I've drawn fish in a context like predation in particular, and I could see something like that working for these (like a kitten monching a bunch of bubble-eye goldfish or betta or something)... but I'm sorry if the desire here would be more like fish protagonist!! It's a little hard for me to wrap my head around, but mostly just 'cuz of the highly differing sexual anatomy/sexuality expression. I'm pretty basic and just like humping, mounting, biting, penetration etc, not so much into spawning... I could see fish being an Element of a scene with other creatures, but not a central role role. For one I've got planned I'm planning some salamanders to feature in the BG... there is space in my mind for oddball things, tadpoles, minnows, baby frog, buggies... as a part of the world.

OVERALL my expectations for PP are incredibly low, but in the lighthearted and fun way. All I seek, are fun environments and a silly cute creature/toy. And some Child Torture ig.

I would say ch5 (Broken Things) had more in this vein than ch4 (Safe Haven), which barely had anything delightful for me to sink my teeth into! The Doctor's aesthetic and the pretty generic robotic, vibes, most of the rooms, prisons, were nothing altogether new or stimulating, didn't play as camp to me. And I think of PP as a kind of camp horror, like FNAF is, it's honestly ABOUT the silliness and absurd extremes, not really meant to be taken seriously, I consider these franchises as motivated by humor and amusement as 'horror'. I felt like it got distracted and was like, "no kids we can be Cool Too! In the way Gamer love" SLAPS THEM!!! NO!! ALL THINGS SHOULD GO BOING WHEN YOU HIT THEM!!!!

Nothing has ever topped ch3 (Deep Sleep) which was such a peak in every way!! Traveling in this GONDOLA while a man gives an EPCOT-era Walt-level speech, the PLAYCARE, the ORPHANS, Ollie is the funniest thing ever, love how he sounds like a child detective in a 90s edutainment CD-ROM... etc etc. Catnap is sexy and getting into this hilarious orphan-into-ghoul pipeline is top notch. We get a fun peep into player character psyche in the form of a guild-ridden nightmare, the cool TV Huggy sequences... (: I was in that playcare... running thru the tubes and throwin my body around the padded walls... wheeeeeee

Ch 4, I liked Safe Haven (the place) to some extent but...? Everything outside of that quite plain or pretty standard, felt a bit like I was in a different game universe. But moving on to, 5 (Broken Things)....

LOVED THE INDOCTRINATION TAPES!!! WOOOO so funny and so everything, Whim and I were like, auuuhhh I wanna be sooooft yeeessss ahhh my friends--! Yaaaaaay! I think they shoulda gone harder into a Big Comfy Couch energy but I still like it as it is! That this was an element of things is in that sphere of camp/humor I go to something like PP for!

Lily Lovebraids herself is aesthetically not anything but, her house was very spectacular and the kind of environment I'm thirsty for after ch4 being so thin on the bone. I really loved the different playful environments, I could kind of imagine a world where a bunch of kids-turned-toys are scampering around the equipment in-character as Smiling Critters and like, shot with a dart if they aren't joyous about it. THATS WHAT I WANNA THINK ABOUT!!! wheeeeeeeeeeee

Getting to go through Huggy's memories and play as Huggy felt like, YESSS !! and also omfg of course, now this is what everyone would want out of PP, right?! Let me into the memories of the tortured childrens firsthand. I WANNA BE A CURSED TOUY!!! I wanna go on a murder rampage with my big fluffy arms :DDD A LOT OF THESE FRANCHISES WON'T GIVE YA WHAT YA WANT!!!! thank you PP

I had guessed the Prototype would be some sort of Dr. Loveless Spidertaur and I was more or less right, but the jester angle, I hadn't anticipated at all, and... I'm amenable to it, enough, it's not as bad as it could be. I'm kind of intrigued by Ollie's psyche choosing a jester persona? With what we know of him... hmm. I fucks with him still. It cannot be helped that literally every time he talks at all Whim and I go "you'd sound like this if you could", he nods and hides his face and sighs. If you want to know Whim's Heart, his True Self, it would sound something like Prototype. And the Ollie persona critically in tandem. It's ahhhnn... just how it is...

Uhm so its like Confirmed then that Ollie and Poppy are essentially brother and sister, epic win. BUCKETS. The vibes in light of this, top notch. While the aspect of having once been jealous of daddy's obsession with Poppy was initially tiresome, I'm intrigued by Ludwig's suggestion that Ollie would like Poppy, and the following period of time wherein Ollie DOES get to meet and comfort Poppy...? and how that congeals into the goal to protect her, destroy everything for her, now... he's become single-focus. I like that he has lost his sense of still 'being Ollie', in my mind in the same way someone like Hanako no longer thinks of the person he is as 'Amane'. In this mindset, having performed as Ollie for all of ch3 becomes very interesting psychologically, eh? Ollie's dialogue was so cutesy and innocent and put-on... love that for Prototype. A vision of your past self as so precious.

I guess it's stimulated me enough to be tapping my finger against my teeth about it. Hrmmm.

Harley Sawyer I wrestle with lol. When he came back at the end we were like NOOOO!!!

The problem with Harley Sawyer is his Coolness Factor makes me cringe out of my body, this kind of character I see as, the most annoying thing guys come up with. Ouughhh just a supergenius scientist man who is all domineering and calm and Truly Evil... but if I TRY to move past that, there is like, that weird element where Sawyer was like another psuedo-son to Ludwig ??????? They kind of have a Tai Lung & Shifu thing going on, where Ludwig really believed in and empowered Sawyer as a child, but let him go in the end for the Bad Vibes he was giving off. He Never Understood What Progress Is All For (Love Smiles Family Etc). I just wrestle with how annoyingly Kimblee FMA he is, you know. But they could, pull it back for me, if they could dig into the Ludwig history. He's all Unflappable Genius now but he was an unstable child once! Can we tap into that...

So. We've got this. Repetitive theme of Daddy Doesn't Love Me. Many such cases. Poppy the absolutely original child who died, the precious perfect daughter. Sawyer the protégé case, neglected/unloved genius child with some generic Videogame Sociopath Unspecified Disorder who is eventually rejected/abandoned by Daddy Ludwig. Oliver seemed to be a child procured in some manner after Poppy's death, seemingly an experiment case with a complex about dad's fixation on Dead Daughter. Well, these things make enough sense as a pattern...

as far as I understand much of Ollie's origin is still a mystery ?? But GOD KNOWS this game loves to just Throw documents at you with no build-up so maybe I've missed something... I don't know if Ollie was ever a real child, an adoption case, or entirely some sort of, Experimental Faux Child for Ludwig to test-run things on the path to somehow reviving Poppy. A stepping stone. But I'm intrigued if his endgame was to simply have Two Children in the end, and if Ollie was ? designed ? in concert to her in some way, made to be her friend as much as a prototype for revivification. Designed for Poppy to love?

That mutilated child body found with Ludwig's body was ? probably Ollie ?
But then its like OK. Did Leith Pierre murder and frame Ludwig in order to take over the company (he has the more 'ultimate complete evil monster no redeeming qualities' thing going on, while also sounding like Cave Johnson so you know the devs have a boner for him), or did Harley Sawyer do it out of revenge for Ludwig's rejection/abandonment (I feel this is a red herring... but whatever).

Now actual chapter discussion is like, while I love Lily Lovebraids' barbie dreamhouse, I have no idea why this was chosen as the set for Prototype face reveal and reunion with Poppy .... it has 0 significance to us or to them, as far as I know. I would have really liked something more personal lol, even returning back to the glass case room he had imprisoned her in...? Why is Lily here, I feel so nothing for her... can we have a moment.

I liked the Prototype describing Poppy as designed to be a child... do you not see yourself as a child, Ollie....? I doubt we will ever meaningfully delve into how the various children perceive themselves but, well I'll think about it. Did Catnap still feel like a child, no matter how many years passed? Gracie did have a whole mantra about being as kid forever.... and growing up being scary...

To meaninglessly connect 100 thoughts, Ollie not personally seeing himself as child-minded as a Catnap or Poppy (who he feels at will to manipulate), does not say much about what may be true about him. Asriel Dreemurr came to see himself as something so far from his original child self, as Flowey, as God of Hyperdeath, but in the end, his tantrums and behavior are all extraordinarily childish. We couldn't earnestly say he 'matured' in those decades of resets, couldn't say he 'grew up'. Of course he didn't! He just became a kid going through torture endlessly. Chara I would say is the same way, of course, even if the vision of self is something like, The Demon that Comes When you Call Its Name, that in-and-of-itself is a product of a child's black/white thinking. I'm always down for a gap between perception and reality.

anyway,

Unlike a lot of people I don't REALLY have a problem with them constantly throwing more stupid nonsense at us, because I would love for this train to keep on rolling in perpetuity, 100 chapters Poppy Playtime, and they should throw as many toys at my eyeballs as they can until they trip over a really sexy one (again) (catnap) (everyone agrees). HOWEVER!!! DIAL IT BACK FOR DA IMPACTFUL MOMENTS!! Make a big yarn lion chase us all around for an hour sure, make a baker's dozen ugly little trolls, BUT!!! Trim it dooooown to like 3 bodies for big moments.

Wait I went this far and I never talked about Spore Grox. What in the world is that. I can't even make sense of him aesthetically in comparison to the PP cast. And what is his name, GIBLET? He should be named something like Scroomples or Eebies or Wally Wonk !! Bibly!!! Babbling Bawp!! I wish he died in a fire, I hate that we are going into ch6 with this ugly freak. Chomp or whatever is fine he's cool.

I liked Huggy & Kissy reunion moment but I slightly don't know how to interpret it in conjunction with previous scenes. But whatever. They won't replay their own game before writing new chapters WHO WOULD?? It could not matter less. I hope they, fuse into, 1 Huggy ... wouldn't that be sweet. The HuggyKissy... the WuggyMissy.... and it could be our friend. It could have 2 arms and 4 legs ... which is kind of another centaur, perfect, it can have a kaiju battle with, Prototype...

Not into diapers at all, neither of us will ever want to draw them! Extremely aesthetic & textural & experiential NO!!! for both of us haha. We find them extremely a turn-off!!!! They've become so ubiquitous in recent years and much more entangled with general lolisho on the western side, which has been a shock to me. I never used to see it so much. Odd cultural shift to me! I guess it's a very stark visual signifier of something...? I always saw it as super niche...

Honestly the age of which a baby wears a diaper is ahm, extremely narrow and not at all relevant to me...? Not a babyfucker at all... not projecting .... not uhm trying to be 1.... there is such a VAST DIFFERENCE between a, 1 year old's experiences and feelings and, even a 5 year old or more relevantly, 11 or 14, 15 etc. Not a headspace I occupy....

I also have no personal fond memories or nostalgia associated with diapers ?? I guess I don't think of diapers as comforting or cozy or fun for babies??? If I was a baby or thinking about being a baby I would probably like to be naked. They tend to hate all clothes....

In terms of what we like about piss, it's definitely that animalistic edge, the look of it, smell warmth, etc, tragic to not let it flow freely </3 imagining soaked diaper makes me feel itchy and rashy... what a waste of piss...

As for pacifiers, much more applicable, though not a passionate or vetted interest; seems fun and comforting, sometimes it's cute to think a particular character might cling to pacifier past the age they are meant to be taken away, perhaps hiding or stealing them to continue use. As a sign of someone being stunted or unwilling to give up comfort, we can enjoy. I could see whim enjoying one IRL for the mouth stim idly.

Laughing a bit at the "not a fetish question in any way" .... ??? do you remember where you are??? He is out here drawing Sunny with a pacifier receiving a blowjob from his sister.......... I kind of think for us this sort of thing could only be a fetish or accessory to. Not personally employing some sort of nonsexual agere as I hear about these days .... we are porn brained and fetish motivated... I'm sorry if it'd be better to answer it as ? SFW ? interest ? but for our own lives and brains I can't untangle it from fetish.

Not generally, no!! Well... it depends on what is 'small' dunnit. I tend to conceptualize a lot of ideas on a theme all at once and pitch them all on one big canvas, sometimes making that canvas bigger or smaller along the way. The individual drawings will be quite small often, but I'm workshopping a whole set of them, discarding and adding willy-nilly.

That said I overall much prefer to work in small sizes with a 1px brush or at most, 6px or something. So generally nothing gets very 'large' in the, like, '300dpi print size' sense! For instance, my various DELTARUNE pieces recently made, were all conceptualized at once on a canvas about 8,000px x 5,000px. That includes all of the references, thumbnails, of around 10 pieces I was conceptualizing (not all were finished). The final individual images when cut out were more like 600px x 500px.

My SPLATOON pieces were all on one canvas around 5,000px x 1,000px. One of the final images cut from it is around 500px x 500px.

I tend to thumbnail a bunch of things at once, then ink everything at once, etc, so even if it will eventually be 10 discreet individual images, they often start out on the same canvas. I have a habit of completing things in 'batches'...

I tend to like a lot of 'gutters', excess room all around to 'cut out' and move things around in, if I want to re-draw a portion of a drawing or take another whack at it, I want to just duplicate the chunk and keep it on retainer on the canvas, while I redraw it. So everything always has all of this scrap nonsense floating around the actual drawing. The very last thing I do is crop all of this nonsense out. My work often has 'frames' around drawings because this is just the most useful way to remember what I'm constraining things to, to remember the borders I'm imagining....

I think creation/maintenance of a petsite would be quite brutal on me, as they are in essence quite ongoing and social communities, with some mind to user's experience.

BUT, I will imagine a situation where I'm just being paid to create the species, world, for a different team to actually manage the site and users, imagine all of the greater inputs... I am Simply the Art Development Team

HMHMHMM. Some basic things...
I would like it to SOMEHOW be not so monetary-based play as much as exploration-based. I always liked websites that involved a lot of clicking around, as a kid... I've never actually ENJOYED the act of 'making Neopoints', though I enjoy some amount of resource gathering like in fer.al. Consistency producing results!
On a lot of petsites, I often felt like the only way to gain a lot of resources was sheer willingness to participate with other users, but I'd really like a system that benefits the solitary user.

An ability to create 'scenes' rather than individual 'pet profiles' would be a key format change; various pets, bugs, plants, gathered under an umbrella defined by the user, encompassed by as many or as few individuals.
Whatever resources gathered could be allocated to a given 'scene', and individual items could be attributed to a given creature's 'things', and because I'm me, I'd like no restrictions on what can be a critter's 'things', even another individual animal.

I think with that basis you could create millions of narratives.... simple families, or collections, or darker things like a captor/captives, or even some sort of agricultural/farming situation. Any sort of enclave or cult. Interpretation is key!

Entirely feral world obviously, with no humans, no furries, no fairies. A handful of biomes, but I'd want to think critically about variable aesthetics and textures. I would probably like to imagine a lot of unique 'islands' or even collections of islands, archipelago, forming what you could think of as 'lands'.

Like for instance a plushie island, with entirely plush foliage, and different sub-areas of certain patterns and aesthetics (a more kiddish brightly colored area, an elegant royal patterned gold tasseled area, a scary ripped up patchwork area)...

There could be a goo/slime/jelly sortof area, with sub-areas that are... sickly toxic & dangerous... while another is silly Seussical whimsy!

NOW!!! another major element I would want!!! Is... you know how many petsites, have your 'pets', and then have say... 'petpets' or 'petpetpets' for Neopets,'Familiars' for FR, 'Rambles' for Livly... I want those sorts of creatures, BUT I WANT THEM TO ALSO BE CONSIDERED PETS!!!!!!!!!!!!

In real life, whether you have a pet snail, or a pet horse, those are simply pets!!
In the case of my own 'petsite', I would simply like no delineation to be made between a worm or a big animal, in terms of how the site handles them!!! WHAT I WOULDN'T GIVE TO HAVE SOME PETPETS AND PETPETPETS AS 'PETS'...!

Using the 'scene' profiles, one could display any creature in any way they so please, and ascribe any degree of characterization to that thing. I THINK THIS WOULD BE APPEALING TO LOTS OF PEOPLE!! Some people like bugs!! Tiny creatures are cute and fun!! IT WOULD BE DELIGHTFUL TO HAVE A PROFILE OF ALL LITTLE THINGS...! If you so pleased!

And I can't resist the Neopian urge to have alternate Forms of creatures, so any given critter would have an alternate form possible for any aesthetic.

Another thing is I want no straightforward earth-world things At All. No Apples and Apple Pie. Strictly fictional silly-named things!!! I feel most worlds only half-way do this... I want everything BESPOKE!!!

I've thought so long and hard about this all but I think that's all I can concretely say!!!!!! Hrmmm!!

This is a difficult distinction to make, so I'll just explain my process...

1.) beginning with a mostly-finished piece, colors sorted and blocked out.

2.) using the 'magic wand' or 'lasso' tools, select and de-select whatever areas/colors I would like dithering to be placed.

3.) using a soft brush at low opacity, or perhaps a gradient tool, I paint the soft transitions in.

4.) using 'SAVE FOR WEB' (in PS CS2), experiment with all of those sliders and settings, until I like the outcome. I usually aim for lower thresholds of color.

5.) sometimes, I like how a portion of the image looks, or color was effected, but I prefer other settings/effects on other portions of the image. So, I will 'cut out' the parts of the image I liked, and Frankenstein together an ideal arrangement from disparate settings. Sometimes, I may want the BG to be very truncated limited color, while the figures retain more shades. So, there's a lot of fiddling around.

in the end, the final result isn't any 1 setting. I may 'start over' at step 3 multiple times. I usually have a vision in my mind for how I'd like the final result to look, and am tinkering until I reach it.

I've played a handful over the years!

When Subeta was relatively new on the scene, I tried to play it, make goals, note my favorite pets/colors. But I wasn't very captivated... the art a little too complicated, designs not as simplistic as I prefer, and I didn't have a sense of the greater world around these creatures like I did with Neopets... didn't have favorite lands or environments. No particularly fun gameplay aspects I liked either... Though I remember its methods of displaying/sorting pets being pleasant, and I believe individual pets could have little collections of items, which is stimulating. There wasn't a way of accruing wealth I actually enjoyed... and no pets I was so in love with. I couldn't really 'develop' OCs within Subeta.

Aywas is another I played, for a bit longer than Subeta! I actually drew some of my Aywas at the time...
But weirdly the issue with Aywas was that, the alluring factor of it for most users was entirely customizable art... as in you could pay an on-site artist to have essentially your OC as a pet, and you could also pay to BREED given pets, including original ones, to produce some amount of babies (there were also lesser breeding coins to basically just apply a simple filter between 2 standard pets)...
I don't know how to put this, but this watered down the integrity of the world to me, and I didn't understand the 'point' of this level of customization, in terms of how I engage with petsites...? Imagine if you could just have some Elden Ring dragon on Neopets... If you could put any OC on the site, what did it mean to be 'Aywas'? I liked some of the stock critters you could find, but nobody else was really interested in playing this way, and of course the site's monetization relied mostly on these custom options. I had a weird feeling that I was playing it wrong...
I remember liking ? exploring for pets ?

Flight Rising I played for a bit, and I have an account there still, though I don't touch it much anymore. I don't find the art appealing, on the whole, and the specbio summaries of species make me feel insane (making little to no sense, as a person who loves specbio ...) ... but the breeding aspect is interesting and I like how that is programmed! I enjoyed combining unlikely pairs. I have some precious and weird dragons I drew (in my own way...) years ago. I have a lot of art of Spirals and Tundras in particular!
Flight Rising is funny... the fact the place you purchase dragons from is called an 'Auction House' made me imagine a sordid sort of world. I think within the canon of Flight Rising I'm a lunatic doing depraved and isolate things in a discreet location. The lore is so self-serious I want... to... humiliate the dragons... ? It's an odd relationship, me and FR...

I don't like wolves so Wajas is nothing to me... "17 different canine breeds" worthless.

Lioden is fine to observe, lions are cute. But I can imagine lions inside of my own mind to my own satisfaction, so I don't see a purpose for me to play it.

ChickenSmoothie is... the least of them probably?!? ldfjkl;g;kf I extremely can't engage with it... have never really understood what goes on there...

Never played goatlings either, I think this genre of petsite can't allure me, even if it is something I love, like goats... I can imagine many goats more interesting than this...

CHILDHOOD STORY is I remember a girl I knew who played a petsite that was horse-centric, but it was ... based on like, buying and selling horses on a fake ebay style site ???? and it used pictures of real horses ?????????? I could not UNDERSTAND it...

Anyway after all of that, the takeaway is that I am interested in bespoke worldbuilding, an appealing, inspiring place to play in. Neopets captivated me by creating a lot of examples of, wild and crazy shit going on around all corners of the world... the 'Gallery of Evil' was very exciting to me, and it let me imagine all kinds of things that COULD exist, like Balthazar, the Jelly Chia, Spider Grundo. Beyond that, the entire world, things suchas the Deserted Fairgrounds, Turmaculus... someone like Eliv Thade exists out there.
A right balance of showing me examples, and leaving a lot open to the imagination... I like setting my OCs in different lands, even different points in Neopian history (like before the fall of faerieland, or pre-moltara discovery)...

Obviously it isn't a petsite, but Pokémon definitely achieves this same sortof thing to me! Enough evidence of some strange or odd things, like an island of all pink Pokémon... even the flavor text on cards alone made my mind wander in fun ways, ponder how different things could intersect, what might occupy the same environment...!

Livly Island has a fun balance! This history of alchemy, a slightly different world from ours with a little more magic... an ecology of the pets... but, evidence in the NPCs, of varying levels of intelligence of Livlies, a lot of poorly understood and mysterious elements. The various lore behind some islands, like the Mandrake, or Love Laboratory, fun to roll around the mind... Rambles as larval livly...

'Petsite' is a broad genre, so many have different goals, purposes! Some focus more on fostering a community between users... some are more about gameplay itself... or customizability of the pets... there are degrees of context or lackthereof for the pets. Some are very restrictive, others are very open. Whatever petsites anyone likes probably derives from what aspect they want to interact with, and how.

My best tip, is to try to choose at least 1 decisive vision you have, and then build/move everything around that choice, try to reverse engineer the rest of the color! I usually go into something, knowing something like, "I don't want to use any brown", "I want the grass to be blue"... "I want red to be the most important shade"

Lets say, you want the bark of the trees to stylize orange, not brown... what kind of lighting could justify that, what color would the leaves be, the grass, to make that orange look natural, FEEL like brown? If the bark of the tree is orange, it might not look rational if the sky is simply normal blue, and the grass normal fully lit green (but that could be your point, if you wanted it to be). It's difficult to describe this, as I don't want to impose any absolute rules... (I dislike tutorials that just teach you to copy someone else's color! I'd like you to find your own harmony!)... but, try to pull a kind of logic gradually, out of things, based on what you want the color to do.

Maybe you want your purple character's fur to be black for this piece... we need to then move everything around that. If their fur is black, what other dark colors will become black, too? Maybe anything typically blue, purple, brown, is now black, swallowed in this lighting. What is left to 'pop'? Maybe only orange, yellow, is catching the light....

In this way, building a room or setting, around that central color inspiration, can lead or follow. "I want the bright red wagon this character is sitting in to be visually striking". Alright, that means everything else should accent that red somehow... do we desaturate everything else? Or make everything else more monochromatic? Or darken everything? Or make everything pale? How do we want the red to 'stand out'? Bright, like a light.... shining against dark background? Or do we want it to be leeching color from everything around it, feel like the world is dead?

As always, I think looking at photography helps.... or the world around you. I'm always agog at color. My husband and I's skintones, in the usual overhead lighting, are so different.... and then, under others, like a grey starlight, both so equalized, even though I know we're different. This plasticity is reality.