✿ RFCK Episode Bonus page ✿
As I stated in the previous bonus page, this is actually the first LOVEWEB episode, when it comes to production order. Turns out it was better to make a small intro episode before immediatly jumping into such a massive episode like this one. Oh the curse of ambition!
Screenshot from the RFCK episode's storyboard from 2019, only the intro was done. Notice how Cybermare's design is one of the earlier ones before i settled on bigger eyes, different hair and no cutie mark.
I remember teasing this episode as early as november 2019 with this drawing. Back then, I wanted to use real pictures for backgrounds and color correct them instead of drawing all the backgrounds. But I decided against because I couldn't make it look appealing.
I wrote this outline around that time too, you'll see that it's a pretty different from the final episode's script. There's a bunch of commands written down to try to teach the viewers about them during certain events. The core of making that episode was teaching viewers about the world and mechanics of RFCK without the episode being an info dump. Which is why having Manon and Cybermare play the game for themselves was the best way of achieving that. Exactly like how it's more fun to teach the viewer about Homestuck's Sburb through having Manon and Cybermare play the game themselves.
The structure of linking beats together with "BUT" and "THEREFORE" is basically how South Park creators write their episodes.
Link to them talking about it in a bit more detail.
The episode's intro has been remade 2 times. You can watch the 2 earlier versions below. The lava lamp beat felt like a poor excuse for Manon and Cybermare to go on a dangerous adventure so I'm glad I changed it later to be about Cybermare's phone running out of batteries. It raises the stakes nicely. Homestuck back then also wasn't a focus in the intro of the episode since the pilot wasn't made yet. It just comes together a lot nicer now. The idea of Cybermare's phone running out of battery and she gotta join a Discord server to charge it feels very silly but hey, at least it makes for a good fun story. Maybe I should learn to loosen myself a bit with LOVEWEB outlines and stop obsessing if things make sense in the real world or not.
LOVEWEB - RFCK (late 2019 alternative intro)
LOVEWEB - RFCK (early 2020 alternative intro)
Here's a concept art of Karru's character I drew as a style test for how to draw the slime city. Karru is featured in the episode since she was a major player of RFCK. She's also the script editor and helps me brainstorm and improve the episodes' plots! (She's very smart).
Almost every character you'll see in this episodes are real RFCK players. When a gang leader thinks you're cool enough, you get immortalized with a special title. Consort for rowdie fuckers and top killers for cop killers, and I decided to feature ALL of them in the episode! Thought it wouldn't have been fair to pick favorites.
Here's some doodles pining down the design of some of the characters and the gang outfits of Manon and Cybermare.
What's next is pics I made for Patreons about the process of figuring out the slime city. In the end this shot ended up cut from the final episode despite having it completely drawn already. At some point in production I REALLY wanted the episode out as soon as possible and I've cut every corner possible.
Afterward, I started entertaining the idea of making a poster for the episode as an early teaser. I did a poll on the Patreon Discord server to see which one people prefered. The last one is the one that got chosen! Very derivative off the South Park movie poster.
I also shared this gif of the discord planet on the right. It took me forever to figure out how to represent websites in the LOVEWEB way so I ended up with big ball planet, inspired by Kirby's canvas curse final boss's design.
Here's a sketch of the tiny endless war tower talking, which I called during production "lil war". I wasn't going to make it move at first but then thought it'd be funny to make it move like a South Park canadian. (South Park is another show that was highly influencial for me)
Before we talk about the episode itself. Here's the entire animatic of the RFCK episode! I won't share animatics of the other episodes since there's nothing interesting about them, but there's a good amount of shots that's been cut in this one. All the cut stuff would have improved the episode but this hypotetical better version would have delayed the episode by a lot more when it already took way too much time to make. I really didn't like that this episode took over a year to get done. I still feel bad when there's a 6 months gap between episodes. You can also see earlier designs of Manon and Cybermare, with smaller bodies.
Also i feel the urge to say... This animatic is BAAAD. I never planed on showing this to anybody so it's a lot of rough stuff. I even have a Flipaclip version of some parts of the storyboard and the drawings on it are reaching abstract levels of roughness. Thankfully I redrew those in the final animatic.
Random Screenshot from the Flipaclip version of the storyboard.
It's crazy to think the animatic was done in october 2020 and the episode took until july 2021 to be done. Idk why I thought it'd be a good idea to tackle such a massive project as the first real episode while also having to deal with school. I really should have just started with the gondola episode and kept stuff like RFCK and Homestuck for waaay later when LOVEWEB is a lot more popular. I've learned my lesson now (I've had to learn it several times).
Now onto the episode itself.
I didn't know what to do with those floating windows in the intro so I just though "Heh, I'll just put screenshots of episodes in them". I could have done nothing with the windows and kept them like they were in the pilot but I'm too much of a fan of "intros with slight changes everytime" to not do anything like that. Funnily enough, I decided to keep the cut shot of rowdy Manon in every future LOVEWEB episode to see if anyone would notice and go "Hey wait a minute... That's not in the RFCK episode!!".
Oh yeah! The voices changed in this episode! It was to make them less... "distracting". People commented quite often about how Manon and Cybermare sounded like Pinkie Pie and Glados. Sooo they later sound like Sweetie Belle and Maud Pie!
I think these voices fits their personalities better. Sweetie Belle is 10% pitched up in this episode and the gondola one and it sounds sooo annoying hearing it like that. When I used to generate manon voice lines all day, I'd get so tired of their voice by the end of it lol. I understand if some people didn't enjoy LOVEWEB because of that or AI voices being used.
Most of the background music is also made by yuuneey and VLIF! They did a great job! I kept using tracks from yuuneey's album until Nomoida made LOVEWEB SHUFFLE that came out a couple years later.
When, it comes to sound design. I didn't think about using Windows XP sounds until the very end of the episode, when everything was animated. It just feels so right to have Manon's footstep sounds be clicking noises. A lot of the other sounds in the episode are from Sonic Adventure 2.
"Inspired by Homestuck" isn't really that correct here. The creators Ben saint and Munchy are Homestuck fans and did put references to it in the game. But this is just a case of Cybermare twisting the truth to manipulate Manon.
These intermissions weren't planned in the episode until waaay later into production. While this gonzo style journalism is cool, I always wanna make sure someone who knows nothing of the subject matter isn't completly lost throughout the episode. Especially because LOVEWEB serve more as an introduction pieces to media first. You can also see the editing style wasn't pinned down to what it is today, with the windows popping ups. I didn't wanna use windows aesthetics at first because it felt like something overdone to me? Especially when seeing random streamers use it. I caved in for the Gondola episode because if there's one show where it makes senses to use windows as an aesthetic, it's LOVEWEB lol.
That specific look inside the slime mines with green outlines and no colors is referencing a comic by ackrostation about a mining juvie (I can't find it anymore). She also drew the "king for another day" style portraits!
All the drawings and photo edits in the eyes of Cybermare during that scene are by Ben saint and Munchy. This scene is inspired by the description given by drinking those sodas in RFCK.
Manon used to use Discord's light mode yes, there was a couple comments taking offense to that lol, very silly. They also use compact mode but that's been changed for clarity's sake. They vibe more with the irc style chatting.
I'm still so happy I got Ben Saint and Munchy to voice their own character, they've done such an amazing job. They even helped writing their own lines because I really couldn't have done their characters justice myself.
This whole sequence is basically the russian roulette part in LISA the painful, I even used the same sound effects. The reference is NOT subtle.
Aaand that's all for the RFCK episode! This episode is now several years old and I got awful bad memory so I don't have much to say now that I'm writing this so long after the episode released. Maybe one day, bonus pages can catch up with the show so I can make those as soon as an episode is published.