My Plans After Uprising Core

 Hello. C J here. I have the Uprising token cards done and uploaded. I’ll post a few of them here. That’s another massive list of things off my plate forever. I am slowly having more and more free time each batch of these I do. It’s time as of now to put that free time to use. Uprising is a much easier game to work with than Quantum and Quantum is still being built as part of that list of things but it will continue to go slowly. Once that is done my entire list of things will be just Dragon Engine, my video game project. Dragon Engine will be in full release eventually but that’s not for a while yet.

I’ve still got a stack of books to read, more I am looking into reading and a list of video games to play. This is all then going to inspire stories and future game expansions. I never have writers block because I read voraciously and only play video games that I want to learn something from. I also have a ton of characters, setting text and game ideas I need to put on cards. Then I can actually write stories about them including novels and card expansions. I’m switching to story planning as my main job as of today. I thought I’d explain some of how I do that. But first a bit of storytelling itself.

It’s a known self-help idea that I actually quite like to imagine a team of your favourite historical personalities to form an advisory team helping you make business and personal life decisions. People like Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, or Beethoven can make a great team if you bring them all together. I’ve read somewhere that someone once did this and had a great team of imaginary advisors but then midway through an important conversation two of them got into a fight and had to be removed from the room. 

It’s a known acting concept that any pose, character, or prop is possible for any actor. I mean stage and film acting. It’s a matter of confidence. Rule number one for acting on screen or stage is confidence. If you’re playing a flat wall with nothing on it, a tree, or a man wielding a magic sword be confident about it. Screw up and be good at it. If someone has an idea, say yes. This is the cardinal rule of story design and storytelling. Say yes. And if you’re holding a sword then you are, in fact, holding a sword. Don’t hurt someone with it.

I got my start designing games by making up video games I wanted to play and then writing down the mechanics I wanted them to have. These lists of carefully curated mechanics still exist. They’re called Dragon Engine. When I needed a sword strike, a run pose, or a consumable item proofread I would stand up, or go outside, and physically act it out. Imaginary cookies are really quite tasty. Dragon Engine is built on me making a game out of imagination and waiting for the software to do it to exist before I start. It does so I started.

These three examples are three uses for imagination. Imagination is the core, heart and living soul of what I do here. Make it up. It will work. Write it down. Draw or type it. Share. That’s it. Entire job. I make the whole thing up. I know what characters like Prophet and the Captain would do in a situation because, like all well written characters, they are very clear about their needs. Prophet and the Captain are very different people and when they want a story then it’s my job to type it up. There’s this really cool quote I wanted to end this post with that I could swear was from the 1900s but I cannot for the life of me find it on the internet.

I must have made it up.

C J Mcpherson