Hello. C J here. I’m taking until January 1st 2026 off from work on my card game and all video games except for my Minecraft server project Fantasy Plus. I’ve had time to think though and I’ve realized some useful things. Dragon Engine aims to be a complete art generation and storytelling package right out of the box. Characters can be any species, colour, colour combination, level of robotic enhancement, body type, gender and magic specialty my setting has to offer. Want a humanoid snorlax to go on a date with a four legged gemstone coloured dragon where they eat chocolate together? Done. Easy money. Want their friend the suicune who owns the cafe next door to film them and make a promo for the cafe’s website out of the power of friendship? Done. Like there’s an in game camera item for screen recording without the user interface. I’m including an image of a humanoid suicune for reference.
I’ve figured out an easier way of structuring the narrative part of the game. The game’s map is already divided into tiles. What if I made a box above each tile that can detect when the player is in it but not block their movement. I mean like an invisible hit detection box. Each one of these regions can tell when the player is in it and spawn exactly six things in a three by two grid. A couch to sit on, a stove to cook in, a friend, a named character, a combat encounter appropriate to their Tier, they can spawn anything and all in the same interface. This then replaces my idea of spawn stones with rooms and will work in the wilderness as well for trees, grass and wildlife.
In the terrain editing Creator mode you then have the pain tool that allows you to open the user interface menu that runs a room and pick the furniture and also what characters are using it. Pick a named individual or a known Quantum deck of characters and it’ll slot them in. The game then checks once every few seconds what room you’re in and provides real time Journal updates including your opinion about the decor, things the other characters say and how the combat is going. This will take no effort to code and will make film, novel writing and graphic novel projects done in Dragon Engine easier. Just save a day’s Journal entries as a .txt file and you have a nice short story.
The price for the software is still a planned $8.99 with a continent map pack DLC at $20.99. The price comes with the license to make art in it for resale. Speaking of money, I also handle the finances of my job here running and literally being Infinity Game Studios. I’m good at money. It’s a family trait that I was taught at a young age. I was looking for some inspiration for my Minecraft server project Fantasy Plus and I thought to myself, how am I going to decide the prices of all the in game merchants? Then I thought, what if I did it by the prices in real life?
Yes. Just yes to this idea. I’ve assigned a single gold nugget an approximate dollar value of $17.50 Canadian. Two of them is $35 Canadian. A loaf of my family’s hand made sourdough is $5 so one nugget gets three bread including the tax. A shopping trip for me often ends up being exactly $35 for a week of normal meals and some food experimentation ingredients. Really, it’s always that number. I just need to price out grocery store prices for real food, maybe look up the going rate for a couple ounces of scrap iron and then go with my own tabletop game line for the prices of armour in a medieval economy. The game will be about real money. That worked.
I’m adding also a full set of metal bows, a range of spellbooks for fantasy combat and some food. I’m making a top tier metal called dragon and I want it to be bright dragon red. Top tier bosses often drop diamonds but not dragon ingots. These are dropped only by dragons. I’m making those by recolouring the Ender Dragon and they’ll be rare overworld spawns that I’ll add when I add more end game tier dungeons. Take them down with a team and share the metal. For food I’m making meat pie, apple pie, sweet berry pie, berry pastry, apple pastry, beef stew and vegetable stew. I wanted things that used existing ingredients in the game and that felt like the food the game already had. I’m kind of hoping I can get some of my family in on this by including food they like. You can gift Minecraft. I intend to take advantage of that.
C J Mcpherson
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