls, and specifically the dolls that are human-sized in this world tend to be… capital-S Special. Like that was something I really wanted to keep from start to finish. I like dolls a lot, I think they're very interesting pieces of human culture and development and specifically I fixate on them so much as just sort of like avatars, totems, or fetishes of beauty? So something about the idea of like. 'What would a creature that was pretending to be human think about dolls' is something I'm mulling over a lot in this space– and Agnes's eventual response to it is also kind of in dialogue with this idea too. Like.. This thing is someone else's image of me, I'll turn it into something I can call my own-- but that's neither here nor there, onto week 2.

IDEA 2: THE MAID AND THE QUEEN

The story still hadn't been fully ironed out at this point, but it was starting to take shape. Going off of that idea as 'the doll as an effigy of desire,' The big draft at this point is now in dialogue with the experience of growing up undesirable, specifically with fatness? I'll call this Cecily's Doll 2 while the first one was Cecily's Doll 1 because the key component of both of these drafts is the doll serving as an escape for Cecily from her body or how people treat it– which. Hrm. I'll kind of just say it the way I said it at the time: "I really don't want the story here to be a fat girl magically becomes thin and gets everything she wants". As a fat person, I hate this shit, and the idea that I could be replicating it was deeply uncomfortable to me even if the 'everything she wants is bad actually' was the takeaway because... there was just this palpable sense of not believing it? Like, c'mon, lmao, don't patronize me.

This was also the pass where the magic was fully expanded upon, each of the main three having their affinities established! I have a whole ass fucking section of my worldbuilding document that talks about how magic works and how the characters' magic affinity might manifest (mentioned above in the Blazons), but the most important thing from this was Avelina's Mirror Panopticon. Magic here was always intended to be more fairy tale than fantasy, operating off of willpower and desires, an idea that stuck all the way through due to the like…. not just classical evil queen angle but also the imagery of Cece just standing in front of a mirror and hating itself. I'm sure that's probably relatable to pretty much everyone.

The other interesting flip in this battery of outline drafts was the doll. It started becoming a little difficult to keep Cecily and the doll orbiting each other the way they had been and finally it came out like... What if the doll is orbiting Agnes instead since she has this latent gender thing going on? An idea which stuck immediately as soon as the proposition became that it belonged to the queen & was in a wedding dress. To be honest, Avelina's implicit incestuous desires were there from start to final, whether it was emotional or transferrant (some drafts had her using Cecily as a proxy for disciplining/touching Agnes even), and the imagery of a father-daughter (or in this case, mother-daughter) wedding dance metaphor spinning lazily in the background as Agnes's knife came down into Avelina's chest was too good to pass up.

Avelina herself however… Was an interesting wrinkle to configure. As a pseudo-symbolic entity that is like. A character as much as she's an embodiment of impossible standards of purity and beauty, fully articulating just How she and Cecily are foils was something that didn't come through until the end. Said articulation being that they're on opposite sides of the spectrum that they both buy into, but exclusively look at each other. Cecily is filth that yearns for beauty while Avelina is beauty that can only see filth. Meanwhile Agnes is somewhere in the middle, someone who Cecily idolizes while Avelina can only see her flaws. Being in the gray like that is what gives her the ability to change things with her own hands, I think. Like she's allowed to have dimension bc of the conflicts between the eyes of her captive and her jailer.

Actually real quick on Agnes, there was a fun little bit there where her latent medieval weirdgirl butchness was a bigger part of the story, but it just didn't make sense with how tightly controlling Avelina was. This design lives on in my heart and tbh I'll probably repurpose her, I love how gross she is.

AT THIS TIME, IT'S LIKE WEEK 3:

After that, it was just putting together the UI mockups and such. It wasn't the best that it took us til week 3 to get a version of the story we actually felt really good about, but yeah once the draft slotted into place, it was kinda just putting the whole thing into production.
I don't have… too much to say about that? I'm very much the kind of worker who's workflow is frontloading the planning as much as possible, thinking things through super thoroughly before just putting my head down and working. My wife and I actually have a pretty good workflow where I'll handle lines & art direction because I'm super fast about my vision & Fay will color bc fae has a better workflow for it, so shit mostly came together about as quick as we could make it work with jobs and life permitting.

The UI concept was also executed pretty quickly & with intention– I knew I didn't want to gum up the pipeline with doing full bgs since, even though I like drawing backgrounds, that's still a skill I'm building the ability to do Fast. So instead we honed in on the idea of like.. 'pieces' of a background, using frames. The original pitch for the frames was to have important features (such as the kitchen table, time of day, and what meal was being eaten) contained within the frames, something that we'll probably do in a finalized build, but for the jam build, honestly the frames felt like enough of a 'something' for the bg.

Honestly there's a lot of stuff we're working on finalizing for a more complete version. We're super proud of our work here and want to see it through, especially since we got a lot done in the time allowed. We'll keep yall posted on that front.

Bonus screen of where character locations would be featuring Agnes and the Agneses.

FINAL WEEK:

I'm not even kidding when I say the script was being touched up and fiddled with right up until the very last hour to try and really drive home a lot of the pain in this thing. The sun/moon metaphor emerged here, Cecily's status as being Officially Feytouched was also cemented here rather than something that was insinuated or implied (Avelina also Hating It was cemented here). The doll being technically a fey plot but not a divulged one was decided here as well, literally as I was writing the scene where it's broken-- The biggest thing of the final draft was just honing in on the specificity of everything.

I also struggled a lot with act 3 scene 2 where you get to see Avelina really lay into Cece? Similar to my sentiments about 'i dont want a fat girl to become skinny and get everything she wants', this scene was the bane of my existence up until the very end because it was supposed to be cruel, yes, but not like… cruel for no reason? It had to be the catharsis of like why Cecily thinks this way or like why she puts Agnes's touch in such a completely different sphere than Avelina's. It had to be sexuality without intimacy, or even more pointedly, sex without desire. Something that wasn't even hate-sex because that's still a passionate emotion of some kind. Something where all that really should be felt between the two of them was contempt and contrition.
However! That's! Really mean! Like again, as a fat person, I did want to try and approach this with some kind of care, especially in a scene that I know for a fact would really heavily trigger the shit out of me not even like 3 years ago? I don't know how successful I was, but there was an effort.

Like actually there was an interesting... something, idk what to call it. Experience? Revelation? I went back to some of my writings from when I was a late-teen/early-20yo where I was really struggling with this shit, like believing that a body like mine could be desirable? A lot of the pain in that scene was fully informed by my thoughts from that time. How fatness has a kind of de-gendering element to it, that you were fat before you were anything else.
This idea had been lodged in my head at that time that you had to be beautiful before you could even Have A Gender/Sexuality, that if you were unattractive enough, the mere concept could be stripped from you. That fatness was something that made you inscrutible to the world of desire, therefore confiscating your ablity to desire as well (and thoroughly believing that even if it isn't really true). It is kind of still something I struggle with, just not as severe, so this ended up being a site to try and work through that for me, like I really wanted to try and talk about that, I think.

All of this sort of collided with a serendipitous clap! when thinking about that earlier question of 'what kind of toxicity do I have experience enough with to write about?'-- the answer rising from the dust pretty plainly as 'the inability to trust someone when they say they want you,'-- and subsequently how that someone might spiral out from how that reads as a persistent rejection of their asserted humanity in preference to some pedestal they didn't ask to be on. A huge part of how the story ends honestly kind of serves as a Bad End for that younger version of me who was so consumed with being undesirable that no matter how much someone could or even would move heaven and earth for them, they just cant understand. Won't understand, even, and trying to dig into how that kind of logic or self-concept operates. Again, I'm not sure how successful I was, but there was an effort!

But yeah I think that might cover everything as far as reflecting on this build goes. I might do an additional post mort when we get a more complete build out, but for this one that might cover the most of it. Hope you?? Enjoyed???? This???? Hope you enjoyed?? The game even???? Please play our game. We worked very hard. As a bonus, here's a doodle of our babies.


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Last Updated: Jul 18, 2026

I'll keep little Cece to myself forever :)