[Coldsaturn]

We've been getting backstage info and I so love how intentional everything is. It's so interesting to read how deliberate the creation of the lads was so that the players would get emotionally attached to them, and that it was all about the gap between the familiar and the unknown. Like, yes, it's like that in every fandom too, and it's solid advice for developing and writing characters in general.

What Love and Deepspace's Art Director Knows About Making You Fall in Love

The Plushie Game meta

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A few extracts: 

Feng’s argument is essentially: contrast gives you novelty, and novelty begets attraction. The familiarity of a recognizable archetype draws you in (”I know this type”). The unexpected contradiction within it holds you (”but I’ve never seen them do that“). The gap between what you expect and what you get is where the emotional charge lives.

And that charge, when designed well, has a kind of dramatic pull that keeps expanding. A multidimensional gentleness pulls harder than a simple gentleness. A character who is cold but capable of warmth has a wider emotional range, and that range is both the artistic challenge and the commercial engine.

What you’re really trying to capture is the experience of real human contradiction — being complicated, containing multitudes, being one thing and its opposite — and make it readable through design. Because that’s what makes a character feel real.

Not perfection. Not just consistency. Contradiction.

Love and Deepspace answers this differently for each character. Xavier’s encounter feels like starlight and quiet devotion. Rafayel’s feels like standing at the edge of the ocean; beautiful and slightly dangerous. Zayne’s feels like winter warming from the inside. Sylus’s feels like overwhelming darkness and strength that chooses to be gentle. Caleb’s feels like sunlight you thought you’d lost, returning.

These aren’t aesthetic preferences. They’re emotional blueprints. Every design decision flows from the feeling, not the other way around.

[Coldsaturn]

The LI's attack power has a chance to go up during battles after MC is hit. He can literally go a bit berserk because you're hurt

[ChicletPrime]

just a note that i went and read alllll of this when you posted it and then completely forgot to comment. part of it is that I usually check the forum while I'm at work and sometimes i get interrupted with phone calls and stuff and then forget to come back and the other part is that my brain sucks and i think of stuff I wanna reply back with and then my brain thinks "yup, commentary complete" and i never actually, you know, write it down for YOU.

i really liked the walkthrough they gave on the designs for the Spring Fling costumes (or whatever it was actually called) with the flowers and the chiffon gear. The commentary about Xayne's lace/pearl choker was particularly eye opening.