Arthur Becomes: The Magician [BEHIND THE SCENES] (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Been a while since I did some proper behind the scenes stuff for any of my vids, so I thought I'd do one here for The Magician. Hopefully some of this is at least kind of interesting.

So, a month before I even started thinking about The Magician, I announced that chapter 4 would follow The Survivor through a community post on YT. Following that, was the first Survivor stream over on Twitch - a stream that didn't go so well. For whatever reason, streaming and recording Red Dead 2 at the same time has not agreed with my PC for a while now, and the worst example of this is the complete loss of the first Survivor stream (the recording basically just got turned into a couple frames every 10 minutes). On top of this, just after the announcement, I started to realise how much better suited The Survivor would be to chapter 5. Even my first idea of The Survivor (which you can see in the intro to Arthur Becomes) is on Guarma. I have no clue why I jumped at the chance to do it in Saint Denis, but anyway. A combination of tech issues and a chance to have the characters fit better thematically with their given chapters convinced me to delay The Survivor and select a different challenge for chapter 4. 

The Magician almost wasn't going to happen because I was on the cusp of getting another idea (The Wildman) to work. The Wildman was basically going to include a pack of wolves that would follow and protect Arthur in combat, starting with just one wolf and gradually increasing in number with every completed mission. This idea ultimately fell through because after a while, the wolves would either abandon Arthur or revert to attacking him despite having them set as bodyguard peds. It was also pretty much impossible to prevent them from attacking allied NPCs, which would cause constant mission fails. In the end, I'm pretty glad this idea fell through, because the novelty wasn't quite interesting enough to last an entire chapter in the post-narration style I felt like doing.

The Wildman idea didn't completely die here, though. I liked the novelty of having a bunch of bodyguard peds basically carrying Arthur through the chapter, and I liked the idea of the bodyguard posse growing larger in numbers with every mission. Instead of using wolves (which are coded to react to humans differently than human NPCs, hence the clash of fleeing and attacking stuff) I decided to use chelonians as my bodyguards. This would transform The Wildman concept into The Leader, basically having Arthur be the head of an ever-expanding cult. I don't have any actual screenshots of this either, but I did take some photos on my phone to show my girlfriend because I am an old man. (images 3, 4 and 5)

In the end, I had some more boring tech issues with The Leader, which eventually lead me to abandon the idea (for now) and move onto chaos mod and The Magician. 

There are quite a lot of little cinematics that I never ended up using for The Magician, most notably from his little intro. Originally, instead of coughing and exploding, he was going to vomit and explode. Before that, he was going to vomit and have a bear spawn behind him, but I couldn't get the bear to behave the way I wanted him to for the shot. Rockstar has essentially made my life a living hell when it comes to cinematics because they are yet to release the Rockstar Editor. Can I get a "Not cool, Rockstar" in the chat please? (image 6)

That's about it for now, I think. Let me know if any of you are interested in seeing some of those cinematics - I might start posting them as unlisted videos that only Patrons can watch on my second channel. 

As always, thank you all for the continuous support despite the long gaps between vids. It means a lot to me. Take care, cheers.