Hello, Students!
It's been a very, very long time since I've done one of these, but since I've finally completed writing for Scott Loxias and moved onto the casting portion of his development I thought doing one of these could be fun. As I was wrappnig up his route/events I was kind of thinking about how he came to be and how he ties to other characters and why; and I recalled that people had enjoyed reading these and so here we are again.
From a physical design standpoint Scott is pretty simple. There's not too much to talk about in this realm. I think going into it I knew I wanted Scott to be the antithesis of the old stories about cyclopses. Those old stories basically just make them out to be brutes and pretty much just monsters and my philosophy with PSA has always been these are creatures not monsters. So that was where I sort of started the old the stories if you look back at them the bigs were crafters having made Zeus' thunderbolts, so I thought, "cool let's have Scott decend from one of those guys and maybe that's why he say takes welding." So cool that's nailed down, the next thing was "okay he's really strong so why not also make him a part of the weightlifting team?" So hence he has a letterman jacket. The next big thing I grappled with was that in all the old artwork of cyclopses they all had three eyes, two closed, one in the center open, but always they were depicted with three eyes or at the very least the impression that two eyes were missing. The other thing was that they were consistently described as "hairy and ugly". Two of these things were so opposite of what I grew up beliving I always figured one single eye dead center and no hair on the head. The other thing I didn't realized was that originally these guys were huge way too big to believable accomodate at PSA. So- I went back to my old friend evolution and just said, "through time they got shorter and lost the two non-functioning eyes or the face shapes evolved to no longer imply missing eyes whatever maybe people just drew them wrong." Currently there's no in-cannon explaination because it ultimately doesn't matter much. The hair thing was something I did feel I had to explain though because they were explictly described as such. So I thought while sure I could just say Scott was bald, I wanted there to be a reason people aren't naturally born bald like there's a reason if someone loses their hair. Like- a disease or maybe developmental reason, so I decided to take that avenue. I grew up with a guy named Ben who when we were just around probably six years old? Got cancer and he lost all his hair. And Ben was just a solid dude, was nice to seemingly everyone, had every reason to be bitter or mean, but wasn't was out going, friendly, sociable, he was what I wanted Scott to be, so- I made Scott a survivor of childhood cancer. Hence, bald cyclops. Now I kind of wanted to illustrate that cyclopses being bald wasn't the standard without I guess having to explictly say that and- Scott had the letterman jacket plus by this point I think we had already designed all the other members of the team and I wanted to be able to show his personality through the jacket like I had with the others. The jackets were easy ways to convey things about them, so with Scott I wanted to keep his jacket pretty modification free to set him apart from the others who all had a bunch of patches and pins. Because Scott is sort of- type a? I guess he comes from a rigid home where it's always spotless and I guess I kind of figured that'd naturally come out with him not wanting to ruin the jacket by putting a bunch of pins through it and the like. But I thought the one exception he would make would be the yellow ribbon because it's tasteful and is a mark of his strength that he beat cancer. Now that being said you may have noticed it's not the iconic yellow ribbon you think of when you think of cancer awareness and that's because it's copyrighted. So instead we opted for just an actual gold ribbon to represent childhood cancer.
So that covers the thought process behind his physical design. Now we move into the personality side of things. So our starting point was those old stories right? Right. He welds because he's got a nag for it smithing is in his blood, sort of a family thing. I chose welding specifically because that's what I took in highschool inspired by my step-dad was considered one of the best in MN when I was growing up so bam anchor one. Two we put him in weightlifting because that would logically make sense, but okay how does that inform his personality? Well I had friends in weightlifting in highschool and they all sort of intermingled with all the different cliques and I wanted that for Scott, but that's not enough, what does he get out of it? This man can win almost any fight so he doesn't need it for strength, he's not competitive so why? Well, what about because he just enjoys fitness whcih then bleeds into okay so maybe he's consdering that as a career path overwelding, okay great. But that's still not enough let's flesh him out more, Scott is a fence sitter, he's noncombative, he doesn't want to involve himself in inter-personal affairs, why? Well- because cyclopses historically have been dipicted as ruthless brutes, so any eyes on him is the chance for him to be racially profiled, and it doesn't help he's the only cyclops at PSA.
So that's all great, he's got his pros, his cons, ambitions. But- now comes to writing him, what does Scott sound like? I don't want him to be a dude bro, that's sort of Taurus' realm. So I start thinking to myself who I've known that I can kind of reliably draw upon to write this guy and I think of my old drummer, now we sort of have a complicated relationship. Because he was head over heels for my girlfriend at the time, but the band needed a drummer. Bam, wait- my drummer went to school with my bandmates... Star has a band and is based on my guitarist... if I'm basing Scott's personality off my old drummer's I should make him Star's drummer! And blam, final pillar of his character rooted. From there it's constantly interjecting this person's traits I knew into this character of mine, and it really helps to keep him consistent because I didn't just make it up. This person is stored in my memory so it's easy to draw upon what Scott should say, how he would say something. And I think it naturally adds depth that maybe wouldn't have been there.
But it's interesting because I had such sort of mixed feelings about this person for years and now I've taken them and fashioned them into this character that I really love and probably would get along with pretty good. But I think it goes back to something I've said before to people when they've told me to just down the roster to save on costs it's like- I can't these charcaters are so intrinsically linked together especially this late into the game you remove one and suddenly you may have to rewrite a bunch of stuff or then there's just this sort of faceless enigma that's clearly important, but that the player will never met. Scott wouldn't be who he is if it wasn't for Star. I guess I'm running out of gas here, but it's just interesting how so many little things from throughout your life can come together to create this wholely unique thing. And I think some of that personality also stems from Scott's larger role in the scheme of the game, Scott is supposed to make you feel safe, good. When he's around the player knows nothing bad can happen, no one is going to try and kill them or- some other dire event isn't going to happen. And like I've been saying it's like, "okay how to you invoke that feeling?"
Anyways I guess that's all I got to say about Scott hopefully you guys found this moderately interesting. Finishing Scott's stuff just felt like such a huge moment in the development of the game given just how big of a part he ended up playing that I felt like I wanted to highlight him.
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