#behind the scenes thoughts

[lilyseleneluna]

Behind the scenes commentary on the Maiden Chapter 1

Disclaimer: my thoughts here aren't canon to the fic universe unless I write them into the story

Like I said, I actually pre-wrote Family Sticks Together until Act 4 bc I was on a writing binge. I've been taking a break for like a month and then inspiration struck! LOL 😂

Tbh I never intended to write about Jeanne bc idk how she and Arthur would somehow become friends. But as I thought about it more, I realised that she's gonna play a role in the main fic later.

And also it would be fun to explore the lives of other side characters bc they deserve it. Especially all these women in history, who Arthur changes their lives for the better.

So I'm just gonna churn out really short fics about these side characters, but they'll updated like every few weeks bc life is crazy lmao.

Chapter titles will all be quotes from Joan of Arc herself. This IS her story. 😌

As we all know from Rónán's and Arthur's convo, Apollo is Jeanne's father, he pleads with Arthur to spare her life, Jeanne faints at news of her heritage, she becomes friends with Arthur, she swears an oath not to raise arms against England for perpetuity, and she joins the hunters of Artemis.

So how does that happen?

The first chapter mainly talks about Jeanne's life up to the execution.

Apollo doesn't actually show up in the fic but his presence is felt throughout the story. Jeanne actually takes after him a lot. She has his face, his temper, his curls, his dark side, his wit, his amazing talking skills, etc. 🙃

There's a reason he's never showed in her life and I'll explain later.

Historically, Jeanne was on bad terms with her family. I'm taking creative liberties here and using that tension bc she is a bastard. They weren't abusive or anything, but they did NOT like her.

HELP! ARTHUR CANNOT STOP BEING AN ELDRITCH LITTLE SHIT! Istg, this boy freaks people for fun. He's such a little wet rat bastard. 💀

France and Jeanne are buddies that throw shade at courtiers they don't like. Ofc now they've been torn apart so that's gonna be fun to unpack.

I've tried to imply it throughout the chapter, but idk how successful I was. Jeanne actually has a lot of built-up anger. She's angry at a lot of people, but she only made her peace with it bc she was about to die. Now that she's not well...💀

I keep bringing up the number seven in the fic bc it's Apollo's sacred number. Also three is an important number for the Greeks so that keeps getting mentioned as well. ☀️

Arthur's definitely not allowing Jeanne to be raped in this verse. And the guards are 100% loyal to him. The English have been conditioned too thoroughly to respect his orders (also the geas is scary asf) to go against him.

THIS FAMILY IS SO UNSERIOUS. LIKE THEY ARE CONDUCTING A VERY SERIOUS RESCUE MISSION AND CHOOSE TO HAVE A CAT FIGHT IN THE MIDDLE! 🤡

Ironically, it makes Jeanne less wary bc they're acting like normal siblings and not assholes. So good for them.

Jeanne's been repressing her memories bc she's stubborn. She's been in denial for her whole life and suddenly the truth smacks her in the face.

That's how she faints LMAO.

[lesbianelsas]

alicent + using viserys as a proxy

Is it the King's command? Yes, but it n- - Then at once, Your Grace. But it needn't be. None of this needs be this way in truth, Rhaenyra.

[owllooker]

That’s how I was expecting the interview between Pearl and HotGuy to go in Hotguy Comic Zine /j

[sonofcelluloid]

Daniel, WAKE UP. Oh, hush, it’s only me, your lover. I simply need your credit card. NOW. Dear, don’t play naive. You know very well I would not ask if I’d not already reached my daily limits. Never mind that, we must make haste! My prized Blade Runner Volume 2 rare Rachael action figure set is being bid upon on the Electronic Bay as we speak! No one else will value her like I will, you see. It comes with two outfits and includes her iconic three tiered blue brocade faux fur coat! There’s a tiny prop cigarette, Daniel! At the current $2,990, it’s a steal! I am not yelling. I’m impassioned. For if you let her slip from my grasp I will never ever forgive you. I’ll weep endlessly

[quicksilversnails]

Took some notes from the Wild Life retrospective episode of the Imp & Skizz podcast featuring Grian because I thought the behind the scenes info was really interesting!

(3:15) The wild cards were all kept totally secret from the players (apart from Grian), with the exception of the superpowers and finale (as they required the players to set keybinds)

(3:45) The players were given files containing the required mods each week, which were named things like "creeper rain" to throw them off

(4:12) Wild cards were a combination of data packs and mods

(4:38) Grian told them not to read the folder name to avoid spoilers (which is kind of impossible), so everyone fully believed there would be creeper rain lol. Grian was saying it in jest but everyone took it seriously and were apologetic about having seen it, to which Grian told them not to worry

(6:58) Grian originally contacted a data pack dev called Brace for help with programming the wild cards. Some, like the shrinking/growing could be achieved with minecraft attributes, but the snails were too janky and unusable. Grian still liked the idea though, so he reached out to mod developers Henkelmax and Breadloaf, who designed the pathfinding/behaviour from scratch

(8:49) They had a debugging mode used to test the pathfinding of the snails, shown in the podcast and in Grian's credits

(10:09) Grian wants most of the credit to go to the development team and artists, as he was mostly in charge of ideas & organization!

(10:39) Grian's only regret with the snails was that they were too fast in session 3, leading to unexpectedly many deaths. They were apparently not so difficult to get away from during testing, but perhaps the testers were more used to them than the players were

(11:44) Grian: "We did develop to the lowest common denominator" ie. prioritizing how players would struggle over how worrying about if players would do too well

(12:56) Oli's voice for the snails was iconic. It cost Impulse a life because he intentionally stayed closer to it to hear the voice lol

(13:42) Danny was in charge of the snail models and animations

(14:11) During testing, the snails just sounded like Oli, which made it feel weird. They pitched up his voice so that it'd be less immediately recognizable

(15:18) The snails' jumping attack was meant to be clearly telegraphed: they would stop, wiggle, make a "ooeee" sound before jumping. Many players had their friendly creatures volume turned very low/off (as cows and other mobs are loud), which made this attack much less obvious for them

(16:57) The growing/shrinking had the least testing done for it, as it was the simplest conceptually and to program. This meant that the falling off of blocks due to the shrinking hitboxes wasn't anticipated

(17:55) Before the 1st session, Grian told them that he didn't think anyone would die to the wild card. Pearl's death made Grian pretty nervous, as he didn't want everyone dying too early in the season

(19:29) 6 lives were given, knowing that many of the death to the wild cards were unexpected/unfair. The intent was for ~3 lives to be allocated for wild cards, and ~3 for PvP.

(21:13) The developers were all fans of the Life Series!

(22:43) The shrinking/growing was intentionally pretty simple to ease players/viewers into the concept and build up toward more dramatic wild cards like the snails

(25:38) In the hunger episode, Grian didn't know which foods would be good

(25:58) Grian thinks that "it's unfair that Grian already knows everything" is valid criticism, but that it's important for him to be involved with the ideas. Having someone else do that is like having someone else record his videos: Life Series is his brainchild

(26:35) Well before the season began, while they were still developing the concept, Grian asked the other players for wild card ideas that would meet a few criteria. All of them ended up being unused for one reason or another. Impulse thinks his ideas were very "inside the box" because he was viewing things through what was possible in vanilla Minecraft. His idea was to have a scavenger hunt where the players would search to find a relic. The first person to find it would get a buff. Skizz's idea was for every player to turn into a random passive mob for every given interval of time. They would have to find every other player of the same mob type as them or else the whole group loses a life.

(29:44) The food qualities were weighted by the rarity of the item, so very common blocks like dirt and cobblestone would never give anything good. The other items were randomly selected

(30:23) Regular blocks/items cannot be made edible normally, so they had to circumvent that and custom code a fix for items not stacking correctly

(32:41) While a lot of players do want to win, the main priority is creating entertainment, which prioritizes playing recklessly

(33:20) The food wild card wasn't included in the finale because it would've felt like "too much". There was a higher risk of technical issues since it changed the data values of items, and Grian didn't want someone's last death to be because they ate their sword. In his mind, it was a good and fun wild card, but didn't need to be repeated in the finale. Impulse points out that they all would have collected more rare items by that point, removing the incentive to search for blocks to eat

(33:46) The wild cards in the finale were nerfed from their original sessions. The shrinking/growing had a smaller height range, the snails moved slower, etc.

(36:21) The personalized snail skins were a late addition by Danny, who made 18 skins very quickly

(36:49) Grian did not anticipate the snails becoming as popular with fans as they were. After the session released, they had the idea to release the snail merchandise, which directly funded the rest of the season

(39:20) Grian spent what "felt like every day" testing with the developers. They'd record the sessions on Tuesdays, meet up with the dev team, talk about what need to be done, testing, bugs, etc, edit and upload on Saturday, and would get a few days grace before starting again

(40:01) After the snail session, Grian was worried that the season would be very short due to all the deaths. They were considering toning down the later wild cards but ultimately didn't change them too much

(40:36) The time wild card was carefully balanced. If it had gone even a little faster, many players likely would have died because they wouldn't have time to react to threats like baby zombies or creepers.

(40:57) While sessions normally run for a variable amount of time, session 4 was hardcoded at 2 hours. Grian ended the session ~10 minutes early, just after they hit max speed, because he felt like things were getting dicey

(42:46) When the wild card first activates, it looks a lot like the server had frozen or crashed. Grian told the players before the session started that it would look like the game was broken, but that it isn't broken. Skizz tabbed out anyway and missed the beginning 😔

(43:30) Having the rain start just as the wild card began was a good visual indicator of time slowing down. This was a suggestion from the dev team (probably Brace)

(44:41) Impulse and Grian "cheesed" the end of the session by going branch mining. Grian wanted players to take advantage of the wild cards (eg. mining quickly, helping to kill someone), and not have them just be an annoyance.

(45:30) Keeping the client and server-side time stay in sync was challenging. The sky's motion was changed to be smoother on client-side. The players were also not as fast as the server (around 2x faster), the server was going faster than that, and the time of day was even faster

(46:56) The sounds were pitched up/down based on the speed to add to the effect

(27:46) In testing, if the players were made 7x faster, it would be basically unplayable, which was why it was capped at 2x speed. This made mobs very dangerous, as they were now faster than players and could catch up to you and kill you easily

(49:01) On several occasions, they had to extend the fuse duration of creepers to make them more fair. In the time session, their speed was only increased by ~10%

(49:39) Usually, Grian was the one to test the wild cards and notice when things like creeper speed would be an issue, since he was the one with experience making videos

(50:50) A challenge with balancing wild cards is accounting for the playstyles of so many players: reckless players like Scar and Skizz, "kind and gentle" players like Bigb who would stay off to the sides, and "the sweat squad" (Scott, Impulse) who play very cautiously

(52:48) Trivia Bot was the only wild card that was not planned in advance. Grian was struggling to come up with a wild card for that episode, and wanted to have a wild card available that could give people lives in case many people died to early wild cards without it feeling cheap.

(53:33) Trivia seemed a little boring on its face, so presentation was essential

(54:34) This one made Grian the most stressed due to all the moving parts involved in making it (coding and pathfinding mostly by Henkelmax, visuals by Hoffen, audio/music, questions)

(55:08) Trivia Bot's design was based on Grumbot and Mettaton from Undertale. Hoffen drew concept art shown in the video

(58:32) They show Trivia Bot's custom animation for becoming a snail and it's really cool

(59:12) The music was the most stressful part of the project. Grian spent 2-3 days looking through Epidemic Sounds for a Trivia Bot theme song and couldn't find anything good. He commissioned Zera @hopepetal for a theme song, which is played in the podcast. However, Grian realized he needed a full audio package, so he commissioned Oli late in development, who created the final soundtrack and many audio variations

(1:01:38) Grian wants to send appreciation for everyone who worked on the project, even if their work ultimately went unused

(1:02:58) Skizz was happy to give back however he could by staying on standby in the final episode as a zombie, as the players were able to "reap all the benefits" of the hard work of the development team

(1:05:21) Grian didn't know any of the trivia questions beforehand, which were done by fans of the series. The goal was for ~50% of the questions to be answered correctly, which was approximately met

(1:07:11) Players couldn't get questions about themselves because it would be too easy. This would encourage players to leave their bot, allowing other players to mess with them

(1:07:57) Grian felt a little left out from the discovery element of the wild cards, and decided to mess with Scar by hiding his bot. He wasn't expecting Scar to die from it, and could tell that he was genuinely a little upset by it. Grian felt bad about it, which led to a genuine in-game alliance between them

(1:12:32) Grian was very close to letting Trivia Bot give lives as rewards, but decided it would feel too cheap

(1:14:38) Mob swap was slightly toned down, with more camels and sniffers spawning

(1:15:07) Evokers didn't drop totems anymore. Instead, there was a minuscule chance a warden or wither would spawn, which would drop a totem if killed. Grian was a little disappointed that the warden got cheesed in the end

(1:17:45) Having the mobs start passive and turn hostile was mostly for the presentation, building anticipation, and so players could predict where mobs would spawn and react accordingly, making things feel less unfair

(1:20:32) There was no superpower made for Skizz (or Mumbo presumably)

(1:20:38) The superpowers were another late addition. There was a large design doc where Grian created all the powers, which were handed over to Henkelmax and completed over 4 days

(1:21:42) Grian avoided superpowers involving strength, that could cause someone to die easily. Most of the powers were social or movement-based, which couldn't be used for offence as easily

(1:22:25) Some powers were randomly assigned, others weren't. Impulse's was random. Cleo's, Bigb's, Lizzie's, Grian's were assigned.

(1:24:25) Grian gave himself the mimic because it could easily backfire (like in Grian's fall damage death), and because it would've been confusing for a player who wasn't aware of the other powers. They likely would've spent the episode just figuring out how everything worked and not actually using the power to its best ability

Lots of discussion about the superpowers and how they interacted in the episode itself, go watch if you're interested :)

(1:33:38) Talk on how the series "standard" rules evolved since 3rd Life. There was no keep inventory, and no restrictions on enchanting levels or potions, which created slow or unbalanced fights

(1:36:23) 3rd Life was designed to be an experimental series, which made Grian eager to improve it. For example, some people just weren't dying in 3L, leading to the boogeyman in LL, and so on

(1:37:17) The goal with the seasons isn't to one-up the previous one, but to create a different experience every time, which keeps things engaging for the creators

(1:38:31) At the end of each session, Grian would ask the group if they had fun and how they felt about the wild cards. According the Skizz, the answer was "a resounding yes"

(1:39:08) Grian had moments throughout the season where he personally felt like things didn't go well for him, and was anxious for the rest of the group's episodes. Things worked out while editing the raw footage, though. His issues were never with the wild cards themselves, but his own actions (traps not working, spending too long branch mining), but would always find funny moments in his footage

(1:43:41) Everyone in the Life Series cast genuinely likes and genuinely respects everybody else in the group. This allows them to make the show and get mad at each other, because they know it's all just in-character

(1:44:50) It'd be hard to top Wild Life in spectacle, and Grian doesn't want to start an arms race with himself. The next season could potentially be closer to 3rd Life, but Grian's not sure yet. For Grian, Wild Life was the most enjoyable

(1:45:20) Grian: "As long as people keep enjoying [the Life Series] then I'd love to keep doing it"

(1:49:35) With the finale, Grian knew how the wild cards played out the previous sessions and was able to adjust them

(1:49:56) Grian's goal was to create safe chaos where everyone knew what was happening and wouldn't die to them, which didn't go entirely to plan. The snails were 60% of their original speed and people still died

(1:51:03) Grian made a precise timeline of when each wild card would start/stop, it wasn't randomized.

(1:54:16) All the superpowers were randomized, with Bdubs' power being removed from circulation because it didn't have much use in a finale setting

(1:56:10) It was important for Grian that in the final moments, the wild cards were removed, so there were no interruptions. The timing worked out well because there were a few people left and it ended within ~10 minutes (this implies that the change wasn't based on # of players alive, as people had speculated based on Gem's death)

(1:58:48) The players all randomly switched to zombie skins throughout the session to mess with people on NameMC. Well-played :)

[go-see-a-starwar]

Hayden Christensen + Natalie Portman

Star Wars Episode II Love Featurette

[demaparbat-hp]

Oh, Lala...

[sadexecutivelove]

Sofia Coppola sleeping on the set of Marie Antoinette (2006)

[eggsdrawings]

the shared crush crisis

part two!!

[qiuing]

Secrets

[rayman-raymania]

Happy Holidays from the boys!

Even if I couldn’t get much up this year, here’s a little something for the blog! Genuinely had fun drawing them all again! Love the more winter themed drawings I did before so I’m very happy with this set!

All three as an alt!

[mintypsii]

mini sanusos 🤫🤫

[xia0ming56]

Gregors canto being the first of all the sinners makes me so sad for him bc bro was really gg thru it but thr was barely any camaraderie among the sinners since they js met and no one cared enough to rly gaf..

n then thr was the whole double whammy with yuris death on top (which is even worse considering gregor said that grete was around her age)

and then the TripLe whammy whr we meet the whole villain gang for the first time and everyones finding out that smone they were close to is part of that gang

so gregors js thr seeing his abusive mom after being thrown back into the battlefield like

N no one rly notices😭 and even after the canto finishes they get scolded by verg and dante wasnt rly experienced enough to know how to cheer everyone up (cant blame them since they literally had their head replaced like a day ago) and the other sinners were grieving yuris loss so he js sits on his own seat n stays quiet HE DOESN EVEN CRY😭😭😭😭😭

[pesky--dust]

Everyone knows about the existence of these Hannibal notes on Will, right?

I would like to talk about this particular passage:

We have information that Will's father has HTN and his mother is monogamous with husband and married with 2 (TWO) children, which would mean that Will has siblings???

[galedekarios]

"It creates a distinct visual motif not found in other romances that captures the connection between the two characters while feeling distinctly not of this world."

"We wanted this to feel like Gale and their partner were really merging into one, new, perfectly harmonious being."

[source]

[mirrorball-leclerc]

the hungarian gp is just the gift that keeps on giving isn’t it? because apparently logan sargeant and james vowels are no longer on speaking terms?