TheAstralBackstage

Heyo. Zed here. I have a fun extra update about the video game projects. I’ve hit a technical challenge in this project that I so far haven’t been able to find a way around. All of the character and NPC assets I have are humans. My setting has entire nations composed of other species besides humans. The entire setting of Allegro contains no humans. Allegro is all animal folk of various species. I can only find human assets though. My solution to this was to find some way of duplicating the character and NPC assets I have and recolouring the duplicates. I’ve looked into this and it seems possible but no one’s done it before. I have spent a year hunting down the right option or menu inside of the Unreal Engine for recolouring an asset. Finally today while loading some files into a test map in the Unreal Engine I found it. Here’s a screenshot of the menu I am using for this. Here’s the original human character I was working with. This is Frostwalker Kwang, the character I’m using as the p...

Heyo. Zed here. This is the fifth post in my ongoing series about making my upcoming video game line. I’d read the first four before reading this one. We have a name for the first two games in the line; a premise and a proof of concept for the script; a software and engine do to it in all for free; and a player character with a name, character model, animations and combat style. Next up is the setting. The setting for Allegro is a landmass named Chandesh. Allegro refers to the game’s plot and the fact that the main character can sing. Chandesh is the name of the continent the game is set on. The continent is steampunk themed and is in a constant state of armed conflict between the technology using nations on the West coast and the nature loving nations on the East coast. North is a city state called Rynn that is neutral to their wars and trades with both. They are called the Iron West, the Untamed East and the Arcane North. All ten nations on the continent will be in the game including...

Heyo. Zed here. This is my fourth post in the series of posts I’m doing about how I’m making my upcoming video games Astral: Allegro and Astral: Alliance. I recommend reading these in order. Use the Labels menu to find the rest of them if you need to. This post is about how I’m designing the player character and the game’s combat style. All of this is being done within the Unreal Engine 5. The Unreal Engine 5 also has all of the assets used in this post and in the entire game line for free as part of its built in online store. For this project I’m only using free assets. I’ve spent some time designing the player character for Allegro. The character’s name is Reconnaissance Officer Araden Relgrove. Allegro features him as the sole playable character. You can’t switch later on. He is fully voice acted by me. I’ve picked the 3D model I’m using for him already. It’s in the Free Content Marketplace as part of the Paragon line of character and animation packs. I can’t 3D model so I’m relying...

Heyo. Zed here. Here’s my third post about the process of making my upcoming video games Astral: Allegro and Astral: Alliance. This post starts to get into the technical aspects of how the games will be coded. Both games are going to be made completely within the Unreal Engine 5. Unreal Engine 5 is free video game and rendering software that I rely on constantly in order to do this project. Everything I need to code the games is there so long as I learn the rules of how to work with it as a software and that I follow the documentation correctly when it comes to actually doing the code. The Unreal Engine 5 contains two options for coding languages, C++ and Blueprints. I do not know anything about C++, but Blueprints make sense to me so I picked that as the coding language for the game. It’s simply a toggle in the Make a Project menu to switch between them but it can only be done at the start of a project. At least that’s how I do it. It’s next to the box where you enter the project’s na...

Heyo. Zed here. This is my second post about the making of my upcoming video games Astral: Allegro and Astral: Alliance. Astral: Allegro will likely be out first so I’m focusing on it here. Astral: Alliance is more complex so I need to do the simpler one first. We’ve reached the second step of the game design process, concept. Naming a game is a hard job because a name has to sum up the game’s concept and purpose. Then, if they don’t fit together in that order, the name has to be redone. It’s a lot of work coming up with one name and often a project can go through six of them before it sticks. So onto concept. In place of explaining the entirety of Allegro’s plot I’m going to give some samples of the character dialogue in the opening few chapters of the game. Allegro centres around a war that was brutal and utterly unnecessary. No one knows how it started or who is to blame, so our main character Reconnaissance Officer Araden Relgrove is sent in to find out what really happened. Most p...

Heyo. Zed here. This blog is about video games. I also make video games. I can code actually quite well. I’m working on two video games right now. Both of them are solo projects. Some of the Minecraft maps I’ve shown off recently are actually intended as practice for making the level maps for these two games. I’m out of books to make this year and Minecraft has been useful enough for now so it’s probably time to get some more work done on them. I’ll be sharing every step of the game design process here. If you’ve ever wondered what goes into making a video game, or want to get into the industry yourself, then hopefully these posts will be helpful. I’ve got two games on the go right now that I’m resuming work on. Astral: Allegro and Astral: Alliance. I don’t have set dates on when either of them will be out because if I knew what date they were done on then I would know how long they were and how many words the scripts are in advance. To clarify, I can’t predict the release date of a ga...

Heyo. Zed here. I’ve had a look through the Android App store in the Games tag. This took two days by the way of constant note taking. I’ve found a long list of games I’m going to have to look into. Expect commentary, opinions and reviews of most of them. It might take me a while to get to all of them. The Games tag I’m sure has more of these that I haven’t found yet. I’ll give the list for now here. I’ve picked the games I want to play by the images of gameplay they have. Typically if I don’t see any images of gameplay in the sales page I skip the game because I don’t know what genre it’s in. Most or all of these are free with in-app purchases. Solo Levelling Arise I think this game’s name might have translated into English strangely, but we can guarantee that Solo Levelling Arise has single player, levelling mechanics and things that start off higher in space than they started. It looks like a fantasy RPG from the sales page. I’ll try to grasp this variety of English later. Nexus War...

Heyo. Zed here. It’s getting hard to find good games. This is a common statement I make to myself. There’s nothing good these days. I’m going to be honest. I’ve owned two Switches. I’ve never found a single good game for either of them. I’m disappointed. No, not disappointed. Sad. Like, emotionally sad. I wanted Nintendo to do something intelligent for once. Nintendo, I hate you. I really hate you. You suck. Give me another Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. Give me another Pokemon Gold. Give me another Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door. Give me another Kirby Air Ride. Give me something nutritious. No, I don’t want games made out of just rice paper and corn syrup. Please. You’re an international megacorporation like something out of Shadowrun or Blade Runner and you can’t even figure out what a product pitch looks like. I’m sad. Really sad. There are better options though. It took me five years to track down but I figured out where all of the game developers and compani...

Heyo. Zed here. So I had this thought that I’d start doing a series of posts about making real life versions of food from video games. This sounds like fun. I tried to figure out what game I should do first. I thought maybe Horizon Zero Dawn. Then I realized there isn’t food in that game. I did some digging and the health potions are made out of meat. From their description they’re made of a broth of animal ingredients that restores health. Cool. That sounds like a good place to start. Soup. Then it got weird. Like, real weird. Like this thing doesn’t understand what meat is. The ingredients for the health potions are different ratios of bony meat, rich meat and fatty meat. Dude. Man. Dude. Man. You make broth out of bones. Only one of those meats has bones. Man. No. Also you mostly get meat from hunting foxes. Really, again, not good. Foxes are apex predators. They’re not edible. And sometimes you get an item from one called a fox bone. They can be traded to one person halfway across ...

Heyo. Zed here. I’m going to do a series of three posts explaining how I built the large project you see here, Chateau D’Or in Survival mode. To clarify, the entire project was done in Survival mode without cheats, flying, or unlimited blocks. Here I’m going to explain how I did that step by step. First is the shell. This is the outer part of the building including walls and the roof. In terms of walls and roof you want a set of blocks that look good with each other. The colours and textures need to add up to something that looks like a building and not a pile of sticks. This is a personal preference thing and there’s no right answer to it, but I recommend building smaller structures with a set of blocks before moving onto the larger and harder to make ones. Here we’re using stone for the walls and oak slabs for the roof.   The first step is to pick a spot for the building. Look for flat land about the size and shape of the building. I always structure my buildings in multiples of ...

Heyo. Zed here. There’s a reason I am starting off this blog’s posts with Minecraft. I’ll probably get to talking about other games and maybe some tips for them but Minecraft happens first here. There is a reason for that and I’m going to try to explain it. The game tells a story. I don’t mean that it has a story in it. In fact it has no plot whatsoever. It actively avoids ever telling the player a story. I mean it has a story it makes. The story of you, making things and the landscape those things are in around you. I mostly play Creative mode so I can build things from my stories. Here we see part of Ascala from the Astral, built in Creative mode. But even when I go into one of these with a narrative in mind to inspire a build I end up coming away with more story ideas and not fewer. This shot in particular is telling. Who uses this subway? Are there newsstands nearby or little shops selling coffee? Could I retrofit one of the houses on the street to be a cafe? Who lives in these hou...

Heyo. Zed here. I’m continuing my Minecraft adventures in Survival mode this time. I’m done the test buildings I was working on in Creative and so I’ve switched from my main Creative map to my main Survival map. I’m building something. They’ve added a ton of new crafting systems and blocks into Minecraft in the last few years and I’ve never had the chance to use them much. I decided on my next build project. I’m going to craft one of each crafting block the game has, like the anvil, smelter, crafting table, or loom and then build one building around each one as part of a larger town. I’ve got two buildings done. Here we see the large bay I’m building the town around. Turn around and we’ve got the town of Port Gold. Here we see the trading post, which has the crafting table, and the lighthouse, which is there so I can find it again from a distance. Here we have the trading post and the farm I’m using to feed myself while doing this. Here we have the inside of the building. And here we h...

Heyo. Zed here. I’ve resumed my ongoing project to build my entire setting in Minecraft. Today’s job is experimental. I’ll give you the tour. We start our story, as most stories start, with an aquarium full of pufferfish. Then it’s up those stairs you see there in the centre. Now after a brief stop at the cafe it’s up another flight of stairs to another minecart rail. This one’s above ground because I haven’t finished moving it underground yet. Then after a very long train ride we pass by a pre-generated village as the sun sets. And here we are, in Experimental Build One. Here we see me trying out more houses and materials to see what walls, windows and roofs look good with each other. This took a while and most of these here don’t work well enough for me to make a city out of. I standardized the trial size to one small hut each and these houses are functional but haven’t been given interiors yet and likely never will except for practice. And here we have today’s build. This took about...

Heyo. Zed here. So I’ve been playing a lot of Minecraft recently. Yes, I’m taking some off time while I finish setting up book printing. After writing the books, proofreading them, finding the right paper and moving my entire website over to Blogger, I’ve been busy. I’m making sure I don’t burn out. All this means Minecraft. But this actually has a second purpose. I’m practicing building areas and cities from my setting the Astral in preparation for building them as level maps for the first Astral video game. Let me take you on a tour. Our tour starts off in a cafe. Because every skilled engineer needs their coffee. Then down these stairs is something very useful. Okay, so there’s an aquarium first. That still counts as useful. I filled it with a couple pufferfish. Okay, a couple hundred pufferfish. I’m in Creative mode and they’re free. By the way all this is done in Creative mode where you have unlimited blocks and can fly. This wouldn’t be possible physically in normal Survival mode...