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I'm Returning to Video Game Work

 Hello. C J here. The card game Quantum is planned for the next ten years or so and it’s just a matter of typing and art from now on. My chocolate recipe works and I know what I’m doing with it next. Heart and Fur is out and that’s the last product I have done that needs to be released. This means I can start something new. Or, rather, I can return to something old. I still haven’t finished either of my two current video game projects.

To catch everyone up, I’m an author and also a video game coder, script writer, level designer, character modeller and voice actor. I use only Blueprints and the Unreal Engine but I’m good at both thanks to three straight years of research. I’m working on a massive video game project still that predates the Astral setting and all of my other games. The trilogy I’m still planning out is composed of three games, Allegro, Absolute and Ancestral. These will require the entire Astral setting and most of the crafting recipes being done in card format first so I can’t work on them yet. See the Hearthfire Design Document in the Downloads section for my plans for the crafting engine.

That leaves me with two options. My first thought was to resume work on my hack and slash set in the setting’s Hell, Duskbringer. This also requires the Eternal Torment Expansion for Quantum being done first. That’s not happening for a few years yet so Duskbringer isn’t an option either. There’s one left, Glaive. Glaive is set in the Quantum Era 40,000 years before the Astral Age begins. 40,000 years is a lot of time and the Quantum Era has no continuity or common characters shared with the Astral Age except for the gods. They’ve even colonized different planets in that time.

This sounds good. I get to make things up and have them work. I needed a break from video game code but now it sounds like a nice project. Glaive is the name of the main character. He’s a tall, intelligent but talkative Silver Dragon draconian who owns a ship named the Lance and is also a skilled weapon conjuring wizard. I thought I’d continue my work making the Niurn setting region and make the first act of the game set in Niurn with its mythic Norse theme.

The game will be for Android. I’ve looked into this and the movement and camera controls come packaged into the Unreal Engine for Android by default. The Blueprints I have planned for AI won’t be hard either. Make melee combatants run towards the main character and when they detect they’ve collided with him have them do an attack loop. It will be a loop as they’ll have more than one attack. Ranged combatants will stand still and shoot if they can see the main character. Bosses have the same options but also arena-filling special moves with voice lines set on cooldowns.

The level maps are what I’ve been practising doing in Minecraft for a couple years. Everything from the grass to the mountain ranges to the houses will be made of six by eight metre rectangles. Minecraft was a good test run of this. I can use the starter materials for grass, brick, wood, metal and stone as well as the starter shapes for the actual objects. There’s lighting code in the starter content that I can change the look of by copying it and pasting it into a new item and then just sticking is on walls. I can make and then save furniture and doors out of the starter shapes and materials combined together.

For the characters including Glaive I can make armour and heads section by section with the same materials and use the Attack Actor to Component to stick the pieces onto the generic starter character. This means I don’t have to redo any of the controls or animations that allow the generic character to run or jump. If I play an animation that isn’t in the starter animation setup I can use a Blueprint called Resume Animation Graph to make the character resume walking again. I can also duplicate and recolour the starter content endless numbers of times in case I need a unique leaf, flower, or metal type.

For combat Glaive is a weapon conjuring wizard. We have four combat buttons just like an old console game. They are jump, shoot, fast attack, slow attack. The character can call and dismiss weapons as needed so I can use Attach Actor to Component again to swap those mid attack or combat sequence. The animations are from the Paragon Hero Kwang. I’m debating how much crafting I want. The game will be free at least to start. Now I need to go double check my notes and get to work on the script. Here’s some art of our main character and his signature weapons.



C J Mcpherson

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