Skin Deep Trivia
Here's some dumb ass trivia for the game. Just a bunch of random facts!!
The whole post is full of spoilers, so I'll put a break here to perhaps help you avoid them if you want to. Enjoy this photo of Nina and Little Lion in their younger days:
And this picture of Wonky Space:
All right! Here's some trivia!
Nina Pasadena is a character from Flotilla 1 who we brought back for the game
When we started work on the story, Brendon gave me a gigantic spreadsheet of all the stuff in the "Blendo IP" - all the people, fake companies, gods, slang terms, etc. that he'd used in previous games to create a sense of Nuevos Aires as a consistent setting - and told me to go wild. I then picked people and places and things from that list to construct the story with.
Nina Pasadena is a character from a random event in Flotilla 1 who is trying to assassinate you.
The Zena illustration in the pirate convention is the illustration of Nina from Flotilla
Following on from the previous point... Brendon then reused the Nina illustration from Flotilla as a base for Nina and Zena concept art in Skin Deep. The illustration of Zena on the banner in the Convention scene is just this exact concept art that Brendon painted over to turn Nina into Zena.
The convention center in Skin Deep is supposed to look like the Moscone Center in San Francisco
When we were first drafting the story for Skin Deep, Brendon and I decided that the pirate convention center should look a lot like the part of Moscone where GDC talks take place. However, we didn't do this because of any particular desire to comment on Moscone, or on GDC... we did it because the only other convention center we've been to recently is the LA Convention Center, and that one is basically just a bunch of gigantic grey concrete rooms. Aside from the lobby, LA's convention center is too neutral to use as visual inspiration. Moscone's bizarre moveable beige wall panel design is a lot more distinct. I have so many striking visual memories of wandering around in this gigantic maze of carpeted panels, feeling unsettled and physically miserable!
I was originally going to call Wonky Space "Donkey Space"
It's much better that we didn't do this, but for a while I thought it would be unbelievably funny and stupid to call the dimension where you go during lightspeed travel - and where Zena gets trapped - Donkey Space. I wrote a letter to Frank Lantz sort of asking for his blessing, and he never responded, so I just changed it to Wonky Space in the docs everywhere. This happened pretty early in production - like, before we even finalized our first full game plot outline. I'm glad we changed it because the idea is already weird enough, and it doesn't need to sound any weirder. In a game like this, you definitely have to watch your "weirdness budget" a bit so that you don't overload some scenes with phrases that are impossible for the player to independently derive any meaning from. "Wonky Space" explains itself, which is perfect.
Nina's Habitat was heavily inspired by Infinifactory
You can tell from the fact she's locked in there with da nutrient tubes:
I think "we gotta make her go back to her apartment like you go back to the Infinifactory apartment" was literally the first thing I decided about the game plot.
The bands on Nina's wall are from previous Blendo games
Bittermelon is from Flotilla. Compassion Fatigue is from a t-shirt in one of the apartments in Quadcow.
Pippu is from Bugstompers
Pippu was mentioned in an old mod Brendon made for Half Life 1 called "Bugstompers." There was a soda machine labeled "pippu" in that mod. The art in Skin Deep is just an uprezzed version of the soda art from Bugstompers.
The Manitoba Beast Bug returns
This is the most-easily recognized callback to a previous Blendo game, but the Manitoba Beast Bug from Gravity Bone returns as the "bug" Nina uses to track Zena to her base.
We are pretty sure that the rotating yellow arrow has been here forever
We used a rotating yellow arrow over some interactive elements in narrative sequences in Skin Deep. We're pretty sure that this is the same arrow Brendon used in Quadcow... and Gravity Bone?! Like maybe the same asset? Why change it if it's not broken, right?