TheAstralBackstage

 Hello. C J here. I know I’ve flooded this site with posts over the last month or so. I’m going to take some time off from posting so people can read some of them. I’ve checked over the last few months of views and reliably I have noticed a few things. Food posts get views slowly but steadily, especially desserts. Novel samples and novel writing advice get views quickly in bursts. Video game updates with images get a ton of views. Cool final card game art in my hand drawn style gets views in large bursts. But what gets the most? Anything with the name Heart and Fur in it. I’m going to take this to heart, pun not intended. I have time to pursue other more creative projects now. I have about 40 images left to draw for the core card game and I also have the video game reduced down to just making and sorting 3D assets forever. Both of these projects will continue indefinitely but neither can or should take up a full work day. So it’s time for more Heart and Fur. I’m currently finally r...

 Hello. C J here. I’m going to start this post with a sample of a story I’m working on.     Summermoon was the city’s most celebrated holiday. Everything in the city was closed for it except some of the grocery stores. The day was an old Thandrian way of marking the Summer Solstice and it was sacred in the many religions that they brought over with them when they settled the city as one of the Three Peoples. The Three Peoples quickly took up the tradition even though the other two were human. The day was celebrated with decorations, grilled meat and gifts. The day after was always one of rest and contemplation, both by the rules of the Thandrian tradition and the city’s need to digest that much food. That left the question open though, what to do that day?     Vaun was a silver draconian with a round nose and long, thick tail. His small horns were just visible above his dark hair. He had red stripes covering most of him. He had the best, or in some ways the wors...

 Hello. C J here. Welcome back everyone to my Minecraft adventures. Dragon Engine is getting easier to make the more of it I make. I now have all the anthro heads, all the main body parts and all the tails done for anthro characters in Dragon Engine. That’s all the hard 3D model making done. Next it’s finishing the last few details, exporting them as GLB and using desktop Windows software to assign them the coloured textures I already have on hand from learning to draw. The textures are hand drawn including scales, eyes and fur. Walls and ground tiles I know how to do and next I need clothing and trees in my style. Then all of this goes into GDevelop. Then I use some of the free GDevelop menu making packs to make the UI for building terrain and also the UI for making characters. Then it’s making and loading in weapons, damage effects and combat animations. It already comes with move, walk, jump and a few others. Making Quantum is going similarly steady and reliably. I’ve got about ...

 Hello. C J here. Have you ever wanted to spend a day reading books while also simultaneously being in a 3D rendered digital environment based on binary electronics with movement inputs? No? Well, that kind of kills this post now doesn’t it. Let me rephrase. Have you ever wanted to collect and read interesting books in a video game environment that actually matter to the story and are well written? Yes? Maybe? Well, I tried. I’ll explain. Making Dragon Engine is really a matter of asset design going forward and that is going as fast as I can do it without wearing out my eyes. Quantum is now a matter of completing about 40 more line art images with backgrounds or crafting recipes and then doing the graphic design to make them into final cards with text. The text part is completely done. It’s time to get back to book writing. I need one more thing for Dragon Engine and it’s in-game books that detail setting concepts like how magic works, the myths of the creation of the worlds and th...

 Hello. C J here. I have some more cards uploaded to the Books download link and I also have our fifth Starter Set player character, Bell Nightbringer Moonborn of The Astral Ten. Bell is a female pronoun hermaphrodite character and is also a jotun. These smaller, animal like giant folk are immortal and unkillable but cannot reproduce. There have been a set number of them in Creation since time began and while there are a lot of them they have never documented their history well. Our friend Bell is a bit of an anomaly among their people. She’s an academic and is very well trained in magic and its underlying principals. She travels the Astral seeking out rare and forgotten knowledge. Her signature magic motif is arrows, like our friends Zed Matthews has seasons and Owen Riversmeet has mathematics. These motifs are not varieties of magic but rather aesthetics very skilled mages can apply to their spells. These are ten of the most powerful mages in Creation and they’re on our side. C J...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got the core rules of both card games done and as usual I’m now looking to amalgamate them to make my job simpler. I’m adding some card types to Quantum. Nothing in the core rules of Quantum is being changed at all here now or later. I have some ideas from Uprising that I’m going to make compatible with the main card game. This time experimenting with art generation software has been useful but I really don’t need two incompatible sets of similar but separate core rules to manage. I’ve been relying on Uprising to dictate what furniture is in a room and what rooms are in a building but that isn’t working as well as I wanted. It just shifts the design challenge to be on more than one card. I’ve put some thought into this and I realized that I can solve this by making cards with building interiors on them that repeat the layout but that have new people in them every time. These are technically still region cards so they don’t need a new name or job. I’m calling ...