Hi everyone! Crystal here. Every now and then I’ll be posting little updates talking about different aspects of the VN. Today I’d like to talk about one of the two protagonists of Side Future. Here’s Salamander!

Salamander’s the second character we came up with for the game. The first is… the other protagonist of Side Future. You’ll have to learn about that character later, though you’ve already gotten a glimpse… anyhow, Salamander is, as you can tell, a very reckless and impulsive girl. She gets in over her head easily and has to improvise her way out of bad situations. I felt she was a good perspective to start the story from because of this. It’s just not as fun if your protagonist never makes mistakes! Her attitude also ties into her powers. Of course I had to give a hot-headed character like her a heat related power. I didn’t want to go the route of having her shoot fireballs or anything, in part because I was so set on the image of someone fighting using a baseball bat. So that became, “what if she could make the bat burning hot?”, and then, “what if she could heat ANYTHING she touches?” It was a lot of fun writing different ways she can use her power in combat. You’ve already gotten a glimpse of that, with her shattering the window, and one Slipperman’s explosive end. She’s got more tricks up her sleeve than that! 

She’s relatively new to the underground resistance; her teammates Meteor and Starlight have been there longer than her. I feel like she plays very well off of both their characters; Meteor’s much more precise and serious, while Starlight is more sensitive and forgiving. I hope you look forward to seeing how their relationships develop as the story goes on! 

Of course you’ve already seen another side of Sally. Underneath her confident veneer, she’s actually quite anxious and unsure when it comes to the missions her team runs. She’s a bit like a wavering flame, in that sense! This part of Salamander is probably the most personal to me. The introduction of the game, where Sally walks through a crowd of people, is taken from my own anxieties of being out in public as a trans woman. Like, of course things have been fine most of the time. Where I live people generally mind their business. But there’s always been that fear of someone ill-intentioned clocking me and deciding that today’s the day they’re going to fuck someone up in one way or another. I wish that wasn’t there, but it sticks with you, and so it’s something that sticks with Salamander. Powers aside, she’s a character who’s lived the reality of being trans in a place extremely unwelcoming to her, and those experiences are really important to the character she is.

To lighten things up, let’s talk about names! Why Salamander? Well, salamanders have always been associated with fire. It’s said that people used to believe that salamanders were born from fire… though actually, they had just tossed logs that already had salamanders in them into their fire without realizing. That’s what I heard, at least! So there’s that old sort of association, but there’s also something bigger than that. And that is… I’m a big retro game fan. Can you guess my favorite Konami game? From Salamander, it makes sense to shorten it to Sally, and it’s pretty cute, too! On top of that, she has her real name, Samantha. Why all these names? I guess it’s because I know a lot of people who go by a lot of names; names used online, names used in real life, names used only with certain people… I thought it would be fun to incorporate that into the story in a way. If you ever get confused about who’s who, you can always check out their profile!

And now, a word from our sprite artist Alexandra on designing Sally!

"Hello! I'm Alexandra, and I'm the character designer and artist on All the Creeps of the Cosmos! Salamander was the first character design I worked on after joining the project, which also meant that her design would be what defined the look for Side Future, and the standard that future designs would be created to work well with. Crystal and Sadie were great at making the process as smooth as possible, though, discussing what they were envisioning for the game and answering questions, and providing reference material including photos, descriptions, and a draft of the script. The dream situation for anyone doing art commissions! 

In large part due to their excellent communication, the design only had to go through a few revisions before we had settled on what she should look like, primarily involving some minor changes to her hairstyle. The first draft left her ears uncovered, which was pretty cute (you can see a doodle I made of this on the design sheet) - but at this point I'm so used to her final design that it honestly feels weird to consider anything else. 

For the in-game sprites, we went for pixel art with an aesthetic influenced by adventure games like Snatcher and the GBA/DS Ace Attorney games. As I started working on them, I did end up tweaking the proportions a bit to focus more on her face and to make the patches on her jacket read better, and did a sketch in the intended resolution that I then pixeled over, to make sure that everything would be legible even when the game camera is zoomed out. 

I'm really glad to be part of this project, and I love these characters so much... I was about to end this little write-up by talking about how Sally is one of my favorites, but as I went through the cast in my head, I'm realizing that I like all of them and that it's difficult to say that any aren't among my favorites...... Crystal and Sadie are just doing too good of a job at writing them, I guess!!"


That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! Next time I’ll be talking about our inspirations for Cosmos. See you!

- Crystal