TheAstralBackstage

 Hello. C J here. It’s an uncommon thing these days for video games to have a script, especially a large one. Those days of having dozens of voice actors and several writing teams for a game are gone. Games these days are often good but don’t have the massive narrative element that was common in the industry a while ago. To be frank there aren’t really that many stand out fantasy novels either. The publishing industry took a nose dive when the Kindle was invented. It then hit rock bottom, floundered and screamed violently for a while and then quietly dissolved into goo. Let’s be real, they never paid authors like me peanuts. You had to do your own marketing on your own dollar. And if you didn’t follow all of their archaic rules they’d disown you. A book a year and the main character’s age and gender had to match the target audience by year. My point is we really don’t have stories anymore. We ran out of them in the fantasy genre. Dragon Engine is a multi-pronged system designed to ...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got some work done on the script for Dragon Engine. My plans for the top down pixel game Monad are likely on hold for a while as I port all of them over to making a Minecraft Bedrock Edition server. I’ll get a server laptop for it and host it myself. There are some amazing looking Minecraft servers out there, often with a ton of players all the time. If you’re familiar with Minecraft then you may be wondering why I’m highlighting this. Nowhere else on the internet is this busy. Everyone and their stuffed animals are on Minecraft. I’m going to have to play a game I didn’t make for once. Anyway, the server will be fun. Dragon Engine is a very different game. It has no hunger, does not permit farming in the Story mode and has a different licensing structure for selling in-game creative content. The main difference is its script. The original plan I had for the video game was that it could self-generate quests and maintain playability indefinitely. I’ve got some ...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got some fun screenshots of the current development state of Dragon Engine. It looks good. All walls, ground and floor tiles were hand modelled by me in Android software. Their collision boxes and placements were also done by me. I thought I’d enumerate some of the game’s features and the order I’m getting to them in. Terrain Tiles All of the floors, ground and walls are tiles of specific lengths and widths. They lock together to make the environment including the insides of houses. We can see here a mostly complete house. This looks good and also means I can reuse them infinitely. I also have grass and I’m working on trees and flowers. Terrain Design I’m working on making a menu that players and I can use to add or modify terrain. Each terrain tile can be swapped for another one of the same type, using a base bedrock tile as the default. I’m working on adding water as well but not swimming. This will be how I build the maps for Story mode and can be used by ...

 Hello. C J here. In the process of setting up Infinity Game Studios I have learned or come across a ton of useful knowledge. My game Monad is a top down pixel game with a self-generating script. I’ve got all of the core design on the script done. See my previous post The Mathematics of Monad for details. I need to write all of the individual dialogue and narration but the generation structure is done. This might be the best way I could find of getting all the random useful knowledge I have into a product. Most of this knowledge is in broad concepts and not individual facts. I’ll give some examples here. What a fursona is, how sleep and spirituality interact, what is lucid dreaming, how to do the scientific method, what jobs go well with coffee, how I exercise without weights or a gym and how to spend a whole day shopping for almost no money. I think a procedural story would work with these as some of its skills or gameplay options. I have no idea how you craft them in the game but...

 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. 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. 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 think that with the pancake post yesterday you folks know all my recipes. I’ll have more, like next year. I’m narrowing down my posts for the year we’re in down to the ones I know I can still do. The most popular stuff on here has always been number one, dessert, and number two, spirituality. I could have predicted the dessert but not the spirituality. The third most popular is short fiction and script samples from my games. We won’t have new recipes for a while but I can definitely post more stories, which is my actual job I do as a person even more than game design is, and more of my notes about real life spirituality. I’m going to stick to two post series for the year. These will be updates about Dragon Engine, which will mostly be script samples and screenshots, and posts about real world mysticism and magic. The card game will be mentioned only when I have new final draft content done for it, and then the card game will just get a post announcing the new downloa...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve updated the Quantum page here on the website. The card game is going to take a long time. I’ve scheduled a year of very slow work on it before I’m expecting it to be done. Quantum will be the core game line I keep adding to but it needs to be done first before I can do that. It is being made slowly so I don’t burn out. This leaves me with a lot of free time. I need more side projects or I’m going to get bored. Bored in my opinion is worse than burnt out. I have been meaning to make an animation, like a full length movie, set in Ascala for a while. Maybe Ascala needs that animation this year. I can hand draw all the characters and backgrounds. This will rely on the same archive of assets and hand drawn props I need for the card game. The problem is the plot. I don’t have it in me as an author to work on another story this year besides the card game. The card game requires that much work. Then I realized something. I could just commission people to help plan an...

 Hello. C J here. The card game Quantum is planned for the next ten years or so and it’s just a matter of typing and art from now on. My chocolate recipe works and I know what I’m doing with it next. Heart and Fur is out and that’s the last product I have done that needs to be released. This means I can start something new. Or, rather, I can return to something old. I still haven’t finished either of my two current video game projects. To catch everyone up, I’m an author and also a video game coder, script writer, level designer, character modeller and voice actor. I use only Blueprints and the Unreal Engine but I’m good at both thanks to three straight years of research. I’m working on a massive video game project still that predates the Astral setting and all of my other games. The trilogy I’m still planning out is composed of three games, Allegro, Absolute and Ancestral. These will require the entire Astral setting and most of the crafting recipes being done in card format first...

 Hello. C J here. I've finally got my hands on a project I can actually do in a reasonable amount of time. Duskbringer's script is going well and I've got another sample for you all. Here it is. City Meeting One Snow: Welcome, young one. I suppose I need to call you Dusk, don’t I? Dusk: Snow I assume? You’re projecting yourself to meet me? Snow: Yes, I am Snow. No, I am actually here. We are not the most powerful of gods and while some of us can be in several places at once none of us here have ever learned how. Dusk: It is quite peculiar to hear a god speak of learning. Snow: Do you think us all knowing? I am happy for the complement but it is not deserved. We are people on the inside like any of you are. Dusk: Then I have learned something. What are these creatures? Are these souls attacking me here? Snow: No. They are not souls. Dusk: Then what was I fighting last time? Snow: Those are summons, projections of our will. It’s quite a common trick in some parts of the galax...

 Hello. C J here. I've finally taken a chunk off the video game project I have that is small enough to work on now. I hope to have it done without needing to make the entirety of Regency and have every Regency card done. It's set in my setting's Hell. The main character is a wizard who needs something from the rulers of Hell. It's going to be an open world hack and slash with very little else besides fun combat and plot. I'm going to post a ton of script samples here. So far it's one of the most enjoyable scripts to type I've ever worked on. And I'm going to do everything I can to give it a PG rating at worst. It's not going to be horrible or violent. The samples should help explain that. Oh, and our main character is an anthro lion with a cool sword. Enjoy! Opening – The Duchy of Agony Snow: Well. Avira: Young one. Mezeca: Look what. Avran: We. Celeb: Have. Makelith: Here. Dusk: And so the Watchers have spoken to me. I greet you. Avran: Oh? Snow: Y...

 Hello. C J here. I have some further progress notes about planning Quantum Dragon. This new video game project of mine is designed to be attainable in a way that the main trilogy isn’t. The main trilogy takes years of planning for each mechanic in it because it is designed to rely on real life mysticism and spirituality for its inspiration. The new video game doesn’t. It therefore doesn’t have rules about what will work and what won’t work in its story or setting. It’s going quickly and I’m hoping to have some test runs of the level maps within a week of today. Here’s what I’m thinking. The game might not need quests at all but I’m thinking most of the gameplay will be NPCs requesting you to craft items for them in exchange for a reward. Do five of these requests and you level up. Wilderness exploration and combat are a way of getting resources in the early game and also rarer resources from stronger monsters in the later game. Nothing in the setting can die permanently so the mon...

Hello. C J here. I’ve wrapped up a lot of planning and I’ve posted all of my finished Minecraft builds. Now it’s time to move onto my next batch of work. I need to finish Regency. Regency is my upcoming card based tabletop RPG in an envelope. There are a ton of things I need it to be able to do and I have plans for most of them. I also need at least the first few editions of it done before I can go forwards with making the level maps for the video game. I’m using Minecraft to practice designing those for both jobs. The game needs the following things. Faction Cards Each player in the game plays as an entire military faction represented by 20 cards. As they level up they gain Experience that they can use to buy new cards. The military cards are one named faction each set with art, stats and health boxes. A player can own and control more than one of these but they have to be played in real time. The first expansion will feature Ascala and needs five sets of 20 of these that I’m currentl...

 Hello. C J here. This is the second of the two posts I have planned for today about writing a novel. These ones go in order so I’d recommend reading the first one from earlier today first. Before actually writing a novel or a series of novels you need a good grasp of the setting, characters and plot you are going to be working with. I listed those in order, by the way. Setting first then characters then plot. Characters have to represent the setting in that you only ever see it through their eyes. The plot should be based on the actions, motives, desires, goals and personalities of the characters or it doesn’t really count as a plot. Regardless of how you plan that out the setting comes first. That’s why I did that job first and am still doing it. The setting I write in is huge. It’s a whole galaxy named Creation. The specific region of it I focus on at present is the Astral, a nebula of the same name where there is air in space and ships float but people sink. The Astral isn’t th...

Hello. C J here. I’ve spent a while posting food and Minecraft updates to this blog. Minecraft is really helpful to my eventual goal of making the massive video game trilogy I have planned composed of the games Allegro, Absolute and Ancestral. These games are huge projects that I’ve been learning and training most of my life to do. They’re also hobby projects that require no funding and no team. Let me explain. I went into making these expecting that I needed a lot of things done for me in order to make them. Source code, lighting engine, sound design, asset modelling, animation creation, voice acting and, worst of all, the code for combat mechanics. I needed money to do all of this. Then I learned about the Unreal Engine. An all in one game design software with all of those things built in and a coding language I actually like? Amazing. Wait, it’s free? Wait, what? I spent a good five or six years learning how to use it and everything made sense. I can code in it, either by following ...

 Hello. C J here. I’m actively working on adding social combat to Absolute. Absolute needs the ability to interact with the NPCs in real time and have the NPCs have actual conversations. With social combat being added to the game line I need some reward mechanisms there. Recruiting a new party member or summon monster is easy enough to do in the software. But first you might want to go on a date with them. That’s easy to do with short cutscenes in the style I’m already doing, dialogue over an image of food. So you can go into the wilderness, meet a nice monster, social combat them into submission and then befriend them. That got wholesome in a way I did not see coming. So real question here, do I need every house in every city to be enterable? Like does every NPC need a house? I’m trying to avoid having to do that much micromanagement of the NPCs and their lives. Can they just go back to your lodgings? That sounds easier. There isn’t money in the game at all but you can unlock perk...

 Hello. C J here. Now everyone welcome to the long, slow and repetitive part of making a game, physically typing the entire text of it up and then, in this case, voice acting it when it’s done being typed. This will take years. I have a limit of how much I can type in a day without straining my fingers and I’ll still be under it by a bit after this journal. The rest of that limit will be put towards the script for Absolute itself. Here’s some dialogue from Chapter One of Absolute, City Draped in Gold. Chapter One sees the four draconians return to Ascala where the plot started to wrap up some loose ends. Ascala has more in store for them than they thought. By the way this journal here does not have an important reason and does not make a point. I’m typing today so I thought I’d share some of it. Dear All, these characters are fun to write. Oh, and also, if anyone wants to adult parody them well, most of the four are gay anyway. I think they’d be fine with that. Start Play at South ...