TheAstralBackstage

 Hello. C J here. I’m working today on the script for Monad. Despite being pixel based it’s going to have a lot of story. More specifically it’s going to be a proof of concept for the quest generation engine that I need for Dragon Engine. Here’s the breakdown of how it works with some examples. Campaigns The top level storylines are Campaigns. These are single long stories that are composed of an initial quest description and then three Quests. They are reusable as they dictate three varieties of Quests and let the player pick how they will satisfy the conditions. These are recorded in real time in the player’s Journal. I’m working on the menu design for that today as well. Here’s an example.  Warlord     “A great war threatens our land. Already armies are gathering at our borders. We can win but we can’t without aid. Convince our allies of the necessity of war, delve into the enemy’s territory and return to help gather supplies. Victory will be ours and you will be ...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve posted here one of my three panel Legend Setting comic sets. These are made using open source rendering software. The phrase AI software is really inaccurate these days since everything from YouTube to Adobe PDF Viewer has AI. If for some reason you have a problem with AI being used to depict characters eating lunch then maybe learn what the word AI means first before throwing a tantrum. Anyway, I’m producing these three panels regularly and I’m going to make a second blog to host them in order alongside this one. I'm working on a name. Consider this our generation’s Sunday morning comic strips. I’m going to aim to have one three panel most weekdays and a larger nine panel one each weekend. This is doable with the speed and software knowledge I have. I am intending on teaching my best practices and systems for the software but not yet. Stay tuned for more. Edit: So, this blog software is great but I can't format the images in a way that makes them easy to...

 Hello. C J here. There are two worlds out there. The in person and the online. Both contain wisdom. I’m trying to get them to share it. In order to do this goal we need a place where everyone can hang out on the internet. Enter Monad. It’s a top down pixel game that lets you build a base and invite friends online over to it to view art and read stories you’ve stocked on shelves. I want it to be a grown up, adult friendly pixel game. There will be combat. It will be cute pixel characters having sword fights. I really want some LGBTQ+ content in it and that means I need to finally discuss sexuality and consent in the public eye. Furries, like myself, have an intricate language about these subject matters. I want all of that in the game. The issue is that furries, like me, don’t understand what everyone else deems acceptable to view. Or if that phrase about acceptable has meaning at all. Here’s some fun fandom art conventions. Muscle A lot of artists can depict characters with larger...

 Hello. C J here. These are some fun things I thought I’d share. The furry fandom throws large city-filling events every now and then. We call these cons. They are places to be around other furries and also to buy and sell our amazing art goods. They also cure depression of any grade on the spot when you walk in. The same goes for most forms of anxiety. I’ve had some amazing and very productive conversations with a number of psychologists formally studying one for a thesis paper on positive psychology. Acceptance does that. Also, everyone’s allowed to come. We want more friends. Next, sugar is actually really useful biologically. I do not get as someone who is mostly trained in everything but actually just biochemistry why in the name of Creation people think the stuff is toxic. Eating just candy will cause diabetes. Eating no sugar probably does worse to you. Dark chocolate is one of the healthiest food items in existence and it’s like a third sugar. The brain runs off nothing eve...

 Hello. C J here. Okay, so the furry fandom are amazing people. Everyone knows this, right? Like, we run the internet and are all unusually polite. We support animal charities and have an entrenched knowledge of art and software. Everyone likes us. I’m the only person in the furry fandom who makes it part of my job to interact with the rest of the world equally. To people in that other half of our planet the furries don’t know you like them. Why? We’re kind of shy. Speaking as one of the currently oldest and longest standing art providers in the fandom, furries really take criticism way too seriously. Like that’s not cool we have any but really we need to forget it. And to everyone else, furries often like buying food and clothing and non-technology goods from other people. My point is that I’ve learned strongly over the last decade of market research that there are two halves to this world we live in. The furry fandom are mostly a decentralized internet-based community. We meet up...

 Hello. C J here. Allow me to present to you a question. We’re talking about my video game Monad by the way. It’s in development. It will be made out of pixels. Anyway, the question is as follows. How do you notate a concept in numbers? This question has come up in my work a lot. Games notate real life phenomena or phenomena from stories in numbers that both a human and a computer can use. That is their job. This is why I use games to present knowledge and also real Earth magic practice. If I know I need to present an action in a game then I read up on it and find a way of presenting the numbers it relies on in game form. Everything in life can be reduced down to numbers like time in seconds, lifting strength in kilograms or speed in metres per second. Everything except for a concept. They don’t last seconds and they can’t be lifted. Monad, my retro style top down pixel video game, is my attempt at doing this. The game takes everything I can’t fit into my open world third person ro...

Hello. C J here. It’s time to talk about my new video game project Monad. I’ve used and learned a lot about the Android app development software GDevelop in the process of making Dragon Engine. I am very fond of the team behind the software, the interface and the tools it’s willing to give the player. By player I mean the one making a game out of it. It feels like playing Minecraft only you get to sell the whole thing after you beat it. Here’s what I know I can do for Monad. Pixel Style I loved old pixel games like the original Pokemon Gold, Mystery Dungeon Red Rescue Team and Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. This era of games is over. Everything is 3D now and although some games benefited from it these classics really worked the way they were. I can hand draw pixel art. I learned for fun when I was growing up and there are easy tools for it in GDevelop. I have already acquired a Silver plan for the software and the game template for top down pixel style games. It’s onto level design now....

 Hello. C J here. I’m back and I’m going to catch everyone up on Dragon Engine progress before I do anything else. It’s going well. I’ve jumped between coding engines twice now. One was to the very well built Android app GDevelop. The engine mostly specializes in pixel games so it didn’t have some of the functionality I need to make the character models. I then jumped again to Godot. This free desktop program looks, feels and runs beautiful. I’ve got a screenshot of a pre-Alpha development build to show here. The character is a placeholder but the 3D terrain tile is a custom made hand modelled asset. I added the collision myself as well. Imagine how good it will look when I add in a skybox. I’ve realized I need to make wall tiles half as wide as the edges of the ground tiles but otherwise they align perfectly. I need grass next and then hand modelled trees. My one rule is to never put anything ever on a diagonal. Knowing how computers think it’s in exact X Y and Z coordinates and r...

 Hello. C J here. It's been too long since I've used that signature. I'm back to running this blog as of today. I'm going to consolidate and update all the pages first so don't worry if something moves on you. Then, I've got some new video game ideas and a ton of art to discuss. C J Mcpherson