Author/Designer of the Also Rans, in progress towards playtesting.
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Here Be Monsters
Because you can’t fight a boss without clearing out the trash mobs along the way. Alright, that isn’t fair to the goombas and lackeys along the way. Frankly, if you’re a boss monster, you don’t need to personally dirty your claws dealing with every PC that wants a piece of your hide and the quest…
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Pox: Chaos and tanking in one improbable package
I’ve been doing a lot of work on Pox, the third member of The Also Rans, and the last character for the base game. In the story, she was kicked out of The Hero’s party because she didn’t do enough “deeps.” Pox doesn’t actually know what “deeps” refers to, but she absolutely swears she can…
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Can you please shut up?
“Pox not at all like be asked shut up. Is not even make sense to say! Pox look up, but nothing there at all to make shut, and when Pox try ask what they want shut, eyes get all bugglybulgey and then they flop their arms all looseygoosey like they just need to drop something…
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Altering destiny with better AI art prompting
“The Divine’s plan is no more ours to know than They choose to tell us. We cannot act other than blind, and cannot know our path except in comparing our steps to where our heart has told us we strayed from that path.” I’ve had a lot of success with Alastrina’s prayer card. I’ll show…
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Overly ambitious is two huge projects mushed together!
I started writing The Also Rans (which you can read fun bits of) as a wild inspiration on a trip. Then I realized how saturated the book market is, that I don’t have the knowledge base to create a video game, and board games require a lot of understanding and tweaking to make them work.…
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Game design choices I wouldn’t do
What bores you? On my authority as a gamer, and the fact that I am on the internet, makes me an authority figure on the subject of what games shouldn’t do. And since I am on the internet, I expect my opinions should be stated as fact and obeyed by all, as a proclamation from…
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You have to run before you crawl. Oh wait that’s not how that goes…
I am impressed enough by what AI art can do that I forget that it needs a lot of training to be even vaguely competent at a task. When you’ve gotten it decently trained on a specific character, and ask it to change the appearance of that character in some unique way, generally it can…
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This response got taken over by short attention span fairy
“The best gift I ever received? Not getting stepped on. Or kicked. Or threatened to have axes thrown at me. Or skipping the threats and just having axes thrown at me. Today has been my favorite day because none of those things has happened. Yet. But who knows, the day is young and there’s always…
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Throwing wild pitches: Jo’Jaxon mechanics
I’ve had a month of pretty solid design work, and am flowing a lot more on Jo’Jaxon, the Splizzball pitcher known for improbable throws. In keeping with his character trait, there has to be some randomness in how he does his throws, and I think I’m ready to share off at least the basics of…
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Attack/Magic/Summon/Item/Run
Gamers’ tolerance for randomness in games is very much a sliding scale. Dealing with randomness can be fun and dynamic, and certainly makes for more storied games. Your success based on randomness.. well, that’s a whole lot less interesting. Nobody plays Chutes and Ladders for the hard tactical play, since the only thing you actually…
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Daily Writing Prompt: Splizzball, duh.
“Obviously, Splizzball. Everybody loves Splizzball, not just because it is the only sport in the realm, but heck, they even let some of the more civil monsters come and watch. So, that’s one for world peace, or at least the owners get a piece of the pie. “Gold is gold,” is what my agent tells…
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Art Evolution
The artist reflects on their creative journey with AI art, particularly focusing on developing a character named Flonk, a hybrid of a payara fish and a cockroach. Despite challenges in getting the AI to visualize specific details, including coloration and scaling, the artist embraces unexpected choices that enhance Flonk’s appearance, showcasing progress in their work.
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You said three. You didn’t say they had to relate to each other.
I’ve spent about 13 years working on one of my own, so The Also Rans is definitely high on the list of books that had an effect on me! And yeah, its a plug, but a highly relevant plug that you can read part of right here for free! Ok, but seriously to the prompt.…
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If you practice hard enough, do you get a promotion?
“The other aspect I have come to embrace is that there simply is no way to be certain of the will of the divine. We can clear our minds of all distractions, we can listen keenly with an open heart, we can beg to be only but an instrument of their will.. and sometimes go…
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Legacy is a bold word. How about “I did a cool thing that helped others?”
My book/game, of course! Not the only legacy I have going for me, but as this is a project I have been working on (off and on anyway) for well over 10 years, it has one of the longest lifespans of anything I’ve played a hand in, and maybe fittingly, it is something I wanted…
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Rambling about world building, part whatever
When I first started writing The Also Rans, I didn’t really do worldbuilding. Oh, sure, I knew about the idea of it, but it really was hard to come up with a reason to do all that worldbuilding if I didn’t see the characters in the story doing anything with it. Not having aspirations of…
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Not being picky gets you the best monsters sometimes!
There’s a certain creative freedom when you don’t need a specific art to show up. Maybe its because humans like drawing monsters, or maybe its because AI art naturally gravitates towards making monstrous freaks when you tell it not to, but either way, it can be really creative when you don’t tell it “give me…
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Monsters in Shoes
Just an art post for today. I was going for prankishly tying monster shoelaces together, and I got a lot of weirdness. Charming weirdness too good to simply delete. What stories do these horrors have to tell?
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If you lost it, it wasn’t needed. Much.
What sacrifices have you made in life? “Never gamble what you can’t afford to lose, and don’t chase your losses. If you lost them, they weren’t meant to be yours. That said, I do like eating meals and having the ability to pay for them when situations require that, so regretting losses does come up…
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Desperate Pleas and a lot of cool cast off arts
When you’re making art, sometimes there is nothing inside the marble chunk. Sometimes, though, the little chips and pieces are fascinating, though, and I really do like me some AI art castoffs for inspiration. I’m cobbling together a sample playset for both Alastrina and Flonk so I can do some playtesting on it next week,…
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I get by with a little help from my friends
“Reluctantly a leader, regretfully a follower. I’ve come to learn that being too supportive of the wrong type of leader doesn’t actually do any good, and it is very hard, once you’ve seen how it is to be misled, to follow someone else’s lead with as much trust as you once did.” “Awww, Softhair Prettything…
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A wriggly worm in my apple
So I leveled up in StableDiffusion today, and I want to show that off. I’ll get back to this fascinating fruit question, I promise, but first: Art time! In order to generate card art for Flonk‘s moves, I need, well, Flonk. He’s hard to animate because he’s a creature type I made up. AI is…
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5 small improvements from 5 characters
“Trust in myself more. I really should; if my friends can trust my judgement and look to me for whatever guidance I can offer, then I suppose there’s something there that I don’t let myself see.” “Uhh, be more awesome than I already am? Not sure how that’s possible, but I guess I can make…
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Garbage In, Garbage Out
“Freedom? I mean what even would that be? Some kumbaya crap they tell kids to be happy about as they teach them the rules? ‘Rejoice, children, thanks to your freedoms, you are free to do this homework assignment and work a job until you are of no use to society, then you’re free to go…
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Scummy Mummy looking for love
I really loved the mummy in Kevin’s No Theme Thursday, and that inspired me to make her a boyfriend. Covered in foul disease, because mummies do be like that. So this is an entry into this week’s NTT from a prior week’s NTT. Because my schedule do be like that, apparently! While I don’t necessarily…
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WIP: Monster Cards
One of my original ideas for a story/game was that writing combat sucks in a lot of ways. Reading about heroes bashing up villains isn’t generally very fun; there’s only so many ways you can do “and they stabbed each other with swords and some of them died” without being boring. Also, there’s the Civil…
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The golden rule? Mm, more like the rule of crumbling cookies.
“That one’s easy. Do onto others what they try to do onto you. I usually skip these because, well, they’re crap like favorite holidays or what kind of sweater you like to wear, but this one was made just for me.” (Flonk is a monster turncoat, who joined the crew of the Also-Rans out of…
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WIP: Flonk vs Monsters
Flonk’s battle card and at least the gist of how he’ll play out in combat is shaping up, and I wanted to show some of the thought process! Being a monster, Flonk is assumed to be on the monster’s side, and he’ll pretend to be a turncoat at the beginning of combat with them, with…
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Letting myself be put on the sidelines was very hard
“I should have left so much earlier. When.. oh this is hard. When he left me there, I trusted he would come back. I trusted that I was worth coming back for. I.. guess I wasn’t.” (Alastrina is leading a ragtag group of would-be adventurers on a quest they got ditched for being, well, ragtag…
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Bad luck is expected, why sweat it? It only musses your hair.
Gamblers are never nervous. Nervous is something you absolutely do not want your fellow players to notice about you, and it is a habit you should absolutely divest yourself of. Unless you’re playing a friendly game with me, in which case by all means carry on with your tells. You don’t think you have a…
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Maslow, shmaslow, I like being alive.
“Surviving every day makes me happy. Also eating. Not getting stomped on is a bonus, too. If Maslow studied monster society instead of humans, his job would have been a lot easier on him than wondering about all that self fulfillment crap.” (Flonk is a monster with a very narrow view on how things are…
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Keep on moving, because you don’t get nowhere when you don’t.
“I stopped warming the bench with my butt, figuratively and literally. Well, seeing how Splizzball’s a summer sport, I guess I was more shading the bench than warming it, but getting off of it was important enough to say I did a good thing for myself.” [Jo’jaxon is a (former) Splizzball pitcher, and while you…
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Books about assassin robots and zombie master Founding Fathers
Scud the Disposable Assassin comes from a gritty future where megacorporations are openly owned by monstrous aliens, cybernetic mutants roam the streets, and, oh yeah, if you want somebody dead, you can hire a hitman from a vending machine. The titular hitman, like all of his robotic kind, are resourceful and focused on their assignment,…
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Consecration, The Original Memory Game
If your MC is a cleric, there’s going to be a point where you say “Get offa mah land.” And by my land, I mean whatever patron deity you’ve just evoked to burn the unholy butt cheeks that happen to be trespassing. Which is technically divine squatting; I don’t know that deities have to respect…
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D’awww Real Monsters!
I had a fun day making monster art for my cards. These are all low level trash mobs, but they’re still worth making fun art for! Enjoy the eye candy! I am starting to get a handle on the power level, or lack thereof, of monsters — even lowbie trash needs some interesting skills, but…
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Alphas are inherently ugly. But grounded!
The learning curve on nanDECK is.. steep. The results for a newcomer are.. well they’re hideous. Not only are they not ready for prime time, but they’re not even ready for the “met at a bar, went home with, woke up with the next morning and regretted your life choices” time. I can’t soft pedal…
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Zoinks, its a minor villain
This is my first entry for No Theme Thursday, which looks like a lot of fun and I wanted to play too! I like act villains in sagas. They’re not here for a long time, they’re just here for a bad time, and before they wear out their welcome, they’re defeated and the main characters…
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Rethinking my game goal
My lovely Alastrina, well, the real life inspiration for her anyway, suggested something I had never thought of. Wives are pretty good that way, even if it is “did you think about how displeased I’ll be when I see that pile of dirty dishes in the sink from this morning, molding by this evening?” This…
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“Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time”
So why do warriors in MMOs have taunts? I mean, I get the function; as this helpful Reddit post points out, it’s the “rogue did something stupid” button. I get why a tank would want an ability to pull hate off of their squishy buddies, but why taunt, specifically? Warriors are not exactly known for…
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A crisis of faith
“Faith. If it was easy to understand, then the faithful would all have attained enlightenment already. Since my Order is still here and, well, they tried to teach me their ways, I suppose that means nobody really understands what it means enough to be done trying to understand it.” (Alastrina is the main protagonist of…
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O.M.Goblins are so cute
Yesterday I posted some of Flonk‘s moveset where he screws with bosses, at the risk of pissing off said boss monster. I was playing with some AI art generally to work on the move cards, and then it struck me: “Why not have goblins playing pranks?” AI is apparently very good at goblins. I mean,…
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When you’re a monster, fight like one by backstabbing your oppressors!
Now that I’ve gotten a little better at Flonk‘s art, I wanted to introduce a bit of his moveset. Each of the Also-Rans play differently, even with the whole “you get two moves per turn, and some sort of charge up move” thing, I wanted them to vary wildly. Since Flonk is a monster, and…
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Staying on tangent is a secret skill to some
“Pox no good keep secrets, so if Pox had something Pox not want other people knowing, that would be big ability, yes? Maybe Pox not wish Pox had though, secret secrets not as fun as telling friends secrets, although maybe that not same thing as what DailyPokey TalkyPerson want Pox to say? Why DailyPokey TalkyPerson…
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A face only a mother could love
Maybe because AI was trained on human images, it really benefits from noses. If you don’t have a species with a nose, then you get a lot of head scratch pictures along the lines of “why did you do that?” If, on the other hand, if you let it have a nose, facial features tend…
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Originality and AI Art are not a great match
I mean, obviously; AI is all about copying things from patterns, and if you don’t have a pattern, well, good luck. On the plus side, you don’t feel guilty for wasting an artists time by being wishy washy. On the minus side, you are wasting your own time as Stable Diffusion offers up a pile…
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I made cute bugs today. I wasn’t trying to.
Asking AI art to make monsters is easy; most things end up looking monstrous when computers stitch together body parts into something its algorithms say “meh, that’ll do.” Even Dr. Frankenstein knew that fingers don’t come out of armpits, but that was back in 1818; two hundred some years later and we are much better…
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In a world of ‘fake it till you make it’ fakers..
“Confidence is like putting on cologne in the morning. A little dab behind the ears and one on the neck, and people will brighten up as you get stuck in elevators with them. Once that runs out though, and you start sweating, well, kinda goes the other way when you’re the stinky guy everybody’s trapped…
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Faux Cell Shading? Mais oui!
There’s just something about cel shaded art that works for me; its kinda like the video game equivalent of how comic books look, and if you’re going for an action pose, well, there’s no better inspo than comic books, either. I’m working on concepts of the card art for battle moves while multitasking, so I…
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Battle Screen Concept, aka “Oh God now I see how little I know how to do”
One of the ideas I had come across while surfing other WordPress game development blogs was working on a Game Design Document (Reddit has good examples). I started trying to describe in words what I was getting at, then I realized how crap that was and decided to muck about in Gimp and just edit…
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Daily writing prompt, as responded by James Kopecky
“They say people like us, you know, lifestyle gamblers, are as much kin to sharks as anything else. I for one find that such an uncreative comparison, and does very little to capture any nuance. Have you ever seen a shark bluff? Or read the other players at the table to find out which one…
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Daily Prompt, as responded by Alastrina
Alastrina is one of the characters in my book/game/hybrid thing; she’s the priestess main character who finds herself very much out of her element on her quest to save the world. “The last thing I learned? I don’t know that I’d have a last thing I could point at; this whole experience has been so…
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Daily Prompt, as responded by Flonk
“Question I hate to be asked? That’s.. not a concept where I come from.” “So, I’m a monster. We answer to anything bigger than us or with more teeth than us, because if you don’t obey that rule, well, not taking orders is soon about to be the least of your day’s problems. Also, its…
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A healer as a main character? That’s unpossible!
RPGs start with a sword guy. Or a gun guy. They don’t start with a healer chick, because healer chicks kinda need a sword guy to do like 90% of the damage for them, and basically they stand around behind the sword guy, being a mana potion to healing potion conversion tool. Tough sell for…
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Worldbuilding on the fly
In writing circles, there are three camps of writers, all of which are seriously flawed human beings and we should all judge them: As you can tell, I have great respect for all modes of creativity; writing is writing, after all. Writing is also incredibly uncomfortable sometimes. Maybe its the time we spent in withered…
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Debuffs and .. rebuffs?
(credit for the feature pic) I really like battlers that do more than make white numbers fly out of bad guy heads. If its a competition to make bad guys fall down, then the heavier hitters do that better than the.. not as heavy hitters. Since this is a game focused on the not as…
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Inspiration for a holy warrior from a field trip
The inspiration for the two turn combat system came from going to visit the Namdroling Golden Monastery in Karnataka, India. There’s a lot you can think about on a long winding drive through twisting roads up and down a mountain, so not ALL of it was dorking about how to make a healer main character…
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card sharking a card based combat system
I wanted to show off some of the flexibility thoughts for the combat engine, and introduce at least some of the moveset for James Kopecky, the gambler character. James’ ability to manipulate luck and his skill at doing so in the casinos makes him a natural to muck about with his fellow players’ luck. By…
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The action economy and RPGs
I really want to make an RPG not be a yawn fest. The classic RPG turn formula is pretty simple: Attack, Magic, Item, Defend. Magic and Item require a resource to use, although with tonics and other Spell Point restoring items, its basically just an gold based economy at that point. So you either swat…
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Like teaching a toddler to paint
(This is more of a “look what I made” kind of a post, but I do want to share some “how you do?” notes, right up top.) I wasn’t expecting to get a lesson in AI bias, but, well, I got one. It took a lot of effort to get StableDiffusion to understand the ethnicity…
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do my little turn on the catwalk
(This is more of a “look what I made” kind of a post, but I do want to share some “how you do?” notes, right up top.) One of the things I wanted to do was generate some character art, which for visual novels and RPGs both, are important for the stand up and flap…
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why my game is sporty spice, apparently
Confession time: I really dig Mel C. For a band manufactured as a product, that any of them have a career once the flash leaves the pan, there really isn’t anything but “remember them” tabloid fodder, when you see them 10 years later and life has not been kind to them. So despite the usual…
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Self publishing for dummies (aka me)
While I’d like to brag and say I’m a trailblazer with a plan to, y’know, publish, I am not. This was not something I ever saw myself doing, largely because I never really saw myself as a writer with something to write, let alone publish. I also don’t know any writers closely enough to ask…
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Didn’t make the cut
I had more characters planned than the 5 man band, even before I knew about that being a trope. Having had to juggle five characters, I fully understand why writers keep it limited to 5; there’s 5 lions in Voltron, and nobody talks about vehicle Voltron’s 15 characters anymore (well, this wonderful picture does). Its…
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the fine line of ai art
I am a huge fan of AI generated art as a way to bang out concepts. I realize it isn’t art, it steals inspiration from real human artists, and that the models that allow it to do its stuff were harvested without artist consent. I don’t know how to right those wrongs, or if abstaining…
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How not to make a story/game hybrid
Xenogears was a huge buzzkill of an RPG for me. I only played it once a lot of years ago, so more recent (https://anoverlookingview.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/a-brief-overlook-xenogears-disc-2/) reviews do a much better job of telling you how jarring it was, but I do remember the story being an unwelcome intrusion into what had been, throughout all of Disk…
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Where’d you come up with this idea?
The inspiration for The Also-Rans came from my experience playing classic SNES and Playstation 1 RPGs. Chrono Trigger is an amazing game, and should be on everybody’s “play before you die” list, but that isn’t the game that inspired me to create a story with the unlovable side characters, because there really aren’t any in…