✿ TF2 Episode Bonus page ✿

I have more WIP stuff to show for this episode because I tried not to delete as I went along so I can show more things in bonus pages! I'll try to be more mindful in the future!!



Here's some old story beats. This episode was actually supposed to be mostly focused on Open Fortress. When Manon starts explaining what TF2 is to the audience, Cybermare would have been like "fuck this" and then just talk about Open Fortress and rant about Valve. Problem with this first idea was that it felt too "venty" and really innacessible to people who don't know TF2 at all. It was funny to advertise "THE TF2 EPISODE!!" only to be about Open Fortress, but that only worked in concept. The point of LOVEWEB is to make the audience discover new things and explaining TF2 was a mandatory step before going into TF2 mods and the issue they ran into with Valve.
This was supposed to be a shorter episode but it was impossible to avoid expanding the scope without making an episode that'd be not good.
Already failed at trying to make shorter episodes since the Homestuck one lol!



Merc was also supposed to appear in the mario_kart map alongside with Manon and Cybermare. Then by the end episode, it'd cut to Merc running way too late towards the portal and going "damn" realising he's stuck in mario_kart. This was all simplified to him staying behind a computer screen because the episode kept expanding and I was trying to reduce the workload wherever I could.



Here's some concept art behind the merc! I still like how he looks on the left but it would have felt off in the show itself next to Cybermare and Manon.



Different little ideas for the thumbnail... It took a good amount of messing around to figure this one out.
It was also starting to get repetitive to have thumbnails always be "Manon happy and Cybermare sad" but it was unavoidable this time.



The bottom right one was the one that was I thought looked the coolest so here it is skecthed! The final thumbnail is referencing this artwork advertising TF2's Meet your match update with Heavy vs Pyro.



This release promo was inspired by TF2's update pages and the comic's brushwork, with the pose being the same as demoman and soldier's in TF2's love and war update page.

And as you can read on the promo, Manon is now played by playfulPretense! They were one of the candidates that were VERY CONSIDERED back when looking for VAs. And yeah, they're an perfect fit for the character!!

Before we start, This is the first episode to get a final audio touch up by NOMOIDA! Really makes the show sound more "professional". Idk how they do it, must be magic.



This whole intro was directed by my boyfriend Elliot!! The episode used to start with the wide shot of 2fort with Cybermare saying "Oh, you clicked the head, congrats". This machinima intro really helps hyping up the viewers and more slowly introduce Cybermare and what she's doing. He did all that and also recorded ALL of the in-game footage throughout the episode because I do not have the computer power to run Open Fortress/TF2 at max settings.
Elliot will know best how to explain this whole thing so take it away bunny boy!!

Having the opportunity to flex some of my machinima skills was a lot of fun. I used to do this sort of thing back then here and there, heavily inspired by giants of the scene like Red vs Blue (by Rooster Teeth) and Civil Protection (by Ross Scott) and a lot more I could name, all legendary in their own right. We were pretty limited here, as I had to work with the in-game settings, which really just involved lowering the FOV and making use of the softzoom mechanic to get a more "cinematic" look. Unfortunately, most of the shots after the first are still cameras instead of something more dynamic, as I had no means of smoothing out the mouse movement when looking around and that usually looks pretty jittery and bad without it - see Minecraft's cinematic camera mouse mode that a lot of people used back in the day (and probably still do now) to make machinima type stuff. Basically, we didn't have that, lol.

The way I went about recording this was getting a bunch of friends into a private server, very old fashioned machinima sorta stuff where I would noclip with my "cinematic" settings and direct them like actors. Obviously the whole intro is staged, not actual gameplay, but the goal was to make it look like actual gameplay - just a little more cinematic, or about as much as we could get away with in our limitations. We had a lot of shots that didn't make the cut, and all in all the whole recording session went on for about 4 hours if I remember correctly? And only about a minute or so ended up in the video (which was the intended time anyway, but it's always surprising just how long recording sessions can go on for.)

We tried quite a few different shots, a lot of which are lost now, but there were quite a few we were surprised to get on the first attempt:


That's verasimila on the right!

Once the whole action intro was recorded and done, we swapped to a separate map to record audio for when The Mercenary starts getting shot at during his interview. I wanted it to be authentic, so we went to the actual map Merc has his interview on, and had all the actors shoot their guns at varying intensity from all around the map. There's no footage or audio leftover from this really, but we do have this little clip from when we wrapped all the recording for that night:

And that's about it! I made sure to keep everything consistent throughout the rest of the vid too when it came to the Mercenaries, like when Cybermare is showing off how you can customize your character in the game. All those Mercs are the same ones you see in the intro!

Also I'm the one that shoots Mercenary during the interview. I got the canon first kill, just saying.

Since this video, I've taken on a role as Project Lead and Game Design for Open Fortress, which IS coming to Steam finally, so keep an eye out for that. Shadok mentions it later on in this page, and we're working hard, with an announcement planned pretty soon! You heard it here first (probably)!!



I forgot how high pitched Manon's voice used to be! It was definitely a good move from playfulPretense to propose a lower/calmer voice for Manon for the next episode.
Also Cybermare being an announcer in Open Fortress of course means there's a mod that adds Cybermare as an announcer for Open Fortress!! It was released as a WIP because this is a HUGE workload for Vera to record so many lines and it had to coincide with the release of the episode and the Open Fortress update. Will it ever get completed? Is Manonnikki ever gonna get an update? Homestuck part 2 when? idk!!!!!!!!!



Having the episode takes place in mario_kart was too good of an idea to pass up. Being able to take Manon and Cybermare and put them in specific things like a crazy custom TF2 map is the core of LOVEWEB and what sets it apart from everything else. This episode wouldn't have been the same at all if it happened inside where they usually live. And of course Manon's favorite TF2 map is one from the 2000s that's littered with old memes.



Yall don't realise but this episode was a GREENSCREEN HELL

The animation is overlaid on top of mario_kart recordings through the power of greenscreen BUT!! My usual video editing software does green screens pretty badly so I had to borrow a completely different software ONLY to make the greenscreen effect, and then re-render the shot to be re-added into my usual video editing software. This took what, 2 minutes per shot? it's not that bad right? I had to do this with like 100 shots so it took overall like 200 minutes aka more than 3 hours JUST to do the greenscreen effect on all shots.
It was NOT FUN. I don't plan on doing screens again until I migrate full-time to another video editing software that can take care of it.



Manon is really meant to represent a specific type of TF2 player. Naive and young, who only like this one FPS and only play on silly servers with alternative gamemodes and custom maps. It's rarer now but fans like that still exists! I used to be exactly like Manon during my first couple years on TF2 lol. It felt like I had to re-learn the game once I started playing how it's meant to be played.



What Cybermare says here is more so meant to be a reminder to viewers that LOVEWEB isn't about reviewing random media. A good amount of episode suggestions end up being "talk about this thing that I like" and that thing has no real connection to the internet aside from "It's hosted on the internet". Everything is hosted on the internet now so an indie game or show just getting popular online in no unique ways is not really interesting to cover on LOVEWEB.



Back when this episode released, TF2 was INFESTED with aimbots. Playing on Valve server was always ruined by them, because there's no moderation on them. Valve actually did something and as of writting this (March 2025), it's no longer an issue! Hopefully it never becomes an issue ever again!



Hell yeah Merc! Of course voice acted by his actual VA Stachekip! I gave basic directions to Stachekip about how the character's lines should go and he's the one who wrote Merc! With that kind of cameo I'd always prefer that the actual writers of the character write them. It makes them feel way more authentic than anything I could do (and it gives me less work so I can focus on other things teehee).



Well something did happen eventually! 8 months after the episode released, Valve released the TF2 source code and personally contacted Elliot to bring the game to Steam!! How crazy is that!! I remember while working on this episode that I was worried something like that would happen and the entire narrative of the video would be outdated and the episode scrapped lol. This episode wouldn't have had its strenght without the situation at the time where Valve neglected mods and its own game. Thankfully things are a lot better now! And while it's awesome that the bot crisis and mod issues got eventually resolved, I'm still glad the episode didn't get outdated too quickly lol. It would have been depressing if all that work went to waste.



The episode didn't have time to explain what speculative work is for pacing reasons. It would have been interesting to tackle because I don't think most people know what it is? It's just when a company does a public "contest" that's basically asking for free labor. Like "Hey everyone new contest where the best new logo for the company wins 1000€!!". This is disrespectful to everyone who's gonna work to try to win and get nothing. It's more ethical to hire artists so they can get paid for their work and also have the benefits that comes with having a proper job. Valve does something similar and just lets the TF2 commnunity crank out a ton of free content for them and all they gotta do is pick what they like and give a percentage of the update's revenue to the creators. It's unethical and disrespectful towards the work of artists..



This bit had to be shoved in here because this happened while the episode was being made and nearing completion. That's the issue with wanting to talk about something even mildly topical when episodes take so long...



Oh yeah this also happened while the episode was well on its way, no wonder I was so worried about the episode getting completely outdated lol.



I really like this quiet moment spent with Cybermare. Especially when it's a genuine moment spent in such a silly place lol.



This emotional moment is important to the characters but again, I can't help but think it's really funny to have this happen in mario_kart. This specific shot showing the Lucky Star dance was me pointing out at the absurdity of the location while something heartfelt is happening. This is still meant to be taken seriously in the end so there's nothing explicit pointing out that joke. It's only a joke to me lol. It warms my heart to see so many comments of TF2 players resonating with this moment ALONGSIDE developing Manon and Cybermare's relationship. TF2 fans who don't know LOVEWEB and long-time LOVEWEB fans who don't care about TF2 both get something out of this!! Yay!!
Also special shoutout to Karru for helping make this moment to feel more natural, writing that kind of dialogue isn't my forte.




This lil doodle is something I drew a whiile ago, I don't remember when. I have lots of LOVEWEB doodles in my folders showing these kind of one off interactions that I'd like to explore in the show. And the conflic and resolution in this episode was the perfect time for this one. This interaction was inspired by a comic showing the autism creature and adhd creature where the adhd creature wants to hug autism creature but they don't like physical contact so adhd creature resorts to showing affection through hugging a pillow. It made me think about how Cybermare doesn't like physical contact and hugging a pillow sounds like a sweet thing Manon would do. Btw do not extrapolate from this that canonically Cybermare is autistic and Manon has ADHD!! It's fine if you find comfort in thinking they're that, but I'm not personally comfortable coming out saying one of my character has this or that neurodevelopmental disorder when I don't have strong personal experiences or knowledge with those.



Yes!! The official LOVEWEB x Open Fortress collab!! I forget how awesome it is that I can wear cosmetics inspired by my characters in one of my favorite games ever. Also The models were made by Arbuze / Arsen! He did a perfect job with them.



Here's some of the concept art I drew for the cosmetics. Of course these still had to fit the art style of Open Fortress and not be too wacky. The pins chosen were the horn and horseshoe because they're more subtle look better from afar.



For the glasses they're more "aviator style" to fit the merc and the era he lives in (the 70s). On the right you can see the tiiiiiny Manon signature on the frames akin to Raybans. Almost invisible detail in-game lol.


And yeah that's it! The episode might be outdated but it's still cool. Elliot reported to me that when it went up, there was so many newcomers trying to download Open Fortress and TF2 Classic that both of their downloads crashed lol.
Thanks for reading!!