What Is The Musing Mage?
The Musing Mage is a Twitch Witch with a critical eye and a passion for storytelling and lore.
She’s a streamer with an appreciation for well-made role-playing games, in-depth lore, and little patience for questionable game design.
And, rather proudly, the designer and illustrator of her entire emote collection.
The Beginning!
Streaming and entertaining others is something I’d been wanting to do for a long time, but struggled to find the time, energy, and courage to do. Mostly that last one, since if I’m properly motivated, I can find the energy to do just about anything.
But, like any budding streamer, one of the biggest challenges to face was nerves. Even now, that’s still one of the biggest struggles in putting myself out there. But the community I’ve been building, in all of their weird, lovable chaos, has shown me that there’s a place for everyone out there, so long as they’re willing to poke around to find their people.
Even if that means sending their people to the corner sometimes to think about whatever cringeworthy thing they’ve done.
Building the Present
While the initial focus of the channel has been on high fantasy RPGs, such as the Dragon Age series that we streaked on stream, we’ve begun expanding outwards thanks to the loving bullying we’ve received from our community.
Through community engagement, polls, and a generous gift from one of our community members, we’ve expanded from our plans of Dragon Age and The Elder Scrolls into Mass Effect, with our first Baldur’s Gate playthrough hitting us with plenty of lore and plenty of consequences as well.
Further community engagement has led to the creation of weekly segments for The Sims 4 and Crusader Kings, which our co-host and community pushed for by being sadistic chaos gremlins who want to see the world burn. Or, more likely, want to see me lose my mind trying to take over the medieval world.
Looking to the Future
My plans for the future of the channel involve an expansion into lore and game reviews based in my understanding or creative writing and game development. No game is perfect, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good games. And I want to give each game I play a fair shake. I will point out what I think is well done, I’ll point out what I would have done differently if I were on the writing team, and I will absolutely point out what would have made me send a game back to the programmers if I were a team lead in a studio. I’m looking at you, Mass Effect.
Which, of course, means that we’ll be doing lore videos! Yes, there are lore videos that exist for nearly every fandom, but with an eclectic combination of creative writing experience, education in history, training in game design, and a love of the overlooked stories of fictional worlds, my aim is to bring a fresh perspective to the way we look at stories. This ultimately led me into the world of scriptwriting, which I look forward to continuing to develop my skills in as I plot and plan out more videos in the future.
Here, you can find my thoughts on the games and franchises that we feature on stream, their virtues, pain points, and what I might have done differently.
Emotes and Story Gallery
Illustrated by Yours Truly
The Early Days of Twitch Emotes
I know that a lot of streamers tend to outsource the illustrating of their emotes to artists who specialize in them, and I understand that, I do.
But I was living the broke student life at the time, so commissioning emotes was financially out of the question.
Besides, I was studying game design and they were making us take illustration classes, so since I wasn’t too bad at using Adobe Illustrator, I decided that it might be a good idea to just start off by making my own emotes.
To start, I wanted a pretty simple selection. Mindy’s design, I got from an old assignment I did for my Digital Design Tools class, and the rest, I sort of tinkered with on my own until they looked right. My goal? To have a mascot, and emotes for healing, time running out, death, and victory.
Thus, my first emote series was born!
When the Chat Inspires
When I made Affiliate after 6 days, I realized that I now had to start thinking about more emotes. Suddenly I had more room to give viewers something to play with. Which, of course, meant that I needed ideas for new additions to the channel.
So, I first turned to things that had become channel jokes and memes. Like my propensity for being a loot goblin, or my chat’s habit of choosing violence first thing in the morning and being utterly ruthless towards poor, innocent mob monsters.
I also needed emotes for different emotional states. And thus the cheering, crying, and shiny emotes were born And, of course, since I couldn’t bear to have any emotes that weren’t utterly magical, I made sure that each and every one of them had a glow to them.
And lens flares. Probably enough lens flares to make my poor Photoshop instructor cry in despair. In fact, a soft gradient and copious lens flares are how I created the starry background you’ve been seeing this entire time.
Community and Viewer Requests
Sometimes, your community wants what they want and they will brook no dissent. That’s what I learned very quickly in my first few months on Twitch. Sometimes your community will have the most inspired ideas. Sometimes they’ll have the most unhinged ideas. And sometimes, their ideas will absolutely be both.
As part of my channel redeems, I allow viewers to redeem ten thousand channel points to have me make a custom emote of their choice to add to the channel. Which did help to fill the ranks of my channel emotes when a flurry of rapid support unlocked many an emote slot for us.
And thus, the viewer emotes were born!
As a result, we have added a Brazilian Mindy emote at the request of one of our dedicated Brazilian viewers. A raspberry with a witch’s hat emote at the request of one of our European viewers, a witch wolf emote at the request of one of our streamer friends, and both a baby Krogan and a Mabari emote at the request of the community at large to celebrate our love of Bioware games. And a lurking emote for those of our friends who requested another function emote for announcing their presence.
The Challenge
There came a time at which point I genuinely thought I might be in over my head when it came to making emotes for my channel. After all, I’ve always identified myself as a writer, not an artist. I do words, not pictures. I only do pictures if people (read: instructors) make me make pictures.
Listen, if I want to whinge a little on my own website, I will WHINGE on my website and there is NOTHING you can do about it!
Ahem.
I will admit, illustrating emotes was intimidating at first. I was always second-guessing proportions, lines, curves, everything. And don’t even get me started on how many ways I figured out how to avoid doing Mindy’s hands. Hands are HARD, especially in Illustrator where nothing quite looks right until it’s finished. And don’t get me started on the number of altered illustrations and different frames I had to make in order to animate my emotes. There were points at which I thought I was going to throw my tower across the room.
But I didn’t. I persevered, and here we are. It was an arduous learning curve, but one that, in retrospect, I’m glad that I put myself through. I have plans now to open up commissions for other streamers who may want emotes done for their channels, and I never would have had the courage to make that decision if it weren’t for the fact that I went through the process of making every single one of my own emotes by hand in Illustrator.
With some references, of course, I’m not a complete savage.
But it was definitely a learning experience and one that I truly feel was valuable for me and for my path forward as an artist of many stripes and talents. Even if some of those talents were ground out of me at two in the morning, staring at a computer screen and wondering what looks wrong with this picture.
At one point, I even taught myself how to make my GIFs transparent so that I could make better quality assets for my channel. But it did teach me how to use After Effects in ways that my classes never did. And I’m proud that I rose to the challenge and gave it my all. I’m very happy with how my emotes collection has expanded and evolved, and I look forward to seeing where my viewers take it in the future.
