5/9/2026 | On Rewrites New!
This is a news post I've been wanting to make since before I even started making the website -- it'll be a memorable moment when the site is actually functional enough that I get to share this. This post will be about the aspect that everyone's probably wondering about — the rewrite — what that will mean for Shellsiege, what is actually going to change, and why this is happening. I'll be splitting this post into sections so it is easier to follow, and in case you only care about one particular topic. So let's get into it!
I'm not one for apologizing for not posting, generally, because especially when you're doing stuff for free and for FUN online this is just not an aspect to stress about. However, I like transparency, so I still want to talk about the unproclaimed "hiatus" for the past few months.
Shellsiege doesn't have a schedule to begin with, obviously, because this is a hobby I do for fun. I still prefer art and comics to come out at a *SOMEWHAT* frequent rate, though, just from an artist's perspective. This summer is an obvious exception to that rule. After finishing Torn Apart - Part 1, I honestly can't remember what I did afterwards actually, but I knew I was going to have at least a *bit* of a deserved break from that grindfest. I already knew I had a spark of hope for potentially starting on a website this year (despite having NO skills), and I knew I wasn't going to start on the next part right away, because frankly I'm STILL not done drafting it. If there's anything I've learned, it's that if you're not happy with your draft, then don't rush it. And if there's anything else I've learned, it's that you will never be completely happy with your draft until you actually start drawing it, and even when you've finished something you'll probably STILL be unhappy with something. All this is to say that I'm trying to find the balance between giving my drafts time and not going forward with half-baked ideas that rub me the wrong way, while also trusting the process enough that this doesn't result in a Perfectionist's Inaction Loop. TL;DR: Drafting the stories takes even longer than actually drawing the comics, which already takes disgustingly long, so the "dev cycle" for new stuff is Harsh. To begin with. But generally, it's safe to assume that if nothing is happening for a long time, something IS happening *somewhere*. I'm just literally one person doing everything lol.
I try to tackle different aspects of Shellsiege as the mood comes to me. There's obviously a lot of things other than story —worldbuilding and all its aspects, the biology front, character writing, character details like planning out their wardrobe or vocab or whatever, the Internet-facing side of things like character profiles and site links, "asset" drawing, the "turning into a printer" work of having written a comic and now actually needing to dedicate several weeks to drawing it, and then obviously like... drawing at all — okay this list could go on forever, but point made. All of these things require different moods, and I try to vary things up based on where my inspiration is currently (sometimes it's nowhere, and it takes a while to find). They also require time, some of them significant amounts of time, which annoyingly leads to periods where I have nothing concrete to show for WEEKS, because it's all behind the scenes research work or sorting species of wrasse based on distribution or whatever the hell. This is all stuff that leads to cooler and more cohesive art and writing overall when it's been given time and done well, though... that is my hope, at least. So I'm willing to put in the time and work to do busywork if it means I can have an easier thing to work with later, and have enough things to build upon that it fuels a self-inspiring loop.
With all this being said, the posting absence will likely continue for the foreseeable future because of the rewrite. Let's talk about that next.
Okay so I wouldn't blame you if you thought this came out of nowhere (if you're new, then you reasonably didn't think this and likely didn't even know there was a "previous version", but for the sake of this article it would enhance your reading experience if you pretend you also thought this). Let's quickly go through some main points:
Basically half the worldbuilding system, and with that basically the entire world. This includes major changes to species, from sapient species to nature, ecosystems, cultures, characters and to stories as an obvious side effect of *everything* changing.
— Seafolk are being completely overhauled. That is, "seafolk" as a concept is now obsolete entirely, because going forward, there will only be one sapient species; octofolk.
— The ecosystem is being overhauled a lot, but because there was (intentionally) not much focus on the ecosystem in the past (because I knew this would happen at some point), this will probably not be that noticeable.
— Literally the entire world map got overhauled, but this was also intentionally not focused or leaned on too much, so the effects of this will also likely be pretty vague.
— Because of the above points, some stories, character designs and other adjacent things WILL CHANGE due to recontextualization, obviously.
In honesty, the ecosystem and world are aspects that were underdeveloped before (and they still are!), so this is less of a "change" and more of a "finish", if that makes sense. This overhaul began because I got inspired to actually try finishing or at least deciding on SOME of the ecosystem worldbuilding, and that went a lot more in the "just do everything again" direction than I anticipated.
When I started the rewrite, before it was intended to be a rewrite, Shellsiege had slid more into the "anthro" category of worldbuilding, where a lot of animals are people for no particular reason. I obviously like anthro worldbuilding and stories a lot, but Shellsiege is also in part a speculative biology project. I can get very particular about immersion factor and whether something goes over the line of being plausible. I already knew that focusing on the ecosystems and that front of worldbuilding was going to get deep into the science-aligning aspects. To keep it short, it turns out that my tolerance for suspension of disbelief ended up limiting... a lot. Like not only making it implausible to justify having 10 sapient species, but even to justify 4 types, and in the end even having different kinds of cephalopods be sapient went over where I draw the line.
I assume these changes are going to be disappointing to many people, but I see this very positively. While doing the rewrite, making the decision to go from a multi-species setup to just octofolk felt like a breakthrough; it made me realize that having several species in the first place was a leftover from earlier versions I was clinging to for the sake of tradition rather than it actually serving the worldbuilding in any positive way. In fact, it was previously going against a lot of the worldbuilding, also considering octopuses (and cephalopods by extension) are my *main* interest, meaning anything to do with other sea creatures was always going to be underdeveloped in comparison. I now think it will be infinitely more interesting, fun and fruitful to have other sea creatures as parts of nature and ecosystems (as opposed to the previous situation where animals being sapient had to be a massive handwave, which also meant there was no reason for something to NOT be sapient, which made worldbuilding with nature very difficult).
Obvious statement is obvious: I believe basing the overarching worldbuilding on the animals I have passion for and want to draw and write about will result in better output. Having them only be a slice in a pie full of 80% other animals I don't really care about (no disrespect to fish and sharks, but I'm biased) but which should logically have a very large part in worldbuilding, realistically significantly larger than cephalopods, naturally leads to most of the worldbuilding being uninteresting to me and feeling like a chore. Having the main focus *solely* on cephalopods makes way more sense from the standpoint of "I want to write about cephalopod people" and, logically, should lead to much more creative and inspired work. To continue, when you consider the logical and logistical difficulties that come with worldbuilding for like a billion different species of different shapes and sizes — this IS interesting and can lead to fun worldbuilding, yes, for the record I love seeing this and it is the thing I look for in anthro media — it makes worldbuilding with any ounce of realism VERY hard because of all the considerations you have to think of and all the angles you have to think through before you can decide on LITERALLY ANYTHING, even if it's something *seemingly mundane* like how a sidewalk would look, would smartphones even exist, or would the bike ever have been created when people have such different anatomy from each other and if not, then what are the ripple effects of that? This introduces a lot of hoops to jump through, and it is just not worth it if you're primarily planning to just focus on cephalopods anyway, even if on the surface it will make the world look more varied and interesting.
I don't yet know the extent of how much will be changed and rewritten with this. Shellsiege is in a constant state of change; this is a world I'm doing as a hobby and the intention has never been to wait until I have the One True Definitive Version until I post anything. Characters are continuously being revisited and rewritten, stories are being looked at and revised basically any time I look through the drafts, and this basal worldbuilding is a very good example of how much things can change over time even if you change little things. What I DO know is that since so much *is* changing with this rewrite, I will probably take the chance to work over a lot of aspects in the story- and character writing I haven't been satisfied with up until now, because it'll be fairly easy to bunch further changes with all of this. Rather than doing it in increments, obviously, to where I update everything based on the ecosystem re-engineering, and *then* decide to redo everyone's backstory. So, I suppose expect to see a lot of changes of varying levels.
For comics, my goal is to preserve as much as possible — as I think I already implied, I am trying to *change* things rather than outright replace things, within the new framework. This means that things will be redrawn to fit the new worldbuilding wherever applicable, and rewritten or restructured in parts if something is now fully incorrect and needs bigger correcting measures. I want to avoid outright deleting comics, which I shouldn't have to do for the most part, given I've intentionally held back from going too deep into (unfinished) worldbuilding in the comics so far. Some comics may be deleted and reposted if the changes are major.
As for art and things solely made for worldbuilding, I've already taken matters in my own hands to "clean up" anything that goes blatantly against the new worldbuilding. I'm not so much into "updating" art as I am for comics. Art is more about vibes to me and less of a commitment. If something doesn't work anymore, just make new stuff that does, down the line.
I want to take some specific examples in this part for things I know for sure will be changing. First off, people might be wondering *how* you transition from a multi-species society to worldbuilding that's suddenly single-species. Conveniently for me, I hadn't done an awful lot of detailed worldbuilding about infrastructure or other things yet, so the way I design the world will not change much (because I hadn't really decided, and actually knowing what I'm doing this time will likely make it more interesting going forward). But a pretty prominent aspect of this world was the existence of the food chain, and through that, predation (regardless of how illegal it was). We will continue to have this in spite of *technically* getting rid of the food chain. I had a Tumblr anon ask about cannibalism once, and I believe back then I said it was not going to be a common theme (this statement has straight up become incorrect, this is subtextually present quite often), and also technically not cannibalism because these *are* different species on a natural food chain. Unfortunately (my condolences to Tumblr anon) this is just straight up cannibalism now. Which is still in line with real octopus, to be clear, but now it IS just straight up cannibalism. So this is a *change* to worldbuilding that isn't really a change considering this already existed, but it may be less palatable for some people to comprehend an octopus guy eating an octopus guy than it is for a fish guy to be eating an octopus guy, even though it's like the same thing in principle (they are both people), so I feel like this is worth mentioning. Some of the existing social hierarchies I was building on top of before were very much following the big-eat-small pattern you have in aquatic ecosystems especially, and the same structure very much exists in cephalopods, so this aspect survives relatively unchanged through such a major worldbuilding shift.
For overall worldbuilding, I think it's safe to say some terminology will almost certainly change, but this will all be reflected in the rewrites. There are some larger decisions I haven't come to a conclusion with yet, with the concept of shoals as a very obvious one — shoals were obviously based on social group behavior by marine animals such as fish and squids and, as a concept, replace the human concept of families or legal households. However, octopuses are not social animals (with exceptions and nuance), so building a culture off of octopuses might not necessarily have this tighter communal aspect at all. I haven't decided on this yet, but regardless, the terminology surrounding this will definitely be changing somewhat — and surrounding other things as well. (For example, I'm trying to see about stripping away religious vocabulary, but this is a fairly difficult task when an absurd amount of english phrases and statements directly reference religious figures or concepts and oftentimes have NO alternatives that even almost imply the same concept.)
I would go as far as to say every single character will be affected by these changes. The obvious cases are all the characters that are any species other than standard octopus. I'm looking to keep the rewrites stemming from this fairly tame, though — there are some characters whose, well, "character" was based in part on their species, but nobody is RELIANT on being a specific species — I don't think there's actually a way to write a character that 100% locks them to a species, thinking about it. My point being people's attitudes, personalities and abilities exist on a relative scale and behaviors can always be adjusted within a new framework to still approximate or be identical to the previous writing. So, my primary goal for most characters is obviously going to be keeping their personalities the same, and finding mostly analogous thought processes to explain their thoughts and actions. Designs will also change — for everyone. This is mostly because most of the characters previously had scars, due to the ease of which you would accumulate scars when a lot of people have death claw fingers. Consequently, making it so that literally nobody has claws significantly raises the bar for what has to happen for anybody to end up with significant amounts of scars. This is a change that will make my life WAY easier because I can say with certainty that I don't have a single character whose scars I could previously draw from memory and that is detrimental when you're making comics. If my new designs still end up having ridiculously complicated scars, you people need to throw rocks at me.
This news post has been LOOOONG overdue. I'm just happy to have finally made it so people aren't completely in the dark about what's happening and what is going to happen. Shellsiege is going towards a new era of... hopefully being a lot more focused to where the worldbuilding can Exist. This probably sounds ridiculous, but obviously I'm the person making the worldbuilding, so I'm painfully aware of the like 80% of it that barely even exists on a baseline level and holds back actually exploring the world. With these changes, that will hopefully change — I'm optimistic because knowing I get to worldbuild octopus society, architecture, cultures and other stuff sounds inherently fun and exciting rather than something that you just kinda *have* to do to get to the good stuff, as it was with much of the previous worldbuilding. So: I will be here, working on getting the website to a decent point, worldbuilding, and then getting around to all the redrawing and getting everything "ready to go". I hope this addressed some questions you might've had, and see you around!
27/8/2026 | Website Development Underway!
Heya! Welcome to the Shellsiege website! This is kind of a monumental step in working on this project; just talking from a creator perspective right now, but I'm brand new to web development, and actually starting a website from scratch has been... let's just say the barrier to entry was quite rough to overcome. But here we are, making the website, and I'm extremely excited.
Making a dedicated site for Shellsiege has been the goal for a while now; it is frustrating both from a creator and follower standpoint for everything about a project to be strewn around over several websites. At the same time, picking just one website to turn into the DEFINITIVE central website is a very big commitment, because each existing site comes with its own limitations and possibilities. Any site can decide to arbitrarily suspend your account, and any site can abruptly change their interface. Of course, in the current times, any site can also suddenly go under, and in any of these cases building based on a limited, existing layout on any site is a massive gamble. Additionally, it's hard to find a site that lets you have the freedom to do EVERYTHING you might possibly need.
For the aforementioned reasons, I came to the conclusion a few months ago that if I make a centralized site, I will have to make it from scratch — that way I can actually make it have anything I want and everything I need, and even if the current host goes under, I will have the code. And here we are now, making that a reality! I haven't fully decided what exactly this site will have, but for the time being I will say that comics will stay on Comic Fury and most art will stay on Toyhouse and Sheezy. This site, in turn, will be a definitive link- and information hub which will hopefully pull everything in one place. I will be working to implement a wiki of sorts, a news feed (you're looking at it!), and hopefully RSS functionality.
Hope everyone's as excited for this as I am!