Sun is shining, snow is melting and today I saw a pair of Black-billed Magpies picking up twigs and gauging their quality #birds 🌿

so leon s kennedy am i right

Give my regards to your god // #ResidentEvil #RE4 #leonkennedy

Freaktimus pops out whenever Op had a stressful day.

llies on the floor, dying

they make me so frikking SICK

i got so hard i passed out

Anyways more human formers!! Featuring my favorite grumpy old medic #ratchet #drift #megatron #transformers

animals of various shapes

🏃

hhihiihihhi 🚶

waw

ESスタ

That's a hindsight thing, though, as again the cut to reactivity over the time jumps came late. Outside of that, maybe letting the player give him back to Danarius? Poor shock value and a waste of resources because almost nobody took the option. Good evil options are ones that are tempting to take.

Overall, Fenris turned out better than he had any right to, considering the rocky start. He had a lot of soul, a vulnerability forged by pain that struck a chord with a lot of players, and I'm glad. Do I regret anything? Probably having him live in a corpse-filled mansion that would never update.

And Gideon Emery was a delight, as it turned out. Consummate professional, and that lovely gravel in his voice... good god. Bite the knuckles. There was a struggle to find the voice at the outset where I did my best not to say "just pls do Balthier" but he found Fenris on his own and it was amazing.

It gave me the center of his story I was missing, but wow was it uncomfortable. In a good way, maybe. I likely wouldn't have, if I hadn't been so desperate. In a way, I think DA2 had some of our best writing *because* of the timeline. It was raw, with little time to sand down the interesting parts.

I did know trauma, however. How it can eat you up. How the hate and resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. How it can infect your relationships. Fenris's trauma isn't my trauma, obviously, but here I dipped into a more personal part of myself than I'd ever done before.

I struggled, at first. It was hard to get away from "Fenris hates everything, all the time". It felt very one-note, and I didn't know where to take him. My third clue, I guess. I also wasn't sure if I was the right person to write a former slave. I did know that couldn't be the center of his story.

Why? You can't make a player care about the world, but you can make them care about characters who care about the world. It's the easiest way to provide hooks into a conflict, outside of it knocking on the player's door. Heck, it's probably better than that. Players will burn the world for approval.

The way we'd approach making the followers is brainstorming a list of concepts covering first the array of gameplay classes (and sub-classes) and then making sure they each have some skin in the game when it came to the story's conflicts - ideally having characters on both sides of the major ones.

CHARACTERS - DAY SIX: Fenris Now, DA2 is a story all on its own but I'm not going to go there other than to sum it up as "we had just over a year and a half to make this". It's why I only wrote one follower, Fenris, and although it'll make his fans mad: I probably shouldn't have. Let me explain.

We brought Steve in "just to try out", and he pulled it off. Even the "frog time" line, which (seriously) nobody else could. And when he got to the romantic lines, Steve's voice turned into pure butter without, again, sliding into "oh, he's slightly creepy". Both Caroline and I were sold.

Casting Alistair was SUCH a chore. He required a weird mix of devilish charm, but with enough sincerity and adorkableness it didn't come off as smarmy. Every audition went full smarm... until Steve Valentine up and appeared out of nowhere. In the midst of a batch of audition files, there he was.

That was the new Alistair: a more useful and likeable yet equally dorky version of Xander. We had very strict rules in DA about language: no modern speech styles, colloquialisms, any words that came into use in our world after 1900 got severe side eye... but Alistair? Alistair got a blanket pass.

CHARACTERS - DAY FOUR: Alistair Ah, Alistair. Depending on who you ask, he's the adorable woobie with the biggest heart or the irritating, over-used man-child. Yes, he is indeed all of those things. Good characters have flaws to go with their virtues. Ugly spots. That is literally their humanity.

I also knew where Morrigan was right and very wrong about her. Misconceptions of the truth are built into DA's foundation, and they were fundamental to this mother-daughter relationship I was building. Like many seeds I'd put in the world, however, I had no idea whether I'd ever get to explore it.

I had a conception of who Flemeth was, and why, right from the very start. Her creation went hand in hand with Morrigan, as a being whose thirst for retribution hundreds of years ago attracted an entity (slight confession: I didn't know Mythal specifically, at the time, "an elven god" was enough).

Why are they a type? I... don't know, honestly. I guess I have a feeling that older men fade, they strive to regain their youth or establish a legacy and we've seen that story a thousand times, but older women? They become free to become something new. I guess I see so many possibilities in that.

WIFE

CHARACTERS - DAY THREE: Flemeth I have a type. I admit it. There are certain wells I can return to repeatedly and always find something new to explore. One of them is older female characters. Mike used to rib me about it. Consider Wynne. Meredith. Genevieve. And, of course, the biggie: Flemeth.

And, man, she killed with that performance! Kate, too, but I'll get to her later. Claudia dug down, and that scene where Morrigan tells Flemeth she'll never be the mother Flemeth was to her? That came from someplace very raw. It was devastating to witness in the booth. There were tears all around.

Thus began a feverish three days where I wrote probably the most complicated scene of my career: Morrigan's reckoning with Flemeth in DAI and the fallout after. Three different versions (OGB Kieran, non-OGB Kieran, and no Kieran), each with branching for other choices (like the Well of Sorrows). 🤪

CHARACTERS - DAY ONE: Morrigan Morrigan began, waaaay back, as a bit of Morgan le Fey (hence the Dark Ritual) mixed with Delirium from Sandman. The Delirium elements subsided into more of a weird cadence of speech as my idea of Morrigan solidified - more cynical, wanting to connect but unable to. 🧵

very old drawing- table megs #transformers #maccadams

This reminds me a little of Mel Brooks dealing with studio notes.

Today is the only day you can rt this

After lying around untouched for over 20 years, I finally tried out my ancient set of colored pencils. And now I’m wondering why I didn’t use them for so long - I love drawing with these!

#transformers #fanart #2danimation Somebody to blame

currently doing a 20% VDay sale on this ‘til Feb 14, in case you wanted to treat yourself or a lover with one 🥀

never underestimate the power of a good fucking pdf converter

‘Lord Of The Rings’ Reader Can’t Believe How Long It Taking Sam And Frodo To Fuck https://theonion.com/lord-of-the-rings-reader-cant-believe-how-long-it-taking-sam-and-frodo-to-fuck/

fun part of getting a new toy is getting to draw it

If you see this, post a character that starts with G. Grunt 💥

ships afloat (Comm for the extra wonderful @captaincharlemagne.bsky.social and @sonotthekraken.bsky.social, who both once made me cry a little and got makeup on my shirt.) #ofmd #OurFlagMeansDeath

My favorite trio #megatron #rodimus #ultramagnus #mtmte #maccadam #transformers

your crazy ass stupid post just fucked up the whole world . hope it was worth the likes. hope youre enjoying the clicks

cywhirlgate<3