Searching High and Leaux

Get it? If you're French, "Leaux" is pronounced like "Low?" Punny!

Sorry. o.o

If you've been following my blog you may or may not have figured out that I'm mildly obsessed with the TCAST download counter. (We've hit the 3000 milestone, guys! 8D) Ok, so I'm not like obsessed, but I do check it every once in a while and squeal and run around the house until someone hits me with a firehose. Ok, I'm kind of obsessed.

My point being, a lot of people have played TCAST. But I want to talk about someone who hasn't played TCAST. And may not even know TCAST exists.

Namely, the person who drew that picture right there.

Yeah, that's right, Leaux, the incredibly talented lineartist who is massively responsible for the positive reaction TCAST has, has not played TCAST. Or, if she has, (I'm not even definitively sure she is a she, but I'll just call her that for convenience) she hasn't mentioned it to me. This isn't because we fought or anything, it's because she disappeared into the internet.

She appeared about as suddenly as she disappeared. Out of nowhere, her first post on the LemmaSoft forums was this in the TCAST WIP thread: "Uh hi, if you stil need volunteers for art. . .
uh here's a link to something I did:"

At which point I was like, IF I DIDN'T NEED ART VOLUNTEERS I DO NOW, DAMMIT! COME WITH ME AND BE MY BRIDE-ARTIST!

Except I didn't say that, because when I'm asking people to do stuff for me, I try not to be creepy.

Leaux is not only talented, she worked quickly, was flexible, and took direction well. Though she's clearly a great colorist, I just had her do the lineart because I had other people lined up to do the colorart. In my imagination, I thought more people doing less work would be less stressful on them and take less time. In reality it meant I lost several colorists and was constantly chasing after new ones. But oh well.


The coloring ended up taking an extra six months after Leaux finished the lineart. We never really talked outside of the art. After she finished, she vanished off of the Lemmasoft forums and never responded to any of the e-mails I sent her. So there was a six month gap between when she was last heard from and when TCAST was finally released.

I conducted a mini-campaign to find her again, but without any success. The user with the name "Leaux" on deviantart is someone else, and Google is being an epic fail.

I just hope that wherever she is, she doesn't think of the effort she put into the game as wasted.
Because every time that download counter ticks, another person has spent an hour enjoying her work.

P.S. I haven't totally ruled out the possibility that she's an angel. o.o