TheAstralBackstage

 Hello. C J here. Christmas is a big deal in my family. We take a good two or three weeks for it every year. It goes well past New Year’s and into the next year. This might sound intimidating. It is. For those of you who have a marathon Christmas to do this year, I’m going to share my holiday survival tips. There are a lot of them. Most of them are food. The ones that aren’t food are beverages. Tip One – Water Number one rule, Christmas involves a lot of moving around and a lot of food. Stay hydrated. Take breaks for water, soda water, or milk often. Tip Two – Caffeine Even if you’re young and don’t drink coffee often, maybe have a bit of tea on Christmas morning. I have a rule. The more presents I open the more caffeine I need. It works. I survive all the way to Christmas dinner and sleep after without crashing. Tip Three – Eggnog I love eggnog. It can be made homemade. For the fancy version look at the TV show Good Eats and the eggnog episode. For the simple version, mix three pa...

 Hello. C J here. We’re going on another Minecraft adventure today. Here we have a shot of a street in my practice map for making Duskbringer. If you want to know more about Duskbringer look under the Astral Video Games label here and read the two posts from yesterday. They’re mostly samples of the game’s script. Here is the nice little town of Cruelty, situated in the Plains of Deceit in the region of my setting’s Hell known as the Domain of Makelith. That orange wood above the door indicates the building’s use. It’s a cafe. Here’s the inside. Those lights? They’re people, coated in brass and made into furniture. The Fallen who rule Hell aren’t just going to go to IKEA and pick up a couple of Swedish made furniture kits. No! The Fallen are really good at interior design so they make their own furniture. As you can see the tables are also made out of the wailing souls of the damned. Isn’t it festive? And here’s the cafe, where you can exchange the local currency Hell has for food a...

 Hello. C J here. I just got back from a holiday market one town over from where I live. I bought some things for myself and gifts for my family. The amethyst pendulum you can see below is for me. The other stuff is for my family. I’m not telling you what it is because it’s a surprise. This is how I spend the months leading up to Christmas. Christmas I know is stressful for a lot of people. I find that hard to hear. It can be busy and complex but I would never say stressful. It’s a time to celebrate warmth and also snow. I don’t like that people spend the day unhappy. This is how I have been brought up. Family is a team sport. Medicine exists so people are healthy enough to buy gifts for their family and friends. Education exists so people know how to buy gifts for their family and friends. Food exists because it can be given. If something goes wrong, well it didn’t go wrong, you’re too busy buying things. If something goes correctly, well, thank the person who bought it for you. M...

 Hello. C J here. I've finally got my hands on a project I can actually do in a reasonable amount of time. Duskbringer's script is going well and I've got another sample for you all. Here it is. City Meeting One Snow: Welcome, young one. I suppose I need to call you Dusk, don’t I? Dusk: Snow I assume? You’re projecting yourself to meet me? Snow: Yes, I am Snow. No, I am actually here. We are not the most powerful of gods and while some of us can be in several places at once none of us here have ever learned how. Dusk: It is quite peculiar to hear a god speak of learning. Snow: Do you think us all knowing? I am happy for the complement but it is not deserved. We are people on the inside like any of you are. Dusk: Then I have learned something. What are these creatures? Are these souls attacking me here? Snow: No. They are not souls. Dusk: Then what was I fighting last time? Snow: Those are summons, projections of our will. It’s quite a common trick in some parts of the galax...

 Hello. C J here. I've finally taken a chunk off the video game project I have that is small enough to work on now. I hope to have it done without needing to make the entirety of Regency and have every Regency card done. It's set in my setting's Hell. The main character is a wizard who needs something from the rulers of Hell. It's going to be an open world hack and slash with very little else besides fun combat and plot. I'm going to post a ton of script samples here. So far it's one of the most enjoyable scripts to type I've ever worked on. And I'm going to do everything I can to give it a PG rating at worst. It's not going to be horrible or violent. The samples should help explain that. Oh, and our main character is an anthro lion with a cool sword. Enjoy! Opening – The Duchy of Agony Snow: Well. Avira: Young one. Mezeca: Look what. Avran: We. Celeb: Have. Makelith: Here. Dusk: And so the Watchers have spoken to me. I greet you. Avran: Oh? Snow: Y...

 Hello. C J here. I might have to go shopping this holiday season for technology. Maybe I’ll get a good Boxing Day sale. I’m not looking forward to the crowds, lines, or fatigue though. I rarely ever buy new technology. I know, I know, I’m a business owner. By the way I actually do own Infinity Game Studio as a sole proprietorship. Like it’s mine. A business owner is expected to have six phones and buy a new laptop, ipad, phone, suit and set of bow ties every year. I don’t. I’m busy actually making things, thank you. I own one smartphone. I mostly use it for drawing because I don’t have a public phone number. It’s an Android because I like the software I can get for it for free. I own an ipad, a large one that I have a copy of Procreate for. I’ve gone through three Apple Pencils. They last me about an hour each and then they die. I hate the thing. I’ve done one painting on it and then it stopped charging properly. I’ve used it and Procreate for like three hours total. I’m not happy...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got some new art for the card game Halcyon. I’m doing the food items first and here are some samples of the art style for the game. I’m also including some samples of what the text for the recipe and food item cards will look like. I want a lot of meat and some beverages for the food deck. Halcyon has a number of cultures it depicts and I want generic fantasy food rather than the comprehensive list of real life food Regency will have. Regency is hard to make and harder to draw by far so I’m doing this one for a couple of years to recover from making the core rules for it. I’m also going to start doing some more art of Ascala in my line art style. I see no reason why Ascala shouldn’t be playable in both game lines. I’m going to stick with the characters I already have but add in some more about the city’s culture and magic. Also I have some characters for Ascala that I’ve named that haven’t seen print yet. Prophet, also known as The Digital Prophet Project, is...

 Hello. C J here. I’m contemplating what I’m working on next now that I’ve got the winter themed setting planned out and also the next year’s marketing planned on SoFurry. I need something else to focus on for a while. Something occurred to me earlier. I own a Switch. I know the Nintendo eShop has some good older games for sale. I’ve looked through it on occasion. I do need to replay Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Red Rescue Team eventually. One other game there catches my eye though. Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition. I played the original release back in the xbox 360 era. It was for that year one of the best things on the xbox 360. It is rather long and while the game alternates between open terrain and self-contained combat encounters with multiple enemies the game’s story is completely linear. It has a point though. It’s about the environment. It came out in a year where anything that was willing to discuss the environment or conservation was expected to sell in high volumes. Even ...

 Hello. C J here. I'm announcing today that I'm going to start posting my art and stories to SoFurry soon. I finally recovered enough from what happened to FA that I'm ready to start looking into more social media. I will continue posting here and on Facebook as well. I never knew until I checked yesterday but SoFurry has a marketplace, groups and Chay built in. I read a couple of SoFurry short stories yesterday and they were pretty good. I'm going to resume syndicating my novel on there sometime in the new year. Thank the Ancestors for bulk posting software. C J Mcpherson 

 Hello. C J here. I’ve named the continent in the Quantum timeline I’ve been working on. I mean the Skyrim themed one. My project to parody Skyrim has concluded successfully with the following list of things. I have a list of species who live there. I’ve named the continent and its planet Niurn – The Land of the Ancestors and the three regions of the planet that are inhabited as Northreach, Empire’s Heart and Southwind. I’ve decided there are Nine Ancestors who their culture pray to. I’ve made up a list of staple food items and recipes for generic fantasy cards for Halcyon, the Quantum timeline card game. Halcyon will also have a spell crafting system with different types of essence as the ingredients. This is a lot of useful stuff. Time to move on. I have a long list of further projects. Now that I know what I’m doing I’m not really concerned about doing them in order. I’ll work on drawing all of this once I have a larger batch of the planning done in total. Here is the current li...

 Hello. C J here. I've got some new backgrounds done for building interiors in the Northreach setting I'm currently working on. Here's the new art. These were unbelievably fun to design. Finally my job here gets to be arts and crafts time and not writing endless stat lines for NPCs. Enjoy. C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. I’ve been thinking about the ongoing video game project I’m in the middle of and I’ve refined my ideas for it a lot. First up, I’ve done some research into Unreal Engine asset design and I’ve found an easier way to make the character assets I need. I found an option in the documentation called Attach Actor to Component. With everything I found on the forums it allows you to take a 3D model of an item and stick it onto a character 3D model at a specific location. Like giving a generic NPC skeleton a sword and then another of them an axe and another a staff. This saves me some work. This means I can attach and remove armour, heads, tails and weapons in real time from a single character model. Modular clothing would work with this. I already know how to make the items I need out of the starter shapes and recoloured versions of the starter materials. These combined together can easily make armour components, clothing and weapons. Then I can stick them onto the default...

 Hello. C J here. This is a quick update that the Legend - Quantum core rules are now in draft three and that I've uploaded a list of the crafting ingredient cards I'm planning for the game along with the new core rules to the free downloads section. The game is played mostly using cards and I've got some samples of what the text on those will look like. The card component is a separate game line called Halcyon. The Halcyon cards will all have art on them in my current line art style and be available as free downloads to print on a home printer. Enjoy. C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. Inspiration can come at the strangest of times. I was doing something random earlier today, like reorganizing items on a shelf, and something I owned fell apart. I put it back together but as I did so I looked at it and went, “There’s a story idea in here.” This is the job. I don’t know when ideas will show up. They make me money. They form the basis of products and everything I do. They show up when they want to. Clearly there’s a new set of sentences in the world today that needs someone to take care of them and these sentences picked me. So I wrote this. It’s a part of what might be a longer story set in Ascala during their annual Summer Solstice celebration. Following the old Thandrian tradition they call it Summermoon. Here we have some of the characters who will appear in the video games having a conversation. This sounds a bit like a BBC radio show doesn’t it? Cool. I don’t get to pick these things. The characters do.     As they decorated fo...

Hello. C J here. I’ve got some progress on Project: One Niurn. I’m accompanying this post with some art in my new style to show some of what this project will look like when it’s done. Here we have a first draft of a cat monster head and a green arm. I’ve narrowed the list of races I want in the final product down to eight, removing a few of the original set of ten or so because they were kind of duplicates. For our obligatory necessary green characters we have Green Dragons, who are full green with black stomachs. For the more human like races we have Frost Dragons who are pale silver, Pale Wolfkin who are pale grey with some scales and Brass Wolfkin who are a copper colour with the same scales. For the more nature or arcane races we have Sun Kin, Night Kin and Brass Kin. These are the same breed as the main character from the video game trilogy. They are all one colour each, are tall and thin and have rounded noses. For the cat like race we have Tiger Dragons and I’m debating drawing...

 Hello. C J here. I wasn’t expecting an update here today but I finally had a real actual lucid dream last night. I’ve been practising with the waking dream techniques in the new Quantum boon for a while. I’ve of course known these techniques in Quantum longer than that book has been out because I had to plan and write the book while already knowing them. But I’ve never had a lucid dream while fully asleep. So I was lying down last night and I just closed my eyes and then I found myself in Ascala. I was in a backyard lined with wood fences, the good kind you can’t see through. It was night time and I looked up and went to myself ‘wow, Ascala has different stars than we do.’ I walked into the house. There in the nice townhouse with pale walls like in some of my art was one of my main fursona, Zed. I said hi to Zed. Of course, we already knew each other. Then I realized my nose was also wolf shaped. All of this was done fully awake. I keep forgetting to mention it but I have a perfec...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve just uploaded an updated version of Legend – Quantum to the free books page. Go check it out. It details the Legend – Quantum setting in vastly greater detail now and has some of the new mechanics for playing in this zero-death setting and era. Now I’m back to planning Project: One Niurn for now. Project: One Niurn has a ton of ideas I can use and reuse from the original game line. We have all of the items, weapons, enchanted weapons, armour and species to name a few. I want this to be faithful to the original game so I’m not adding in any species to this region of the setting that aren’t based on the originals. The originals, if I’m remembering correctly, are divided into humans, the Imperials, Nords and Redguard, the elves, the Wood Elves, Dark Elves and High Elves, and the more animal like races, the cat like Kajit, reptilian Argonain and Orcs. I might be getting this list or the spellings a bit off but that’s what I remember from the games. Each one has a...

 Hello. C J here. With Draw Like a Dragon done and out I’m out of projects for the time being. Drawing the line art I need for my new art style is proceeding at a reasonable speed. Within two months I’ll have line art done for every possible species, species colour combination, body part, clothing option and weapon I could ever want. All of this including the ears and tails will be kept on file and reused. If you’re wondering how I’m doing this so quickly then I’d recommend reading Draw Like a Dragon. I have a next project. I some ways though I don’t want this one. It falls to me to fix something once again. My job involves a lot of emotions that I don’t often disclose here. I’ll make this plain. The industry I’m in abandoned all of us including me a long time ago. Video games don’t exist anymore in the quantity and quality they did back when I grew up. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company reliably churn out trash no one wants. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are not on our side here....

 Hello. C J here. I have a huge announcement today. My guide to learning how to drawn and make art by hand, Draw Like a Dragon, is finally done. It’s out today and has been added to the free book downloads folder. Just check out the Downloads page and the link there for all of the free books I have. The book is short at around 30 pages but I fit everything I know about art and hand drawing in it. Read. Learn. Enjoy. And remember, using my characters and setting to practice is free and encouraged so long as you don’t sell the art afterwards. C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. I'm announcing today the official tabletop RPG companion to my upcoming video game line Quantum Dragon. The tabletop RPG companion is named Legend - Quantum. I finally get to write something in the Legend series again. I am very happy about this. The Legend series other than this one is done and will be out once its proofread, which may be a while from now. Reliably this series is the best work I've ever done on anything. I'm planning on writing setting and character sourcebooks for the whole game line as well but for now I'm working on the core book for the video game crossover. There's a free in-development copy in the Downloads page now. Have fun. C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got some updates about Quantum Dragon. I’m happy with how well developed the Astral is for now and I’ve realized that it probably doesn’t need to be done quickly, not that I have the stamina for doing it quickly. The Astral has a lot of references, inspiration and real life history that all needs to fit together in order to make it work. I’m still working on a convenient shorthand phrase for the earlier version of the setting but I’m glad to have something easier to work on regardless. Quantum Dragon was hitting a roadblock until I asked myself a question. Our main character Captain Glaive, does he have any friends? Like, who else is on his ship? I’ve named his ship Lance, his signature magitech sword Rhapsody and then I ran out of steam. This does not happen in my job. I checked my notes and I realized that I don’t have any plans for Captain Glaive to have a social life. Who else lives on his ship? I’ve named his first mate Rathan Hawkdragon and he’s also th...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve been doing art for a while professionally and the style I have, while it looks nice, is incredibly hard to do. It took six years to set up the list of things I have to have in order to draw even a single character. I’ve been thinking for a while that I should find an easier way of doing art. I took some time this week to seriously look into that. After about a day of work I have a working image from my new art style. This image took about one hundredth of the effort an image in my other photorealistic style would take of the same character. Now that I can draw for fun again I’m going to have to decide what to do next. I will keep both styles but I’ll use the harder one only for games and products that require it. C J Mcpherson  

 Hello. C J here. I’m still taking a long, probably years long, break from work on the card game and the video game trilogy based on it. The math required to make the card game and video game trilogy has to be done slowly and I need a break from math for the time people. Quantum Dragon is what I’m doing in the meantime. Quantum Dragon is still going well and I hope to at least load and lay eyes on one of the blank level maps for it today. I had a thought. I’m going to have money coming in from the Patreon once the Patreon becomes popular. I also am going to sell books at conventions. I’m happy about this, obviously. Most companies with this scale of productivity reinvest profits in their industry. I think I’m going to have to do the same. Once I’m fully rested and am ready for new projects I’m going to start hunting down collaborating artists to make things for me. I want more graphic novels in the fandom. I want more novels in print in the fandom. I don’t know who pays whom here b...

 Hello. C J here. I have some further progress notes about planning Quantum Dragon. This new video game project of mine is designed to be attainable in a way that the main trilogy isn’t. The main trilogy takes years of planning for each mechanic in it because it is designed to rely on real life mysticism and spirituality for its inspiration. The new video game doesn’t. It therefore doesn’t have rules about what will work and what won’t work in its story or setting. It’s going quickly and I’m hoping to have some test runs of the level maps within a week of today. Here’s what I’m thinking. The game might not need quests at all but I’m thinking most of the gameplay will be NPCs requesting you to craft items for them in exchange for a reward. Do five of these requests and you level up. Wilderness exploration and combat are a way of getting resources in the early game and also rarer resources from stronger monsters in the later game. Nothing in the setting can die permanently so the mon...

 Hello. C J here. Work planning Quantum Dragon is going quickly. Surprisingly quickly. Thank goodness. Here are my thoughts so far. We’re doing something resembling hard science fiction with this one but also some magic and resource gathering. I don’t want the game to be all combat so I’ll have to include some slice of life or life simulator elements as well. You start off owning a ship and landing on the starting planet looking for a job. As someone who owns their own ship there’s always work to be done in a large city planet. I’ve named out main character Marak Glaive Silver Dragon. I’m going to write the dialogue around this name and he normally just goes by Glaive or Captain Glaive. Having the character add more ships or team members to his team is easy enough to do by unlocking a friendly version of a ship map or an ally NPC. There will be no actual space ship flight. They will be a place to store team members and also to craft as well as a means of transportation. You have a ...

 Hello. C J here. I’m taking some time off from designing Regency and the trilogy. Regency and the trilogy require a lot of planning and that has to be done slowly. The setting I work with has rules and everything I do has to be cohesive with them. I’ve taken enough time off to be able to work on art or a video game again but these two projects are so far away from completion that they don’t really count as work. I have a lot of free time if I’m not working on them. I’ve decided to put that to use. I know a lot about art and video games. I know how to make a video game. I need an easier, more achievable project for the short term. Introducing my new, less complex, less mathematically demanding project. Quantum Dragon. This is set 40,000 years before the present day of the setting in an era where there were only draconians and the draconians owned the entire setting. Video games in this era of the setting don’t have to follow all the rules I have about continuity and actually allow ...