TheAstralBackstage

 Hello. C J here. A few months ago I looked into AI art generation as a way of doing concept art for the company faster and without a budget. This worked well. In that time I’ve built up quite a collection of AI art that I like. I hand code each image or image series in something that resembles a combination of Java and Blueprint code from the Unreal Engine. I reliably get what I want out of the system. I am going to continue doing this. It works well and now that I have the hang of it doesn’t really require much work. I have no intention of ever selling or profiting from this art but I thought some of it is cool enough to share. I’ve added a new Concept Art Archive folder to the Books link in the Free Samples section. The generator can do some cool Pride or pinup themed art as well so I’ve split the archive into content ratings. All of it is consent driven regardless, including any sword fights or weapon use depicted. Nothing here is offensive. Now that I have all that art sorted ...

 Hello. C J here. Time for more Dragon Engine updates. I’m working on making the 2D textures for the ground, landscape, mountain, hill and cliff tiles that will be used to make the environments in Dragon Engine. I’m also working on the wall, floor and roof tiles for buildings at the same time. There are a ton of both and it’s a ton of math to make them because they’re hand made using hand drawn textures that I mix together. I’m including some final examples at the end of this post. Procedural terrain generation is really easy to do in GDevelop so in a future update I’m adding it in as an option. The default option is a grid of bedrock tiles that can have a final landscape or floor tile spawned on top of them. Tiles don’t move. I have some screenshots below of my proof of concept for these. I’m making all of the hundreds of them I need and then making a menu to sort and access them while playing the game. All of these tools will be given to the player in Creator mode, one of the gam...

 Hello. C J here. We’ve started birthday preparations here at the Mcpherson household. Birthdays are a big even around here and mine is soon. Me and my family just finished unboxing a new mattress and we’re debating the benefits of Pokemon sheets on team morale. Considering our team is mostly Pokemon squishmallows I think they’ll approve. I’m currently sipping an iced coffee and it seemed like a good day for a personal life update. Find my iced coffee recipe in my Heat Wave Survival Guide post. I’m meeting up with one of my friends from Facebook Dating later today for coffee and maybe lunch. This is good. I’ve also found that there is a website called Furry Events Ontario that manages all of the furry fandom events in the region and also works with people to host and promote events. I’ve always figured all the furry fandom in this city know each other somehow and now I think I’ve found how that happened. Time to resume doing house party planning. I’m putting the things I’ve learned...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve updated the Quantum page again with a ton of new stuff including my complete plans for the first three Expansions, some notes about the Expansions after that and what will come bundled in the Starter Set. The Starter Set has everything needed to play the game but doesn’t use even most of the rules. Once it’s out I’m going to be following the plans laid out there pretty much in order and the pace of production here will speed up substantially. All of the new card types I’ve mentioned recently will be essential in making this list work. C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full jar of oats, half a bottle of honey, some dark chocolate and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it. Thank you, Jake and Elwood Blues for the introduction. I made scratch made dark chocolate granola. It’s great. Ingredients Four Cups Oats One Cup Honey One Cup Peanut Butter One Teaspoon Salt One Cup Dark Chocolate For the Dark Chocolate Granola Mix the oats, honey and peanut butter. Spread the salt on top and stir to incorporate. You can use other nut butters or tahini if desired. Spread out on a baking tray or two on top of parchment paper. Bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes until the oats start to look golden brown. Shred or grate the dark chocolate. Mix it in while the granola is still hot from the oven. Let cool and store in an airtight container. C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. It’s a slow, heat wave Sunday so I thought I’d type something nice for fun. It’s hot out. No, we’re not at the fun part yet. It’s really hot. I’ve spent the last few Summers running free barbecues for local fandoms and really they cost a lot of money and no one showed up. Still not the fun part yet. I’m widening my recruiting efforts to include Facebook and Bluesky and that’s going well. I’m also inside from the heat and that’s getting boring. You know what would be fun? Yes, this will be the fun part of the post here. What if I went out for ice cream? Well, really I make amazing ice cream. What if I had a bunch of friends from Facebook and Bluesky over to my house for house made ice cream parlour time? I could make a ton of ice cream in everyone’s favourite flavours and everyone gets free toppings and whipped cream. If they wanted they could tip, including by PayPal, and buy tubs off me for like $15-$20 a tub. I know where to get the tub containers as well and th...

 Hello. C J here. Normally when I have a new recipe I have a really cool story to go along with it. This one doesn't really have one of those. I looked up cornbread recipes in a few cookbooks I own and also on a couple recipe blogs. I compared and took the best elements of several. My one new idea is that the cornbread is based on a generic dry biscuit mix I'm working on. It's that plus one cup of yellow cornmeal. Easy. Biscuit Mix One Cup Flour One Teaspoon Baking Soda One Half Cup Sugar One Half Teaspoon Salt Mix together and store until needed. Cornbread One Batch Biscuit Mix One Cup Yellow Cornmeal One Cup Milk Mix the dry ingredients together. Stir in the milk. Mix into a batter. Grease a muffin tin. Spoon the mixture into the muffin cups. Bake at 350 for 20 to 30 minutes until a toothpick inserted into one comes out clean. C J Mcpherson 

 Hello. C J here. Video game design is proving to be a lot easier than tabletop game design. Make a map. Put enemies and maybe some resources on it. Make a player character with equipment options. Make button mappings with damage. Add dialogue. Tabletop games are a ton more challenging. So, I'm going to look into making some video games without tabletop equivalents.  My first thought is to do a drastically new genre and do science fantasy. I do not want piloting a spaceship in a game but I can churn out level maps including large buildings or building complexes easily as of later on next week. So I can maybe fulfill some of the gaming world's hopes and dreams and make a handmade open world science fantasy game with more than one planet. I'm thinking of doing all anthro characters because that's what I'm good at. In the style of fantasy I want all swords and magic and no firearms. I am strongly going to plan the plot out some this weekend. Yes, it's open world bu...

 Hello. C J here. I’m working on taking the few remaining ideas I have for card games and adding them into Quantum. I’ve checked my notes and I have one left. I had an idea of characters having large sets of moves, like combos in a video game including the one I’m working on, that play off either a skill or one of their Traits. So, individual combat or social moves in large sets with depictions of the moves or dialogue involved are the last thing on my list of card game ideas. This should help to narrate, write and animate stories in the setting for me and anyone who wants to use it for licensed work. The really fun idea here is that characters can have combat or social abilities and entire sets of dialogue based on how they look. A character with gold scales, a wolf nose, or horns could have moves that play off these. I need vast sets of art for these that don’t repeat and this will be some sort of training card set each one. I need to pick characters for each set of training card...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got one more video game development updates for today. I’ve made and uploaded the first tile side and top PNG files to GDevelop and now I can actually see the final look of the game. It looks good. I’m happy with it. I learned that GDevelop has a maximum PNG resolution and doesn’t tolerate spaces in the names. I know that now so we’re good. Here’s an image of a final tile that was placed using my tile placement code. Next I need a tile selection menu and some more variety of tile per biome. This is a grassy mountain valley biome for the first game. I can also add trees later. C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. I've been working on some new cards for Quantum and I have two of them done. These are new uses for cards that branch off existing card types. We have training cards that can be bought for a hefty price in gems but that contain structures with uses to make navigating the game's world easier. We also have my first character backstory card, part of my effort to add more narrative tools to storytellers in the game. This card contains backstory for Victoria Thatcher, an owner character in the Eternity setting region. Eternity isn't done yet and won't be for a while but this character felt like the right one to put on a card today.  C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got some early morning Dragon Engine and Code Like a Dragon updates for everyone. Dragon Engine is my main video game project and Code Like a Dragon is the set of Quantum cards for the card game Quantum I’m making to record each step I take. I want the whole process of setting up the video game to be repeatable so I’m putting it step by step on cards. My current project is a smaller game I’m doing to practice, March on Ishrayl. March on Ishrayl will be in the genre I do, open world exploration based hack and slash. The first step is to make the terrain. Okay, so this probably sounds like I’m making a 3D model with ground and trees and putting the player on top of it. Not quite. I’ve spent ages looking into the best way of making terrain in bulk that also looks good. The land is made out of modular tiles, or at least I call them tiles. They’re one metre tall, eight metres wide and six metres deep. All of this is being done in GDevelop because it’s fun. I’ve go...

 Hello. C J here. Welcome, friends, to Code Like a Dragon – March on Ishrayl. Code is a learn by doing thing so I’m going to be doing a lot in the near future. March on Ishrayl is my test project to get the level map, character assets, narrative, combat mechanics and sound design for a full release video game up and running. It will likely be for sale through GDevelop itself including test versions once I get them running. I’m going to be documenting my progress on Quantum cards as I go and making a Quantum card set detailing every step of making the game. March on Ishrayl is set in the Shattered Kingdoms and will be the example game in Code Like a Dragon. Code Like a Dragon relies on the fictitious in-setting video game design platform SquareBuild to represent game design in a generic way. The game we’re making here together will exist in both real life and in the Legend Setting. What that says about the relationship between the Legend Setting and the Shattered Kingdoms will be ex...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got one other product I’ve started but not finished. Legend – Uprising is designed to be everything I can’t do in Legend – Quantum. Legend – Uprising is a separate card game with base building, deck building, skirmish miniature combat and exploration. It was fun to make and also has features designed to help people tell stories and write novels in the Legend Setting. Legend – Quantum is the core setting resource for the Legend Setting but story writing ideas is the job of Uprising. I’m going to look into putting Uprising in Quantum as cards for existing Quantum card types. Structures, battle maps with height variance, base building or crafting options and character or profession backstory cards are all being looked into. I’m also going to start using the training decks to tell stories. These are the decks with items, spells, abilities, potions and ally characters that players use to level up and purchase new things from. I can reprint them any number of times...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got a sample piece of card art from my upcoming art-themed Quantum Expansion Draw Like a Dragon. This card depicts the shapes used to make a 3D model of a strong male chest for use in animation and art. I realized that Code Like a Dragon, my other computer themed Quantum Expansion, should probably assume you have free or paid assets to make a game and not be about asset design. Here in Draw Like a Dragon I can discuss how to make a cool looking 3D model and colour it in. Code Like a Dragon will detail how to use them in an interactive environment. I don’t know how helpful this will be to people already practising art but I thought documenting my steps must do something useful. The spell poems on the cards will still be in the normal format. Things I’m planning to discuss in Draw Like a Dragon include the following. How to make anatomically correct people and various anthro species using Android modelling software. This is done in pieces like today’s piece of ...

 Hello. C J here. I’m heading into a week of video game design and novel writing on occasion. My main project is Dragon Engine this week. I’m documenting the steps to make Dragon Engine here so thoroughly for a reason. I’m going to package them in a small Quantum Expansion, Code Like a Dragon. The entire process of setting up Dragon Engine will be turned into cards with Quantum spells on them. I might have cards to make or customize a region map card, make items, or add to a character’s colour. The set of cards will be set in Ascala and use the code language Ascala uses, Square. The software used as an example is fictitious and is called SquareBuild. It will strongly resemble GDevelop to the point that I might need to make fake UI elements and screenshots of SquareBuild. Everything depicted will transfer over to GDevelop and other generic game making software one to one. The Code Like a Dragon Expansion is part of a series of Expansions aimed at presenting technical skills in an ap...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve officially started work today on Lands of Creation. Yes, I often work on weekends but only on the creative and brainstorming part of a project. Writing stories is really a full time thing and while I do not write books or draw on weekends I do still think and plan. It’s also when I like to do video game design and social media posts. Reliably I’ve never found this tires me out at all. Lands of Creation will feature no matter what 50 recipes on cards and 200 generic monsters and creatures, mostly humanoid, for use in Legend games. These creatures are Regency decks, so they don’t have lore and instead have stat lines for use with Dominion. They will still have the spell poems that list their Quantum traits and while they work in Dominion they also are mainly designed for Quantum. Here’s a sample of the text of one of them. Jungle Brute I have a male black reptile tyrant with chest as an ally. He is a greater monster, a warrior and a sage. Come to me. Dark Brut...

Hello. C J here. I’ve got my first ever 3D sculpt for Dragon Engine done and ready to show today. Wow, that was fun. It’s my childhood spent making FIMO miniatures all coming back to me. I’m using only the low poly options In the Android app Sculpt+ and layering them to make the shapes I need. Then I’ll recolour them every colour and texture I need and save them separately. Here’s the first image. Isn’t the nose adorable? I have a preset asset for the human heads so I don’t need to worry about them but the draconian head I decided to start with is a lot more adorable than I thought it would be. This took almost no work and I think this is the hardest one on my list. The eyes and mouth are going to be made separately and added into the final character model in GDevelop so I can have GDevelop swap them out for blinking and mouth motions. More soon. C J Mcpherson

Hello. C J here. It’s looking like it’s the start of another heat wave in the city here. While running an AC might be a reliable way of cooling a house down, it does also take a lot of electricity to do and not everyone has one. I just got back from doing some gardening with my family and although I was outdoors for an hour or so I’m fine. I’ve developed a ton of methods I use to cool down when I need to and I thought I’d share them here. They’re all recipes that are good cold. Ice Cream Ice cream is like the perfect food in my opinion, especially when made with the homemade no-churn recipe in Cooking With a Wolf. This recipe is high in milk protein, the vitamins in milk and can have cocoa or fruit added directly to it before you freeze it for extra vitamins. Really, I have a pint or two of it on hand at all times to cool down and also to eat. Just remember that it’s filling so eat it before a large meal to cool down with priority over other food. I might make an entire small Expansion...

 Hello. I have more Dragon Engine updates for today. My first task is to create the character customization interface for the game. This will be for sale separately from the game in the GDevelop Store. The ideas is fairly simple. Use the generic free human and animal models that come with the game. In patterns that are identical to the stat lines in Quantum, make body parts like heads, torsos and upper arms. Do these once each in every colour, colour combination and species I need that is in Quantum. Then do them for modular outfits in the setting’s colours. Then I import them into GDevelop and make a menu using the free menu building assets to assign the body parts to the skeletons of the generic models, transforming generic humans and animals into custom fantasy ones. The Sticker behaviour is already in the game engine and allows for the customization of 3D models. The sculpting software I’m using it still being figured out. I’ve searched the Play Store and my two best options lo...

 Hello. C J here. The original title of this post was Only Connect, a well known quote from the author E.M. Foster. I figured that for once I needed a title that explained the post better than a quote would. There’s a new world coming. Internet technology has sped up or slowed down everything we know and do. We have as a species invented wondrous, beautiful things. I can get a free app on my phone, buy a $2 rubber tipped stylus and draw anything. I can then upload those images into another free phone app and make a 3D landscape out of them for a video game. I can then publish it and make money without spending any. But our species has yet to figure out exactly how to use the really good things we’ve invented. I’ve run Meetups on Meetup.com that no one signed up for and no one attended. I’ve attended ones that no one including the organizer showed up to. I’ve gone to spiritual circles and gatherings and found really they were probably a cult or knew nothing about the modern day worl...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve spent a good portion of this morning looking up GDevelop documentation and tutorials. My goodness. It solves problems. There are lists of things I wanted for my video game Dragon Engine that I deemed unreasonable given UE5’s limitations. GDevelop has lengthy and well detailed tutorials for all of them. So, more features and refined combat are being added. I’ve made a nice list thing as well. Aiming I want and will 100% have ranged weapons for those who like third person shooters like Horizon Zero Dawn and some of the older xbox era fantasy games. I’m adding in the ability to shoot specific parts of an enemy to deal damage to different abilities they have. Larger bodied enemies have more hit locations. A simple Google search for GDevelop 3d hit location and the AI assistant got me step by step instructions. Melee Counter Remember counter-based gameplay? No? Well, it really was a rare mechanic outside of some Zelda titles and maybe some of FromSoft’s games. I w...

 Hello. C J here. I have a new piece of art for everyone. Welcome officially to my new setting project, Shattered Kingdom. I’m working to prepare samples of this setting and while it is not the Legend Setting the Legend Setting will remain my main project. I have the time to work on two and Shattered Kingdoms is going to be vastly different than my current setting. Set in the wake of a war between the gods that changed magic’s nature from combat to transformation and enhancement, Shattered Kingdoms it set five years after the year long Last Battle of the gods as the mortals come to grips with their new animal forms and immortality. Now new voices and new priorities are rising and the nations, names and languages from before the Last Battle are almost entirely lost. There are two goals here for the new, rising nations and their ambitious new leaders. One, learn about their lost past. Two, cement alliance through marriage or cultural exchange to end the proxy war the gods tasked the ...

 Hello. C J here. I have made more plans for Five Million Strong. Lands of Creation is mostly food, which I have planned out. It also contains ten Regency decks, which don’t require text only art. Then it’s Roads to the Spirit World and that’s based on novel writing along with the very well understood practice of visualization. Both are well known with established rules. That leaves me to move onto Five Million Strong. The first two Expansions won’t take that long to make. The Ascala Expansion likely will so I should start now. I’ve expanded my plans for the spells that depict the magic of everyday tasks. Ascala and its half fiction half real life economy overlaps what I can research in several ways but not in all ways. I’ve already planned out making spells themed after running or working in a retail store. It makes sense a magic themed economy would make up magic for everything. The idea I had was to put the whole set of words and phrases into song metre. Really unexpectedly, sch...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got some new art for everyone today. I’m one step closer to having the Starter Set done. We have a hand drawn digital chalk bag of coffee grounds and a jug of milk. I’ve got four more food ingredient images left and then I’ll draw the final food items like cheese pizza and wedge fries. I already have latte done and I’m posting it here as well. Speaking of food, I’m doing the planning today and tomorrow for working on some of the barbecue themed recipes I want to try out this upcoming weekend. I have a barbecue sauce that I think I’ve already posted here. I want an easy, smaller portion size pork rib roast first. I thought that if I take a pork chop and slice it into strips, cover it in barbecue sauce and thrn bake it with tinfoil on top then I might get the juicy tenderness of a good rib roast. I hope to have the first batch of these done this weekend. I already have everything on hand I need for them. Look at the post Plans for Food of the World for the full...

 Hello. C J here. I think I’ve figured out the math puzzle I was working on about social themed stories in my card game. I had an idea a while ago about a card game where the player plays story based events contained as a single deck each. Each deck has 20 numbered cards including reprints of the characters who are in the story and they can be played in order or shuffled. This sounds like the best approach to narrative social events in the game. One problem down. Also I’ve been thinking about the mechanics for the Five Million Strong Quantum Expansion, the Quantum Expansion set in Ascala. I wanted to try to find ways of making everyday tasks and tools into cards with spells, relying on the city Ascala and its theme of industrial magic use to guide the process. Five Million Strong looks to put some of the arcane and the mystic into modern life and its normal actions. I’ve divided these into five categories and paired them with one of the smaller nations within the continent as a who...

 Hello. C J here. It’s been a nice Canada Day. My family and I went and watched the parade and were stopped on the way there by a flock of geese crossing the road while listening to Nickleback on the radio. I was reminded of something along the way. It isn’t really Canada Day related but it’s a nice story so I thought I’d share it. I used to do summer camps when I was younger. I did some science or computer themed ones and they were reliably something to do that wasn’t school. Two though stand out as exceptional. I might not give their names here because I don’t know if they’re still in operation. Actually, I don’t think they are. One was a two week camp where teams of us lived in university dormitory houses that were not being used in the summer. There was really good food at one of the smaller dining halls, courses about interesting world culture and religion during the day hours and movies practically all night. The other one was the opening to a semester at one of the schools I...

 Hello. C J here. First of all, happy Canada Day! I’m staying indoors to stay cool but I’ll maybe make something fun for dinner. Here are my plans going into the next month. Also it’s my birthday on the Summer Solstice later so that should be fun. Heart of Glass My light romance novel Heart of Glass has taken on a life of its own that I didn’t expect. Find the free chapters as they are released in the Novels download link. The first of these, and there will be more, started with an idea to show what my Ascala main characters do on their vacation time. It’s evolved into a process of learning about my own life that I didn’t expect. Ascala is the perfect location in the Legend Setting to explore modern day life even if I didn’t do that on purpose. I’ll get back to writing it when I have the plans laid out for the next chapter. I’m aiming for 10-12 chapters per book. The second one has another learning based premise as one of the main character team’s friends decides to open a small co...

 Hello. C J here. Who do I tell? This is a question I ask myself sometimes. Let me explain. I sell spiritual and science concepts on cards and in books like Heart of Glass. To qualify in my books as either spirituality or science it needs to be useful. So as a result I have a lot of useful knowledge lying around. Things like very scientific practical advice about the study of lucid dreaming, tips to use hypnosis for health and lift strength and what vitamins in combination are good for what gland or muscle group. Who needs to know these things? More importantly, who has use of them? I don’t think there’s ever been a furry fandom member who doesn’t want a bit of magic. We typically follow the modern trend and call it hypnosis and a large part of my job here making cards with educational content on them is mapping the depths and pathways through that concept to see what it can do. So, a furry fandom member already deals in the abstract and in the arcane especially if they’re an artis...

 Hello. C J here. I’m currently working on a light romance starring some of my characters set in Ascala called Heart of Glass. There will be a series of these and each one has a theme. The theme for the first one is what the characters all do when they have vacation time. Ascala is known for its hard working citizens and so most of my characters who live there don’t like time off. Our main character, the gay male noble blooded Blue, currently has to find ways of entertaining himself on a three month paid vacation. Find the free chapters as I write them in the Novels page in the link. This vacation project turned out to be a lot larger and more complex than I thought. I had expected to just have our friend Blue go on long walks and eat some lunch. Then I thought about how he prevents heat exhaustion. Then I realized I don’t know what lunch would be good to recover from that much exercise. I looked to my own life for ideas and realized that a lot of what I know about running this hom...