Nothing in this article is to be taken as canon to the rest of the world; it's merely here because I wanted to share it, and someone might be interested in hearing about past versions of this world.
Autea got its start from a dream I had in 2018; the main information that came from the dream was the general art style (pure black with, at the time, only blue as its color) and the main two characters, then dubbed Plant Boy and Spiky Boy. The characters were a part of a webcomic I was running on the website ChickenSmoothie, and one of the characters (the "plant boy") was owned by a friend of mine. At the time of the dream, I had only made two or three pages of the hypothetical webcomic, but one of the comments I got was "can't wait for chapter 15 where shelby gets depression for the second time and roams the land as an abomination." I guess it was supposed to be something about how the chapters would be so long that the story would be completely unrecognizable by that point? I really don't have a better guess there. As soon as I woke up, I knew I had to draw the guys from the dream and show them to my friend. The result of that was this:
Pretty quickly, I decided to redesign them to just, make them work better as character designs, I guess? The first real pass at their design was something like this:
And with that, we decided to start an RP with the two! Pretty quickly, I started adding on a large amount of lore that wasn't there in the original dream. The biggest part of this was the gods and magic system. The original list of gods went as such:
As one can see, a good few of these gods have remained in the pantheon til this day! Also, I went really hard in on the "one syllable only" for the gods for some reason. Probably just some lingering homestuck? Dunno. Anyway, a lot of these gods at this time were a lot less autean-y - for example, Rivest was a giant orange rat with a bunch of eyes, Rime was literally just a lavender fresno nightcrawler, Auth-Ael was a distorted mass of fog and tentacles with no distinctive face whatsoever, Silvact was a giant half-beetle half-elephant sort of creature, etc. Affic's been pretty much the same the whole time, though. Love that for him. The original RP lasted from March 2018 to August 2018, with responses on my end becoming increasingly less frequent as I suck at responding to RPs :P Then, in early 2019, I decided to reboot the world entirely.
To start off, a MASSIVE change in art style - Auteans looked like regular humans now! In fact, I'm pretty sure they just were humans at this point, I hadn't really quite concieved as auteans as a separate species yet. Most of the changes beyond that were brought in the form of the pantheon changing - here was the new layout:
Now, one might say, "Hey, shouldn't those last two gods be creation and destruction?" And, well, you have a point there, but I'm a nerd who likes computers so I was thinking more in the sense of "it's a lot more cost effective to just mark data as "able to be written over" rather than purging it entirely, so it's a lot easier to corrupt data than it is to outright destroy it." Is that just me? Probably. Anyway, the gods of Creation and Corruption in this world were actually meant to be Shelby and Flint from the original version of Autea, each given halves of the remaining soul of the mysterious Form god (Now known as the Husk God in the current incarnation of Autea). Also, I think I toyed with adding Time and Space gods? Look ma, more homestuck influence!
Man, until I was looking back through my notes, I completely FORGOT there even was an autea V3! I thought this one was v3! I didn't get very far in planning this one, though, so that's understandable. Look, here's all my notes about it right here:
... Man, for not a lot happening in this image, there sure is a lot happening in this image.
Welp, after that it's just the current incarnation of Autea! Hopefully this one sticks a bit better :P