Ahoy sailors!
We've gotten a lot of new eyes on Captain Wayne recently, so it's about time we made an introduction! Wayne is the beating, brawling, sunburnt heart of Vacation Desperation, and he’s been with the team in some form since the very start.
From The Table To The Screen
Captain Wayne was born from lead artist Aidan “APY216” Patrick’s colourful and, frankly, slightly scary mind for a tabletop campaign. The idea was to go full stereotypical pirate: loud, gruff, and belligerent; the kind of voice that bellows from a character that has no intention of doing stealth checks because he likes to make his presence known. However, shout in pirate-speak for four hours straight and you won't be speaking for the next four days!
So instead, APY216 leaned into another one of Wayne’s big inspirations: the classic action hero. The guy that puts on big aviator glasses and walks away from an explosion. He’s cool, smooth, and bass-y but with a hint of that pirate grit when he laughs or gets fired up.
A touch of Duke Nukem? Yeah! But over time, the voice evolved into something more salty. Less Dirty Harry, more Evil Dead. Wayne's got more of that Ash Williams energy: confident, loud when he needs to be, but always dripping with style and guts.
Sailor's Evolution
Over the years, Wayne's design has changed. He's still retained that triangular, broad chested picture of peak physique, but bits and pieces have changed over his campaign. Wayne always had a large, expensive stogie – he's a man of fine taste. (If you ever saw him drawn without it, you didn't. You're wrong. It's the Mandela effect). His coat was slightly iterated on. A long coat helps to cascade into a really imposing silhouette, but when shortened, it made his legs stand out and made him quicker to draw (which is really important when you draw him so much!).
The shoulder pauldron was one of those 'functional necessities', but it also worked with Wayne's role as an Engineer. Neither APY216 nor his DM wanted to count and track ammo because that's just not fun. So, they decided Wayne would fill his arm with spent shells and various metal scrap and it would pop out a new 12 gauge! This took a lot of tedium out of the tracking and worked really well with his lore as a Smither and genius engineer.
Eventually, this was also removed because pulling off action poses with a big wad of cast iron on your shoulder didn't feel as dynamic, but also Game Design ™ - giving people infinite ammo would necessitate an entirely different game than what we were trying to make. However, it was cool, and APY216 wants to bring it back... one day.
Now for the arm. Usually, you'll design a character and put the battle damage in afterwards, but before anything else, Wayne was just an arm. The arm came before the chicken in this scenario, and he was designed around that. APY216 thought of it in the shower, watching how an arm bends, then had the thought, “What if it bent the opposite way, like a break-action shotgun? What if the barrels were leading out the palms? If an arm can bend a different way, what if the wrist could too? Turn the fingers into barrels and that's a chain gun.” (I think APY216 has quite long showers.)
Above is the first image ever made for the idea. Technically, this is the first iteration of Wayne, too - you can see that the arm doesn't even belong to a person. It was Casen, the Studio Director, who pitched the first idea for Wayne…
....a vampire hunter.
This is the second iteration of Wayne. Bit of an ugly mug, isn’t it? The anger and attitude was taking shape, but he just wasn’t there yet, and the rest of his design didn’t match the raw energy of the gun-arm. His hat, eyes, and the lack of hair piss us off. But there was this other character, one that we're not allowed to talk about just yet. One of his key traits was having different outfits and identities, and one of those was the Captain. So, that Captain was given hair, and kept the eye shape with sunglasses. At that moment, I shit you not, he started talking. That was the moment he came to life. He looked APY in the eyes and he told him his name – he said he wanted to be called Wayne.
That's the moment you know a character design is ready, when you can hear their voice in your mind, when they start to move and speak for themselves – and you'll know it when other people tell you the same, that they can see and hear Wayne speaking and moving in his mannerisms and voice, and portray that in quotes that he would say, or draw him in situations he would be in.
And while you're here, WISHLIST Captain Wayne, because now, Wayne lives, and he will come for you otherwise.
