Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1163: Bloomburrow Worldbuilding with Neale LaPlante Johnson

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Neale LaPlante Johnson, the lead worldbuilding designer for Bloomburrow, to talk about the making of the plane.

We are pulling out a driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home edition. Well, today we're going to talk all about the world building of Bloomberg and I have Neil LaPlante-Johnson, who was one of the people in charge of it, to talk all about it. Hey everybody, this is Neil LaPlante-Johnson. I was a world building lead during the set portion of Bloomberg. And who did that? Who did the vision? Who did the early part of it? That was Emily Tang. You might know her from hits like Neon Kamigawa and upcoming Dusk Mourn. Okay, so obviously Bloomberg has a very cool world building. So let's start from the very beginning, which is you learn we're doing, you know, sort of animal world. There's no humans and all the animals have, you know, personalities and

there's a lot of sort of animal resonance. So where do you start from? When you hear about we're doing this, what's the first thing you guys did? I think the first thing you had to do when you're doing animal world is figure out what animals you're doing. That is a combination of what animals are probably the cutest and then what animals from magic past or what animals do we know that people really want to see. This is stuff like squirrels and birds. They emerge super early in the development. Other ones like raccoons, we reacted to the response of S&Cs, raccoons,

and how people liked them and thought they were cute and we added them. So it's kind of a mix. So first thing you do is say, what are the 10 animals that we're going to do? And at the start, it was like 15 animals. We were like very ambitious. Every monocolor had an animal. Every typo or every color pair has animals. Yeah, that was super early.

That was during exploratory, but yes. We didn't start with 15 originally, and they're like, okay, we're insane. We can't do 15. I mean, I would have loved to have played that set. I can't speak for everybody, but it was ambitious for sure. It was ambitious. Okay, so one of the things that's really important that the audience understand is, I think a lot of the set is about the idea of scope and about sort of how do we bring these animals to life

in a way that they feel like characters and not just, I mean, obviously they're animals, but there's a mix between feeling like the animal and feeling like the fantasy setting that we're trying to create. Yeah, and it's one of those, it's one of those things that Emily's Zach and I were super keyed in. It's like, this is a world where yeah, whatever animal you are, if you're a frog, you can jump high, you know, we have the bounce

archetype that it ended up in, birds fly, but they aren't caricatures. This is you know, these are fully functional, huge, like humanistic characters. They're anthropomorphized, but they're still real. If you put Mabel and Tiferion in a room, they could have a conversation. I don't know what they talk about, probably about being parents, which would be great to hear. But obviously, the thing that we're going for isn't, hey, these are just cute animals,

but they don't have any personalities. This isn't like if you saw a mouse in, you know, say, Zendikar, where, you know, it's just a mouse, right? These are fully functional human beings that have appetites and food and culture, and they produce art. And that was difficult. That was like one of those things. And then the other thing that we really wanted to do is make sure that one of the illusions of world building is saying, hey, let's zoom in real close and talk about this one specific

place, Valley. And then so now you're thinking, oh, this isn't just fully functional anthropomorphized animals, but there's also like more out there. There's more civilizations that we could possibly go to, that we could possibly explore. I mean, hinted at that in flavor text and with the raccoon folk. And so that was another kind of like way that we were trying to communicate that this isn't just cute animal set. This is another magic setting just on par with everyone else that has just as deep rich

world building. And like any world building, you know, if we're going to go to a worlds and there's a goblin civilization, we have to understand that goblin civilization, what are they like? And you know, so let's go through the 10 animals. And I want to talk about like, what, what is this, you know, I'm going to go in, in Wuburg order. And we're going to talk about like, what, what was the quality of this, you know, animal, I don't know what you want to call it, but species or whatever. Okay, so let's start with white blue, which is the birds. So how did you guys build the birds?

So one thing early on, white blue is a really good type to get across like nightliness. To me, like white blue is very like a noble kind of type. It can be intelligent, you know, you see that on Ravnica, but there's a lot of nobility, especially birds. I think of birds as kind of like really cool animals. Like when you see, you know, a bird outside your window, you kind of stop and you're like, Oh, I'm going to check that guy out. So we knew we wanted them to be nightly a little

bit like I want to see a little Don Quixote ask though a little bit kind of like self-important and a little silly. But then the other aspect of this is when I was talking to especially our set design lead, Ian Duke, and Emily was talking to Doug, we were kind of about to hint that building just a deck of all bird folk, all flyers might not be as exciting. And so one of the things we built into the world building early on was the idea that bird folk are naturally Cooperative with non flying animal folk from Valley And you can see that mechanically expressed in the you know

If this create like creature that doesn't have flying is mentioned a lot of times and that was really important to kind of solve both The mechanical issue but also lean into the cooperative aspect their nights and so they save other people And so there's other people might not be bird folk. They're knights and so they save other people. And so those other people might not be bird folk. They're people who can't fly. That's why you might see like a mouse riding them or whatnot. Okay, so that was white, blue.

So next we have blue, black, the rats. Who were the rats? How did we give the rats an identity? So rats are super popular, I think, in magic. In other anthropomorphic media, sometimes they're maligned. Rats kind of end up in the villainous role. And one of the things we needed to do was make sure every single animal folk was aspirational.

Everyone should want to be this animal if they identify with some of its core tenants. And the core tenants of the rat folk is, yes, they can be sneaky, they can be roguish, this is still magic right, this is blue-black, that emerges naturally. But they're also the the knowledge keepers, they have massive libraries you know underneath the ground where they store all the collected histories of valley. They have ancient kind of magics that other species don't have access to. And they also are generous with that knowledge.

So they teach other animals how to use that. And that was our kind of way of kind of twisting it. It's like, yeah, they're a little secretive, you know, maybe a little mysterious, but they're not unfriendly. Like, that's just, you know, they're stealthy, they're cool. But they have this other kind of aspect in the back of their head where it's like, you know, they're stealthy, they're cool, but they have this other kind of aspect in the back of their head where it's like, we're incredibly intelligent.

And part of that was spurred on by rats in real life are incredibly intelligent. They're like very friendly and intelligent animals. And they kind of get misaligned through media. And this is kind of a corrective way that we're saying like, no, rats are really, really cool. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so next up is black, red, the lizards.

Yeah, so the lizards were kind of a late ad. We well, there was always the hint of maybe lizards being in the set. But as like a major, you know, one of our 10 major types, we had to justify lizards showing up because the biome of Valley is kind of this Northeastern United States, British Isles, a little bit of Pacific Northwestern in there. And there's not a lot of lizards that are, you know, native to that kind of biome. So with lizards, we were like, okay, so they're an immigrant community to Valley. So they have different customs and the heritages. And one of those is their artists, they are, they are the fusion of black and red, this creative energy from red,

and it's destructive energy from black. And so they make art like sculptures, and then they destroy them. That's like part of that ritualistic kind of like, they're like, hey, I built the most awesome glass, you know, blowing structure you've ever seen. And the next day, we're here to break it. They don't break their houses and stuff, but things that are performative, you know, it's you ever seen. And the next day, we're here to break it. They don't break their houses and stuff, but things that are performative, you know, it's all about that performative kind of art. That's the thing that I

thought was super interesting about them. And they can be a little grumpy. Lizards in black bread, you know, that's kind of our mega aggressive type. So they can be a little grumpy, they can be a little bit standoffish, and they care about doing damage. So we need to make sure that they have cool armor, cool weapons made of stone and agate. So yeah, that's them in a nutshell. Real quick, just for the audience

to give a little timeline. We had a vision summit, which happens near the end of vision. We respond to notes in the vision summit. The lizards got added in response to a note at the vision summit. So we added lizards. So before it got handed over from vision design to set design, lizards got added in response to a note at the vision summit. So we added lizard. So before it got handed over from vision design to such design, lizards were added. They were like they were in the handoff document, but that was the last of the ten.

There was the last one we added. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Next up is red green. The raccoons. Yeah, I love the raccoons. Raccoon folk to me are kind of just this bundle of chaotic

energy. So their whole vibe is they really don't stay home. They're nomadic. They kind of like they have a house, but they're 90% of the time on the road. So they're gonna see them like wandering through valley, they're gonna be using the natural kind of druidic magics to kind of like help people along the way. But that red man in them just keeps them moving, you know, to a new place to a new place. And my favorite example of that is in the commander deck, the commander bellow has a hedron from Zendikar in his staff. And after the Omen Pass

opened, he was able to travel through the Omen Pass and, and grab one of those and bring it back home as kind of a trinket. And that's what the Reckling Folk do, is one of the lean into that trash panda moniker that they've kind of, you know, gained. So they collect trinkets from all over Valley and they kind of collect them in their houses. They don't go to their houses very much, but those are sort of like museums and the collected history of everything they've visited and done over their lifetime. Okay, next up, green white, the rabbits. Yeah, this is I think this was like sort of a shoe in right alongside birds and alongside, you know, stuff like squirrels, we knew that we wanted our pastoral, family matters kind of vibe from rabbits. This is like super classic, they have large families,

they're farmers, and so all of their weapons are based in kind of like vegetables, they're like dipped in metal, real cute there. And my favorite piece for the set, and I kind of want to bring it up is Omar Ryan's Head of the Homestead. kind of want to bring it up, is Omar Ryan's head of the homestead. It's really cute.

This rabbit, you know, has all of their, you know, children. But you can see we, Zach and I were very concerned about the the offspring mechanic and making it feel like, oh, we don't want them to feel like his kids, but they're just young. And so we gave the rabbit children knives. We're like, oh, this is the way to signal these are not helpless little buddies. They're cool bunnies that could fend off a calamity beast if they needed to.

That is cool. I do like that. The bunnies are fun. So in contrast, by the way, the very last thing we had were the lizards. I think the very first thing we had were bunnies. We knew rabbits were green and white. That's the very first thing we knew because we were like, what are rabbits defined for?

Lots of rabbits. We needed to go wide decked. Let's make it the rabbits. Next up is white, black, the bats. Batfolk were kind of another way. B know, bats are sometimes maligned in media, especially vampire bats. And so we also wanted to make bats super aspirational. And they really heavily leaned into magic.

So bats are nocturnal, and they use echolocation. So we had to make a magic system for them. That's the thing I'm most proud of is they have this lunar magic, this cosmic magic, they're connecting to the stars and celestial bodies, they draw that energy in and they use it. And then the magic itself is expressed like sound waves, these echolocation inspired sound waves visualized in magic. And we also took cues and they're costuming with like moonstone and whatnot. But the thing we wanted to do is because Valley has civilization,

I think we needed something to be kind of like the ritualists, the kind of like religious kind of faction and bad folk to me, like a, a religion of celestial body worshiping bats was super cool. And when they open up their wings, it looks like cloaks, right? Like they look like they have giant cloaks around them all the time. So they kind of look like they're part of a religious order already.

So it kind of solved itself for us. Yeah, one of the things that I like a lot is how you guys also figure out like what role in society each of these creatures play and like, oh, the bats are a lot of the clerics and they do a lot of the religion. So that you know, the they do a lot of the religion. So it was very neat, right? The rabbits are the farmers. I liked how you guys really built up the world so that everybody was had a

different function. Okay, I think oh, yeah, yeah. No, I'm just saying I was saying it's it's one of those things that magic does really well. And this is like a little one little tidbit is Zack and I last worked together on Dominaria United. I'm Zach, Zach Stella, by the way, the art director, you've little tidbit is Zach and I last worked together on Dominaria United. Zach is Zach Stella, by the way, the art director. Zach Stella is the art director.

That's who's mentioned, Zach Stella. Yeah, yeah. Apologies. But Zach Stella and I worked together on Dominaria United, and we were kind of enamored at the proposition of making anthropomorphic Dominaria. And Dominaria is such a deep setting. And so we knew we had to... Every single society needs a role to play in this world. There's no kind of

like, this is just for fun. They all have something they do to help make Valley special. So yeah, that's, that's just a little note for people. Yeah. And if you for the audience, like, Ravnica does something very similar, right? All the guilds, they have a function society, we wanted the animals to, you know, be the guilds of this world that they're all they feel sort of functions. Okay, we get into blue red next,

the otters. Yeah, I think this was a non negotiable part of the set just because Emily Tang's favorite animal is otters. We knew we wanted otters. And originally, I think they were in blue. So kind of solving for red in mono blue and just mono blue. So solving for what red meant for them was was kind of the challenge here. We have some great like art direction that kind of led to that. But I think personality wise, the red was just leaning into sort of like, kind of chaotic energy that otters have. Like if you've ever been to the zoo

and watched otters, you know, play, they are just rambunctious. Like you never know what they're gonna do next. So we just wanted to make sure that they have this game called Otter Ball, which is just a game where the points don't matter, nobody knows the rules, but somehow there's still winners and losers. And so they're kind of like athletes.

They're kind of like really fun, chaotic bundles of energy. They also are our storm chasers. They like chase after Calamity beasts and capture, you know, parts of their energies and store them in these little baubles to use later for like their spell casting. Yeah, one of the things we knew very early on about the otters was because they were in blue red, it meant they were going to have to care about spells if that's the nature of what blue red has to do and so I think the idea of them being magic casters was really early just we have to answer this why do they care about spells and they got answered really early so yeah and it's one of those things when you're in blue and red

you're going to have a lot of wizards you're gonna it's just one of those things when you're in blue and red, you're going to have a lot of wizards, you're gonna it's just one of those things that class types do kind of matter a lot because it just what magic does really well is each color identity has sort of like classes and things you expect them to be able to do. And so like you said, mechanically, we want them to deal with spells matter. And then we had to solve for well, if they have to deal with spells matter, and we're going to make them wizards and whatnot. how does that look? How does it look when they cast spells? And every single animal in Valley has a magic type because we were like, this is a high fantasy setting. Yes. Oh, that's another thing. I just real quickly, you mentioned it. One of the goals

of this setting was we weren't just trying to do animals. We were trying to do a fantasy setting that had animals. And that the idea of the fantasy setting coming through was a huge goal. Magic's done, we've done a lot of sort of jumping around and doing different things. And this was meant a little bit to be comfort food. I mean, the different other worlds that they're animals.

But from a, if you ignore the animal part for a second, it was meant to be a very traditional sort of fantasy setting, right? Exactly. Yeah, that's and I think it definitely succeeded in that being it's the work of making sure that every animal folk has a magical ability that we lead into classic, you know, archetypes and just just what you kind of expect from this world and then deliver something fresh on top of that. Some of

the freshness is the cuteness, some of the freshness is like the depth of the world building and some of it's the whimsy and pastoralness. So we're trying to hit all those things but it's just like if you dig down to it it's also just fantasy that you should be comfortable you know kind of exploring as a player especially if you're a long-time magic player this should feel like, feel like going back home. Okay, next up, black, green, the squirrels. Yeah, we had to do squirrels, right? I mean, it's like one of those types that I think if we hadn't done, people would have been like, why, why would you not do that? So I don't know when scrolls were added. I imagine obviously during exploratory, but they had to be one of the earlier ones.

Yeah, they were pretty early. Real quickly, one of the challenges from the mechanical side of things is we want to do animals, but we need to do some number of animals that like people already had cards to build out of. Raccoons and otters are fun, but there's not a lot of previous raccoons and otters. If we're thinking about things like Commander, we've got to build a 100-card singleton deck out of them. We need to make sure there are some animals that had already shown up in Magic.

Birds and bats and rats. Some of the reasons some of those are here is so that there's some grounding of not everything's brand new. Some of it is pretty new. But squirrels were something that the audience has shown a lot of fondness for. I personally have a huge affinity for squirrels. There's a period of time where the brand team banned them from normal magic and I put them in the unsetched just so the squirrels could be somewhere so I am well I love the fact that they're back so that the squirrels now are normal magic you can draft squirrels that's awesome I think it's great too I mean it's

and I think it's really authentic not only do we capture the fun of squirrels right but they're also just cool too like you like this is the kind of thing you were talking about it's like this does feel like magic right this is the kind of thing you were talking about it's like this does feel like Magic, right? This is just normal fun like spell casting magic and we lean into squirrels are like naturalistic necromancers, right? We have a green and the black synergy And so they're a little haughty. They're a little proud But they're also the stewards of the land, right? Like this kind of life and rebirth energy of green versus black. And so they have necromancy powers

and they can raise the bones of calamity beasts to do their bidding. But they also have this kind of side of them that's, you know, they're caretakers. They want the land to thrive. They just understand the life cycle and how that kind of plays a part in it. They're very comfortable with death.

So you'll see bones on there, costuming, and in the green side, you'll see leaves and whatnot. So we're trying to make that synergy. They're really aspirational. We actually got a really early piece of art at the concept push that basically we were like, oh, we don't know what they're gonna feel like. And then we got a piece of art and we were like,

it was just this kind of like very proud squirrel using necromancy magic. And we were like, oh, we don't know what they're gonna feel like. And then we got a piece of art and we were like, it was just this kind of like very proud squirrel using necromancy magic. And we were like, this is her. Like this is exactly what squirrels need to look like. Everybody in testing was like, oh yeah, I wanna play that squirrel. Like that's the specific squirrel that I wanna play right now.

Okay, so next up, and this was another group that was super, super early because you can't talk this genre without talking this animal, which is mice. Yeah, the mouse folk are my favorite, personally. And I think it's just it's they're so classic, like this is the tiny heroism kind of bundle. Like when you think of Bloomberg, and I think you even previewed Bloomberg, you announced it with an image of a mouse

facing off against a giant elemental wolf. And I think that image, this isn't really a secret, but was actually the first piece of art we got back that Zach Stel and I got back for the card set, that art for repel calamity. And we saw that we said, Oh yeah, this is this is right. Like this is what mice need to feel like. And so we leaned into the heroism. They have, you know, big families, you know, there's there's some good offspring stuff, and they've synergized with tokens. But really, the core is they fight things that are bigger than them. So they have the small stat lines. And it just

it's just like, cute when you're playing mice, and they're so fast and kind of like, you know, just they just do so many like cute little things, but then heroic things at the same time. And the way that we solve for them kind of fighting above their kind of pay grade, as it were, their magic makes them kind of like look like they're stuttering or kind of like blurring because they're moving so fast. That was like an artistic solve to kind of get the, you know, get across we had it wasn't called valiant. I think at that point we had a sort of you know, we have that mechanic in there where you targeted them.

And so it was like, hey, so you target them and they get all these buffs. It's like, their magic is them kind of using that energy to kind of go faster and stronger and kind of surpass their natural limits. Okay, our final animal is green blue. So the interesting so this was the one the ones we argued a lot about. So we knew it was either going to be turtles or frogs. And in the end, we decided the frogs was a little more whimsical. And so we ended up going with frogs. So talk about the frogs.

Yeah. So for me, frogs always look kind of grumpy, right? They always kind of look like they're, they're not having the best time. Their kind of mouths are always a little flat or even downturned. And I said, you know, what, what's a better thing to make frogs depressed than to make them be able to see into the future. And if you can see into the future, you'd probably be a little bit depressed to be like, oh, I'm gonna trip on Tuesday, that's, that's not fun. I don't want that. And so they're the augers, and it kind of leans into the green, bluish kind of vibe of magic, you know, scry or surveil like comfortable in

those colors, or at least in blue and, and green to lean into their color palettes a little bit more. So they're the augurs, they kind of see the motions of calamity beasts before they arrive. And so they can see the kind of destruction before it happens. And they use that to prevent, you know, any kind of further destruction, but it makes them a little bit sad. And Glarb, the villain of our story, is tormented by those visions of Valley being destroyed and that motivates him to steal the egg from Maha or to get Cruel Claw to steal the egg from Maha and set off the adventure in our fiction. Okay, so we talked about the ten animals.

There's kind of an eleth group that let's discuss. Yeah. So when we hand it off the set, we called them the predators. So they transitioned into the calamity beast. So let's talk a little bit about what are the calamity beasts and how did they become the calamity beasts? Like I said, we didn't hand them off as the calamity beast. They were just the predators. Yeah.

So, well, one of the fun things about testing is sometimes you get people who are experts in their fields. And one of the testers, as we call them, predators in one of the testing documents that people were testing with. And then someone said, well, technically, weasels are predators too. And we're like, oh, we can't use that word because as soon as magic players are so smart and they're going to oh, well, we can't use that word because as soon as, Magic players are so smart and they're gonna say, well, these aren't really predators. Like there's predators on both sides, animal folk and these quote unquote predators.

And it was also a word that kind of limited us to a certain class and category of animal creatively. So my job, like for the name at least, was to find a term that felt ownable to us like as you know, Magic the Gathering, like when you think of Calamity Beast, you can think of Bloomberg. But also something that kind of described anything between you know, a Wolverine or an elk, like just something that you could you could put a lot more types of animals in that bucket.

And I think we kind of hit the nail on the head. Calamity bees feels exactly like how they need to. And because calamity bees are the seasons of valley, so valley has no natural seasons. So these calamity bees come in and they represent, you know, blizzards or thunderstorms or drought. And so they are calamities, especially like, because they exert this huge amount of magical power on the Animal Folk and Valley.

But obviously with that kind of seasonal nature, you also have like Beza, the bounding spring that brings spring and growth and whatnot. So we had to be able to like oscillate between those two things where the calamity bees, despite their name, are not always bad. They represent the natural cycles that happen in the real world. But to the little animals of the valley, they feel calamitous because when they come, they're

kind of indifferent to their existence. And that's the kind of energy we're trying to capture. You know, an elk isn't mean, but it's probably not going to be, you know, too upset if it runs over and squishes a mouse's home. It's like, well, it didn't know better. It doesn't really think of your home as anything other than just something in the way. So the one final piece. So one of the things we knew early on was we wanted to have a bunch of one-ofs. Because we made a list of things that like, we had all these cool lists. We started with 15.

We knew we couldn't do everything as far as in the main 10. But there's a lot of things, like we wanted to have a skunk, we wanted to have a weasel when weasels ended up not being one of the 10. Can you talk a little bit about what went into sort of the one-ofs? Yeah, I mean a lot of the one-ofs ended up kind of transitioning into our, you know, the party that you find in our story with Mabel. That can be like, or you know, cruel claw. One of our weasel designs ended up just being cruel claw. And so we tried to take an opportunity to make sure that it wasn't just these 10 animals,

but we're hinting at the idea that there's a lot more out there. And those cameo animals, one served a great mechanical purpose, but also served the purpose of saying like, hey, it's not just these 10. These are just the most plentiful, but there's mole people, like there's mole folk, and they live under the ground. And maybe there's skunks, there's a skunk assassin in the set Which which was a great thing or maybe there's some hedgehogs or something that live, you know in some village and they're having a great time Just little ways that we can kind of hint and say hey like this world is a lot bigger than just what you're seeing here

And I think that spurs the imagination. It obviously had a mechanical impetus, but it also helped the world building feel just more deep and rich, because now someone might be like, I wanna see more of those moles. And I'd be happy to give it to them. The last thing I just wanna talk about, because we're almost out of time,

I mentioned this early on, but the sense of scope, one of the neat things about this world is that the animals were roughly the size that the animals were and that the POV was kind of the mouse, that was our POV character, in the sense that the mouse represented kind of what a human would represent on the average world. And that meant that things that you might normally see in another world, just the size of them was different because it was all scoped around a mouse. Yeah, and I think that's, that's something Zach Stella, our art

director on Bloomberg really kind of hit the nail on the head, you know, for me, what it does in the world, but the angle to see these giant, you know, giant trees and foliage, it makes the world immediately feel magical. It feels so different from other magic settings. We don't really have another setting, aside from maybe Segovia, where we really play with scale. Segovia really isn't one of our, you know,

isn't a setting that we're gonna go to, you know, a ton. So to me, that was the best part of all of those, this kind of scale, like a mouse POV. It's adventurous. It puts you in a world and you just want to know what's on the other side of that hill. Because everything's so big and this this you know, every strawberry, you know, might be the size of a mouse itself. And that's really exciting, right? Like this is a world full of like bounty and, and really cool stuff going on and making the scale kind of zooming your camera down,

putting it really low to the ground, right underneath the kind of blades of grass. I think everybody growing up probably had that, you know, moment where like, I wonder what would happen if I was shrunk to the size of like, you know, a tiny little forest animal. And that's, it's playful. That's what Bloomberg is. It's a playful setting.

So anyway, we are almost out of time here. So any last final sort of big thoughts on, on Bloomberg? I can't think of a ton. I mean, what I hope is that people when they're, you know, outside and after they play around at Bloomberg at their local game store and they see a squirrel running around their house, running around outside their house, they're imagining like what if that squirrel was a necromancer? That's what I really hope is people are looking at nature in a different way. They're putting

this magical touch on nature because that's what I'm the most proud of is it's not just a setting that's magical and fun, but it's also really reverent to nature itself. Every bird is a reference to a real bird. Like we took actual birds, attach those as references. And every single artist, we were like, No, no, that's not this exact bird, like make sure it looks exactly like this bird. Or like, you know, making sure that every fur pattern on different mice or rabbits was different. It's a really like a love letter, not just a magic and classic

fantasy, but to nature itself. That's what I really hope I hope people just think, you know, the world around them is really cool. Because it makes me think the world is really cool. Okay, well, thank you with being, I wanted to thank you with being with us. Thank you. So thank you, Neil. So anyway, guys, I'm at my desk.

So we all know what that means. It means this is my Android drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I wanna thank you for joining us, and I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.