Self-Management

Work has been quite busy at the time of writing this, and it has absolutely tanked my deadlines for Megalomania. (My comic book if you didn't know.) Still making steady progress, but man am I behind. It's a difficult thing to balance, you know? I take shift-based work with weird hours to allow me time to work on my projects, but sometimes scheduling and managing that can get in the way of what I should be doing when I'm off. It's getting better, if I'm being honest. I am getting better at it.

I never had to do this when I worked on set, though. Back then, I basically tried to network while I was at work to get my hooks in the next job, and just kinda jump from shoot to shoot like subway cars in an action movie, just barely avoiding hitting the tracks but leaving myself the time outside of work to draw and stuff like that. Issue was, back then, I didn't have the motivation. Now I have the motivation, and I am starting to get the rhythm of signing up for individual shifts in a timely and organized fashion. The progress continues, but I don't know. I miss putting more out there. I've been tempted to stream progress on the comic this whole time, but I can't bring myself to spoil it. The earliest audience I have -if any- will be you, dear reader, as well as anyone else who watches what little content I put out these days. So, spoiling the plot by drawing pages on stream seems like a great way to shoot myself in the foot.

It's my whole creative world right now, though. Without a doubt. My other projects are idle hobbies, things I do here and there to give my mind a place to go other than writing and drawing. The going is slow on those, and I want to manage expectations, so putting out more content in that vein seems sub-optimal. Thought about streaming/making more videos about Minecraft, as I said in another article, but I have moved away from the server and to a private world that my fiancee and I play on together. Doesn't mean I can't still make content though.

So I might do that, but then we hit on that self-management point again. How do I allocate the time? What I wish is that I had the ability to freeze time, so I can do everything I want to do all at once. I think they call that anxiety. I call it ambition.

Thanks for reading  I'll see you in the next one!

Vision Pro Thoughts

Hey long time no see. Work has been busy so I slipped up and mussed a post or two, but I'm back to talk about VR, the Vision Pro, and apple in general. It was on my mind because of a somewhat recent video from Eddie Burback in which he used sponsor money to buy himself a vision pro and promptly got bored with it like a child with a McDonalds toy, and I don't blame him.

It's not Eddie's fault though, the happy meal toy just isn't very fun. It functions, it does everything it says it can do, but there just isn't much use for it. VR is an enthusiast thing, for most people it's a short experience that's better set as something like a theme park ride, you don't need a roller coaster in you back yard. It's expensive, maintenance can be a bitch, and you'll get bored. It's just not as fun if you use it all the time. The kind of product that really needs to serve a purpose in your life to be worth it.

I was confused when apple announced they were making one. It's not really their wheelhouse, you know? The stuff they make is supposed to be "for everyone," it's always an absurdly high price point, but the concept of the product is something that is for the general consumer. Something everyone could use in their life. VR, or even "spatial computing" just isn't that. It's another way to interface with your computer that is as cumbersome as it is immersive, leaving the ol' keyboard and mouse combo still the optimal method for most people. I am far from the first person to say it's a solution looking for a problem.

It's all just so weird, though. As a person that loves VR, to be so against new, very exciting deveolpments in the space just because of where it's coming from and how it's being marketed. The improved hand tracking is impressive. The eye passthrough is... an idea. But, I don't know. I feel like the real biggest development is coming from disney, with that new omnidirectional treadmil, and I'm worried about their gatekeeping as well. No one has both the resources for the necessary research and the open-source mentality necessary for mass availability. So like... what are we doin? I don't know.

What I do know is that, despite all of this, I am excited to see how things develop, and hopeful that apple and disney will at least drive the existing manufacturers to compete with their developments, hopefully with the intent to undercut their prices. Right? That's how this is supposed to work... right?

Thanks for reading, I'll see you in the next one!

Lab-Grown Media

I have been thinking a lot about this rise of AI art. The opening statement is an obvious one: This tech was supposed to take over the undesireable work, but art pays more, so here we are. I have been wondering, though, if even in a worst case scenario there is a silver lining to look at here. I was listening to a youtuber I like talk about the subject, and he mentioned that the ease of use might discourage young artists from getting over the initial struggle of creating shoddy work and then making the effort to get better. Like we would end up without artists we would otherwise have because AI is easier. I don’t know that I agree.

What I think we might lose at the end of the day, is those who make art as a means to get to something else. Fame, money, some kind of social advantage, if making the art is an obstacle blocking a goal, rather than the goal itself, then the person in question may just go with the AI option. If you love to create, though, and you do it purely because it speaks to your soul, then it doesn’t matter if a machine can do it too.

For the sake of simplicity, I am going to avoid speaking on the legitimacy of the art itself, and whether or not it is comprised of stolen work. (For the moment it seems to be, but alas.) It’s arguable that we may reach a point where these things are genuinely creating new and interesting artwork, so let’s look at the issue from that perspective.

What we lose here is art as a career, and I don’t know if that is necessarily a bad thing for art. Keep in mind I am looking at this in a vacuum, ignoring the wider socio-economic implications, but what’s so bad about machines taking over for the churned out, corporate-controlled media? Don’t they kind of deserve each other? I have been working on my comic book, taking my time, making the changes I want to make, and it makes the finished product better and more uniquely mine. All of that happens because I genuinely care. In the case of a lot of modern media, there is this tragic situation where, even if the artists care deeply about the project they are assigned to, it is still an assignment. They trade artistic labor for money, and it would be foolish to go above and beyond without compensation. Not to mention, many of the major decisions -including timeline- are made by committee so the artist’s unique voices can be and often are lost in the process.

So maybe being an artist isn’t a route to financial stability anymore, and maybe it is but just for a much more select few. Either way, the big companies that deal in art came into being because they were necessary for distribution. You had to be “discovered” by them because otherwise no one could find you. It just isn’t the case anymore. These media conglomerates are nearly obsolete now, and they know it. This AI movement is just another swing for the fences in an effort to win the day with sheer quantity. And financially it may work. But who cares? You don’t make art for money, you make art for the love of the game, and so others can see it. So make the art and put it out there. That’s sure as hell what I’m gonna do.

The Fire

It feels really good to have the fire for creativity back. There was a long while there where I felt like creativity just wasn’t a part of my life anymore. It left me hollow, and it is relieving to feel whole. I even have the fire for making videos again. UeCraft and replay mod have done a lot for that. A big part of what I like about video production is cinematography, and that is all but lost in most forms of gaming and maker content. It’s largely about whatever it is I’m doing, and not the video itself. I think that might be why I wasn’t enjoying making videos. Editing isn’t fun if I’m not putting something visually exciting together.

With replay mod on the minecraft SMP, i can actually get some cool shots of everything happening. Even the boring stuff can be a showcase of the world, a bit of visual candy to carry you through talking sections. I like to wear two different caps while I’m working, and my sculpting hat is pretty quiet. This format frees me up to record my dialogue after the fact, and make it fit the scene perfectly. There is still the option for real time gameplay, which is available on the Twitch channel, but this way the videos can be something that I actually built, rather than just a cutdown of a stream.

I’m not knocking stream cutdowns by the way. They’re a good format, I watch them all the time. This is less about what makes for consistent content and much more about what I want as a creator. I want cool cinematics and chill, reflective vibes on my videos, and this is a way to do that. It’s a much more fun way to make videos as well, so it’ll be easier to enjoy the process.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

I Miss Sculpting

Haven’t had to do much of it lately. That’s the deal with trying to keep my projects to a manageable number. Some kinds of art that I love just fall by the wayside. Frankly, I just have too many ideas. I will get to sculpt more soon, im sure. I think after I get a couple of issues of Megalomania out there I will have time to revisit some other stuff. I have so many projects I want to be doing but I know I shouldn’t be right now. Purely because I’ll overload like a cheap power strip.

I have a sculpture of Tucker that I was making out of clay, arguably the only one I could work on while still technically remaining on task. I would still like to finish it, even though his appearance has changed slightly since I started that one so it’s gonna feel a bit off. Keepin’ myself honest though, so it has just been staring at me from my desk, half-finished hand sitting at its feet. I also had some fake wounds and stuff for cosplay that are already sculpted, but need to be made into molds. I would love to see how those turn out.

I also have a wire kinetic sculpture that I want to build. (No, long-time viewers, not another ball machine... yet.) It’s a “serious” sculpture that, in my dreams, would be about 8 feet tall, made of brass and run on wave power at the coast. That would be a whole new adventure but, for starters, I want to make it about a foot tall out of wire as a proof of concept. The mechanics are interesting, and it might even be mixed media because I may use rope, or twine at a small scale, for part of the sculpture. It’s about creativity and the collective consciousness.

But wait, there’s more! Beyond sculpture I have ideas for a children’s building toy system, a portable live-streaming rig, my chatbot/personal assistant, a smoking accessory, and a whole slew of other shit I cant even remember right now. It’s tough to keep track. Not to mention 3 or 4 other stories that I would like to get out there in some form or another. One about a war between heaven and hell, one about an alien invasion, another covering a socio-political apocalypse and even a sequel to Megalomania. I have more ideas than skin cells, so it can get kind of maddening. Im happy to have picked a few to run with, but it also saddens me to let those others die on the vine, so I will revisit them all when the time is right.

Those are just the big ones, but I have more stories pop into my head every day, so maybe some will just show up here as a short story, but maybe on a separate blog feed or under a specific tag for easy location. That could be fun.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

Styling Megalomania

Settling on a style for the comic book was an interesting challenge. It was originally written to be a TV series, so I had a whole different stylistic playbook in mind. For one, I was planning on a very heavily sound designed and music driven show. Losing that audio component was not something I really wanted, and I did still keep a love of music in Tucker’s character. At the end of the day, I ended up ripping the bandaid and trying to lean really heavily into something that was inspired by old-school comics, but with a look that invokes the feeling of drawing in the margins of your textbook. I know that a strong stylistic stance is still right for this story as it unfolds and, with each new page I draw, I’m confident that this was the right choice.

I did end up having to make a change, though, and I’m glad I did. The first iteration of the comic was made at a lower resolution of 300 dpi. Not terrible, but not great either. Most comics are published at 400. At the lower resolution, my linework had to be thicker, and much of the detail in the sketch was lost in the process. The other issue I ran into was, at that scale, my dots for shading were too big. They didn’t feel like shading but instead felt like they were supposed to be actual detail in the scene. Not ideal, and very distracting. To set them apart, I tried making them a lighter gray rather than the same black of the rest of the linework. That did a good job of setting the two apart, but it didn’t solve the strange screen door effect that the dots were causing.

With the resolution boosted, I was able to have much finer linework and smaller dots, but to improve the screen door effect and bring it all together, I hand-stipled the dots into a full sheet I can mask to do my shading. I filled a quarter of the page at each shading level, then copied and flipped and reversed to fill out the rest of the page. There are some points where the lines between the sections of dots can show, but I think it looks like a printing artifact and matches the style so I am happy with it.

I am also doing something fun with color. Old school comics used to be monochromic or two-toned, or at least they were very conservative with their use of color. I am paying homage to that by using my colors sparingly, as a way to indicate light sources and thematic significance. So far I think it’s working very well.

There is a strong possibility that the stylization of Megalomania will change as I progress through the issues, but I think we have started in a very well-anchored place. I will be streaming some artwork for this and my other projects on youtube, keep an eye on the discord for updates about that.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

Heavy and Light Adaptation

I am writing this article in advance, so there should be a lot more news about my main examples by now. I’ll try to edit accordingly, but if I fail to do so please drop some corrections in the comments.

Screen adaptation is difficult. There are basically two main kinds, as I see it. For one, you have a heavy adaptation. In that case the target audience is not expected to have consumed the original source material. The creators of the adaptation have a great deal of freedom to change characters, plotlines, and even themes without any consequence because -to the audience- this is all new. They don’t enter with any expectations. This was generally how adaptation was done in the past. Things like Fight Club (pretty much anything Fincher), classic Disney films, or Jurassic Park for instance, were adapted with the intent to create something new. The source material is used as a springboard, and the concept is reincarnated into a new form.

Personally, I think that’s great. It’s a bit strange to expect a team of artists to just recreate something that already existed without making it their own. That’s quite the soulless endeavor. Unfortunately, that is essentially the expectation these days, and I think that is an issue with media literacy, and I will get into that, but primarily it is a problem of management. The studios have locked themselves into an environment where they are only interested in making things with a high likelyhood of financial success. The way the system is designed -by those same studios, don’t forget- all the money is made on the front end, by marketing. Even with the decline of theatres, you don’t pay for a streaming service because you already like the media they are selling (‘cept you, Peacock, livin’ in the past). You pay for it because their marketing made you interested in what’s upcoming. That creates a dynamic wherein all that really matters is who you can hook into buying, not the opinion of the finished product.

So, if you’re a studio, would you rather:

• Spend extra money on marketing to get people to care about the product

  -OR-

• Just sell something they already want

I don’t know how to break that cycle. For that to change either the audience needs to abandon the big studios (unlikely) or the studios need to abandon this path (less likely), so for now we seem to be stuck with it. So that leaves us with type 2: light adaptation.

In this case, the original source material is known, beloved even. Often it’s a reboot of an existing screen IP, arguably the laziest choice on the part of the studio, but even moreso is the Nerdy Intellectual Property Sources, or NIPS for short. Hollywood’s most prominent NIPS, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, are the obvious subject of discussion here. Personally, I love marvel movies. I think they’re a fun watch and, when that’s the goal, I don’t see a problem. It is worth noting that the MCU is willing to change things relative to the comics, which helps, but that’s where we run into the media literacy problem. You have fans that are expecting the exact same thing as they know it from the comics. I always find that really annoying, but the moment has arrived where I am the annoying one.

In short, I don’t think a live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender needs to happen. Truthfully, though, that is because of my own infatuation with the original. I don’t think it needs to be changed. And that is the issue with these soft adaptations. I think I would feel differently if they really changed a lot, or made a spinoff, or whatever. Some real separation between the two versions. If it’s going to be so close, then I don’t see why you would diverge from the main themes. All of that frustration, by the way, is exactly what I make fun of marvel comics fans for complaining about in the movies. So I’m a hypocrite. Long story short, don’t tweak the NIPS, just make new content. Something that sounds great in theory, but realistically won’t happen. So the real answer is this: If the studios keep burning you, then you gotta not watch it. I am not going to be able to enjoy an adaptation of ATLA that, to me, skips over some of the most crucial character elements that support central themes. So I am probably not going to watch it. I’m not going to complain all over social media about how “wrong” the story is, because it’s not wrong. It’s an adaptation. Not to mention, the media buzz resulting from those tantrums just fuels the fire. People buy tickets or tune in just to see if you’re right, and those numbers are all the studio cares about.

This is a completely new work, and should be viewed as such. For people who don’t know ATLA, or for those who aren’t so committed to the original story, the show will probably be great. It’s a different interpretation, but I will be keeping my ear to the ground for criticisms that do not include the phrase, “in the original,” because those are likely the only ones worth paying attention to. The show should have started airing by the time this goes up, so let me know how wrong I am.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

The Ultimate Train Set

I wss playing Timberborn recently with Emily, and she pointed out to me that I am totally the guy to end up spending his golden years nursing an elaborate model train set into my own little world of switches and levers and scenery and automation. And you know what? She is so right.

Timberborn gets close, I have to say, but I am still looking for the right game to really scratch that itch, and I have kinda taken that as the anchor point from which I’m hanging the whole design philosophy of this space-based resource sim I’m using to learn Unreal Engine. I do have a name for it, but I’m not ready to reveal it yet so I’m just gonna be a little bitch about it and not tell you.

I wanted this game to have challenge, right? As amazing as Tinyglade looks (check it out if you somehow haven’t heard of it) it’s still not quite right, you know? I want to tend a garden, but it needs to be in opposition to the environment. What’s the point of walling off a garden if there isn’t anything to protect it from? I get that it just sounds like I want your average resource management/city builder game but not quite. There’s a central issue in those games that I want to address, and it’s something I call the groundhog day problem. Or, at least, I’m calling it that now. I can coin terms, shutup.

So this groundhog day problem is something that comes up in management games where you feel like you just solved a problem and, through no change of your own, that problem starts over again as if you’d done nothing at all. You find yourself expanding just to resolve something that seemed to be balanced at your current population size, or whatever the meter for growth is in your game of choice. Take Cities Skylines for example. Either one, although you’ve probably only played the first one. In theory, you play that game, and things get to a point where they feel kinda balanced. You have enough people to fill your jobs, enough education to diversify them, and enough jobs for them to fill. Your meters are empty, essentially. Then, almost immediately, you have demand for people. No one died, no new jobs were built, but suddenly the game is calling for you to expand. And I get it, right, that’s the point. If you weren’t being pushed to keep expanding there would be no point to the game. Loads of people love cities skylines 1, and some people are familiar with 2. I’m not saying the game is bad, I personally don’t like that method of driving the player forward.

From where I sit, it feels like everything I’ve worked for is pointless. My ideas didn’t solve any problems, they just kicked them down the line. You CAN’T solve problems in a lot of these games. And that’s what I like about Timberborn. You can. The first time I played that game, all my beavers died. I squeaked through the first drought, lost some life on the second, and by the third it was clear that the population would be zero in no time. So next time, I came back with a plan: build a stupidly big dam right out of the gate, to hell with the expense. And guess what, it worked! For the rest of that playthrough droughts were never a problem again unless I fucked up. I had to maintain my dam and make sure I wasnt wasting water, but I was never at a point where the drought was just too severe for my planning. If something went wrong at that point, it would have been my own fault. That is the feeling I’m trying to recreate. Because it should be my fault. They’re management games, right? Failures should be a result of poor management, not a magical increase in hazards.

In games like Timberborn and Frostpunk, the hazards increase, but steadily. It’s a clear and consistent trend. In Cities Skylines and many others, dangers feel like they’re triggered by your successes rather than your failure to anticipate a problem. Hopefully, some of the ideas I have for my game can address these issues in a way that’s fun and engaging. But, who knows? Maybe I won’t be able to make it work, and Timberborn is as close to the sun as we can fly. I love that game, but I hope my wax wings hold up a bit longer.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

Not My Canvas

I’ve run into a bit of a problem with game development and I’m interested in opinions on the subject. I am in the process of relearning everything that I spent a year exploring in Unity. With the death of all trust in that platform, I am now trying again in Unreal. That’s all well and good, but who’s to say it won’t happen again. This is still a company we are talking about here, especially with Disney starting to dig their fingers in.

At least with Megalomania, I would just need to jump from one drawing software to another. I don’t really feel like I lose control of what I am able to make. With game development, I find it feels more like I’m working on a borrowed canvas. Without warning and through no control of my own, I may no longer have access to the same techniques or styles, and I may have to start over, learning everything again. It does make me hesitant to commit to something like that.

There’s a part of me that wonders if I wouldn’t just be better off continuing in this version of Unity and just never upgrading, but that feels like I’m asking for trouble. Godot and other open source options are intriguing, but if my goal is to spend less time troubleshooting, open source isn’t really the way to go. I’m just trying to figure out what my safest option would be.

The best answer appears to be Unreal, but things are very different. I think I liked the node editor at first but, as things are getting more complex, I just want C# back. What I really need to do is get deep into C++ so that I have some hope of controlling those data structures in the way I was before. It’s supposed to be a lower level language so it should be doable. It just feels very frustrating to be back here after a year of discipline and focus finishing TufTower so I can learn.

I’m determined, though. I am gonna do it. I think it’s likely that some real time will be spent on this resource management game so that I can learn again. If anyone has any thoughts on my predicament, share them here or on the discord!

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

Who Is Ether? | Everbound Lore

Lurking deep beneath the western sea of Relias, beyond the reach of rational minds, is a magic older than the sea itself. In modern day, most only know of it as The Leviathan, though some just call it Death. In truth, Ether is neither. He is a Zenith, a god of the land of Relias. The master of the Void. He was here when this world was formed and, unlike his peers, He will be there when it ends.

Most are unaware of Ether’s true nature. To them, the Zeniths are nothing but myth. Fictions designed to free struggling minds from the pressing weight of uncertainty. Where did we come from, and why? Only the Zeniths knew, and we should trust in their Vision. Of course, by now they must all be gone. Surely, we have none left to bear beyond their descendants, the Nadir. So named as to underscore their inferiority to the grand beasts who first gave them form. The Leviathan is a great and terrible creature, but surely nothing more. Just an overgrown sea monster.

That is all I will share of Ether’s lore for now. It’s not too much of a reveal, as this much will be available from the outset. Ether is the creature I was sculpting around the middle of last year before I took a break. I am working on finishing him up alongside my efforts to sculpt out the map. Hopefully that will come with some concept art as well!

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

Is Everbound Still Happening?

In short, yes! Over the course of 2023, I took stock of my unruly pile of projects and decided to focus on a handful. I have since dropped down to 3, which I explain in the post, Restarting the Blog. Part of ‘23 involved proving to myself that I could finish a game. And I did! It’s called TufTower. I have been running into some issues posting the game on mobile app stores, but it is complete. What I may do to finish it up is just flip it to a web game and throw it up here on the site as a part of my portfolio. In honesty, though, TufTower was just intended to be a Unity learning experience so that I could go into Everbound with more comfort on the platform.

Unfortunately, Unity did what we all know they did, and now I don’t feel a lot of trust for that platform. Of course, that means I have fallen back to learning a different game engine, as I will now be working in Unreal. I still think it’s ideal to build a smaller game in the engine first to get comfortable, as some of the mechanics I want in Everbound would be easier to implement with some experience. My practice game for Unreal is an automation and resource management game, and it may never see the light of day, but I am starting to learn unreal’s node coder and I have some things functioning. We’ll see. If I end up really liking it I may polish it up and release it on PC.

In the meantime, progress for Everbound is still being made. I am still modeling and rigging monsters, sculpting out the map, writing storylines and designing characters. Everbound will take a long time to complete, so I decided to shift it to second place and give center stage to a project that I know will have a more consistent difficulty level and, as a result, release schedule. That project is my comic book, Megalomania, cowritten by myself and Emily, illustrated by me. You can find more about that in my recent post.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

Writing Over Time

As I mentioned in my last post, I like to keep multiple projects in the air. I tend to bounce around from one thing to another, and that means some stuff stays on the backburner for a long time, and I mean a really long time. That’s the case with Megalomania, a comic book I am creating and co-writing with my fiancee Emily. I originally wrote the concept to be a TV series, but seeing as netflix hasn’t returned my calls…

There is a funny side effect of nursing a story for this long, though. As I’ve gotten older, more context has been added. The story was always intended to be a self-audit. The main character is someone who, like me and many others, struggles with the frailty of life. He finds it difficult to anchor himself morally after those he relied on let him down, at least as he sees it.

With time, though, the story has become more critical of itself and not just me. While we still deal with issues of mistrust and heartache, we also investigate how we react to those things, and the wounds those reactions can leave behind. Tucker is flawed. Extremely so. In fact, he rarely seems to make the right decision at all and it’s unclear if he is even trying to. He’s an image of this psuedo-sympathetic catharsis character that angry young men tend to latch themselves to.

I won’t get into specifics until I release some issues, (first one is coming March 1st!) but this story started as me trying to create one of those characters in earnest as a way to work out some of my frustrations, and over 10 years of self-reflection and rewriting, it transformed into a critique of that very phenomenon. I’m very proud of the story that Emily and I have written together, and I hope you enjoy it. I am about 1/3 of the way through “inking” the first 20 page issue and I have more on the way. There will be a limited print run, but I will also be putting the comic up on the website for easier access. The first issue will be free, subsequent issues will not be, I am still working on a price.

Thanks for reading! See you in the next one.

Restarting The Blog!

Hi all, the last blog post I made was about 7 months ago, and I am deleting it in order to make this one. That post was about why my content had lapsed, but I’d rather get into why this tends to happen in a cycle. For me, content has always been a means to an end. I want to share stories and experiences through my artwork. In the modern era, that’s more or less impossible without a presence on Youtube, Twitch, Tiktok and the like. When I have enough money, I can afford to take more time to produce content, but that’s not the only thing stopping me. I have largely untreated ADHD and I am very suceptible to burnout as a result. I tend to sit down and grind out a couple of videos and then I’m toast because I would rather be focusing on the project itself.

While I’ve been gone, I have been doing that. I have 3 main projects that I am holding myself to. Originally, I had been naming Everbound as my primary project, but that is a slow burn. I am constantly working on it, in fact I have been sculpting the map for the last month or more and I am pleased with the progress. In reality, though, it is a big bite to chew so I want to take my time with it. In first place now, however, is my comic book Megalomania. I am 4 fully-completed pages into the first issue and thrilled with it so far. It is an excellent story about self-reflection and moral licensing that I have been writing since college and I am so excited to get it out there. The third project is largely on the backburner, more just an idea I have floating around for an automation/resource management game. I love that genre and I have always wanted to make one with all of my favorite features and mechanics plus a couple new ones of my own invention.

So anyway, what does this mean for content? Streams. I’ve all but given up on editing anything unless you count the in-camera editing for tiktok and youtube shorts. My youtube channel is going to be for updates on what I’m working on in the form of those short videos and work with me streams. Twitch is going to remain the gaming channel as it has been recently, but I am not really going to be committed to a schedule for any of that. I will try to be consistent, but likely you will just find out that I’m on at some random hour playing games and hanging or working on artwork for Megalomania or Everbound. All of those notifications can be found on the discord as always.

Finally, the blog. I can type something out on the train while I head to work (that’s what I’m doing now) so I would expect to see more of these, although I will probably worry less about a designed thumbnail and shit like that. I have another post on the way talking about Megalomania so keep eyes out for that!

I am happy to be honest with myself about what work is most important to me. I started streaming when I was in a really bad mental health situation, and making content has been a great way to get me caring about creating again. Now that I do, though, I need my channels to just be a way of promoting the projects that are foremost in my mind, rather than choosing my projects based on what might make better content.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.

Fire and Fangs | VR Sculpting for Everbound

Hello, there! In this week’s video we will dive into the next beast to be created for the world of Relias, the dragon! A very traditional, fire breathing beast, the dragon was once a proud, grand creature. During the time period in which Everbound takes place, the dragons have been captured and subjugated, used by Emperor Talia’s regime for a valuable resource they produce. I spent this video sculpting out the head of the creature, featuring large, prominent horns and a long snout. This, like the Leviathan, was sculpted in Medium, a VR sculpting program currently owned by Adobe. I do really enjoy working with this program, despite a few setbacks in functionality that really aren’t that consequential.

I started by wireframing out the head shape, focusing on the most significant structures that I wanted in the face. Large cheekbones and prominent jowls, a long snout with a beaked end, and a rounded, narrow head with curved horns. I wanted the horns to feel kind of ram-like, but with forward points to feel more menacing. I think there are some things about the design, as it sits, that look a bit too soft and narrow. It was mentioned during the stream that it may be better to widen the head a bit, and I think I am coming around to that idea. I did take Kory’s recommendation and made the brow a bit more prominent which I think helped quite a bit with the intensity of the neutral expression.

Smoothing the features out was a bit of a challenge due to the aforementioned shortcomings with Medium, but as long as I can get the shape fairly close to what I want, the smoothing tool is able to take away the minor imperfections on the surface. Mostly, that was accomplished by filling out the sections between the wireframe with sweeping shapes using a capsule-shaped clay tool that works basically like rolling paint in 3 dimensions. That left a sort of ribbed texture on the horns that I decided I really liked, and I have gone ahead and incorporated that into the final design. It did need to be redone though, the ridges as they appeared during the rough sculpt did not have enough consistency.

Before the next art video, I am going to polish up the horns and add some teeth, and affix the head to the body, wings and all. I am looking forward to sharing that with you. That’s all for today, but I hope you check out the video, and stay with us over in the streams, to see what happens next in the development of Everbound! Thank you for reading, it’s been a blast! See you in the next one.

Becoming Game Dev Guy | Everbound Updates

Hello, there! Looks like I’ve finally found something to focus on. It seems the project I am developing that generates the most interest is Everbound. That’s good news, because it is the one that offers me the most opportunities to try out different kinds of art and keep myself entertained. It’s no secret to the folks who watch my Twitch streams that I struggle to focus on a single thing, but I want to get the channel going and Everbound is a single thread that we can all follow together. It’s also something that I would really like to build hype for, because I have already put so much work into developing the world. This means that there will be less content centered on the Bender costume, although I will continue to work on that in my free time and release updates at major milestones. I will also still be streaming progress on that build for some moments of key assembly and testing. The fact of the matter is, though, something like a costume is so stop-and-go that it is hard to realistically maintain a broadcast unless I am saving up a whole bunch of work on it to do in the stream, which doesn’t seem practical to me.

Everbound, however, has so many different elements that I need to be working on all the time that it offers me the chance to simultaneously be a variety art channel and one that is singularly focused on the development of a larger project. I think I might also do some additional blog posts like this one to talk about the development of the world and some of the lore therein, so keep an eye out here if you’re looking for some of that. I will be continuing to release updates on the art and coding related to development, and you can find this week’s new video here.

I believe I have solved the targeting problem that I was seeing in the NPC pathfinding, and I detail that in the second part of this week’s video. Short blog post this week because I am running behind and just want to get caught up, but I will detail my progress more in next week’s post. That’s all for now, thanks for reading. It’s been a blast as always! I’ll see you in the next one.

NPCs with EYES! | Unity Game Development

Hello, there! We have more to share in the wonderful world of Everbound. This week’s video covers my recent work on an NPC navigation system for the game. I have been working on a way to let the NPCs loose into the world in more of a simulation-style arrangement. This means that I want them navigating based on sight, rather than relying on pathfinding algorithms like the extremely popular A*. I also like to figure things out for myself, rather than pull in something that someone else has figured out, simply because I think I come out the other side with a much better understanding of the underlying concepts. My hope is that building all of these systems myself will make it easier to have all of the separate parts of this game interact with and build on each other, because I will know enough about the component parts to mesh them with one another and make them fit my vision for what the game should be.

In this case, I wanted NPCs without that look of omniscience that tends to come with classic pathfinding algorithms. A*, as I understand it, calculates the path from both the target and the character. Even if I don’t understand it, I do know that the goal of a pathfinding algorithm as a whole is to find the most efficient path to an objective. This is not, in my opinion, very realistic for an NPC. People get around with their eyes. We have a general direction that we know we need to travel in, and we send ourselves in that direction, navigating around obstacles individually as we come to them, based largely on sight.

For the time being, I have a test NPC in the form of a stretched-out capsule that is permanently tethered to a destination in the form of a little green cube. The first step of the process was to make sure that that capsule knew how to move forward, and that it could face itself toward its destination consistently. The first part of that was fairly easy to do, I have an empty object at the foot of the capsule which checks to see if it overlaps with a ground plane. If it does, the capsule is supplied with a force in the direction it was facing. As for facing the objective, that was pretty easy using Unity’s built in .lerp method.
At first, I had the script constantly facing the capsule toward the target. Unfortunately, this resulted in extremely jittery motion. If the target moved even a little, that movement would be reflected in the direction of the capsule. To combat this, .lerp takes the capsule’s current direction, the target direction, and a time value as arguments. It takes that data and smooths the movement out over the specified time. Combine that with a variable added to the time value that is inversely related to the distance to the target, and we are left with a capsule that turns very slowly to respond to positional changes in a distant target, and turns very quickly if a target is near to prevent losing track of it.

The pathfinding script casts a ray out of the front of the capsule, with a limit set on the distance outside of which it will not react to an obstacle in its path. For demonstration purposes, I slowed down the edge-detection process in the video, and there is a still below to show what is happening. On detection of an obstacle, the script produces two additional raycasts, starting at 45 degrees back from horizontal, and sweeping around to the front of the NPC. When the raycasts detect an edge, that value and the distance to it are recorded. The script then takes the nearest edge (in theory) and sets a temporary target just to the side of that location. This all happens in less than a frame.

Now, I say “in theory” because I did run into an issue. Two, actually. The first is fairly straightforward: I suspect that I should be using a different value to set the direction from which the adjustment is calculated. At the moment, if the NPC approaches the obstacle from a weird angle, it may mistake which end is nearest or place the temporary target in slightly the wrong position. The second issue may be a little more complicated, as I thought I resolved it already, but the system may not be fully resetting after it finishes navigating around an obstacle. Flagging that moment is pretty easy, as far as I can tell. Avoiding an obstacle requires placing a temporary target, and when that target is reached the avoiding process is complete. For some reason though, the system seems to turn increasingly fast as it hits more obstacles, and the temporary targets start getting placed in the wrong location. This seems to be something that gets worse with the number of subsequent obstacles, but not necessarily with time, which tells me I’m just missing something that needs to be reset.

While it’s not complete yet, this system of “pathfinding” is feeling just right for the world I am trying to build. I expect this will result in exactly the behavior I am going for. I am a little worried about how much it will cost in terms of resources to support a system like this, but I suspect the checks I am running aren’t actually much more complicated than the kinds of things you would see under any other pathfinding system. Next week we will be showing off some more of the sculpting projects and character creation that is going into the game, and there will be a Bender costume update in a couple of weeks. Thanks for reading, its been a blast as always! See you in the next one!

Bending is my Middle Name | Bender Cosplay Part 2

Hello, there! In this week’s video I wrapped up my test-fit cardboard build of the Bender costume. Next time we will be working on modeling the 3D printed parts! I actually decided in the middle of this stream that I had gotten as much information as I needed, and switched to the 3D modeling. The main goal of this stage of the project was to build out a shoulder plate and chest section. The hope is to get an idea of how much room I would have inside the costume and what the dimensions and angles would need to be in order for it to fit me, but still look accurate to the character. I decided to stop before the arms and legs as I have a plan for them that can’t really be accurately recreated in the medium of cardboard. I already had the head built, so the next step was to make a ring for it to seat into. I rolled a thin strip of cardboard up so that it took on a curved shape, then cut the whole thing lengthwise to create two strips with the same curve.

When wrapped around to make a ring, they were not anywhere close to perfectly circular. At the time, I was thinking that was why they needed to have a matching curve. It hadn’t occurred to me that the helmet which would be fitting into it was nearly perfectly circular, and that tension from attaching the two rings to each other would make them perfect circles anyway. At this point, I was more concerned about eliminating the overlap you can see in the photo below. I was worried that the extra thickness could cause issues with shape while the helmet was being seated and result in a less-than-perfect fit. Fortunately it was easy to cut the strips to meet evenly and tape them at the ends without any overlap so this problem was completely avoided.

I fit the rings individually based on the helmet. One to the outside, and the other to the inside. Then, taking strips of painter’s tape, I taped them to each other as evenly as possible, leaving a groove for the edge of the helmet to fit into. Normally, blue tape would be exactly the wrong thing for a cosplay project, as it’s not very sticky, but for my purposes it was perfect. I wanted to be able to undo and change things with minimal commitment. For some of the connections that needed to be more permanent for strength, I re-used industrial staples from one of the larger boxes, as well as some zipties. I was really pleased with the neck ring, though, which felt surprisingly rigid after the two were taped together.

The test fit was mostly successful. I did run into a small issue, which was the mouth plate just inside the helmet. The bottom edge of it reached just low enough to get in the way of the fit I had worked so hard to achieve, so at the end of the day I ended up cutting a notch out of the inner ring to accommodate the plate. After that was done, the helmet seated into the ring perfectly.

Next, I moved on to the shoulder plate. In hindsight, the ring did not need to be anywhere near as large as it ended up being. I figured more was more, because I wanted to be sure that it was large enough to take on the angle at Bender’s shoulders and still be big enough around. I definitely overdid it a bit. If I were to do it again, though, I would go just as big. Always better to leave room for mistakes.

To introduce the angle to the shoulder plate, I cut a slit through half of it and overlapped it on itself. It… kind of worked. As you can see in the photo below I did end up with mostly just a crease where I overlapped, and then a matching one on the opposite side. Sit’s nicely on my shoulders like some kind of Elizabethan ruff, but doesn’t really look like Bender. Shortening it and increasing the angle will definitely help in the final build. I am struggling with what I want to build the main body section out of, I suspect that foam will not have enough structural integrity. The whole costume will be hanging from this shoulder plate, which will be mounted to a chest harness that I will be wearing underneath the costume to save my back from the weight. So far, my best guess is that I will cut and bend a piece of sheet metal, or make a buck out of sand or something and heat-form a sheet of acrylic. Neither sounds too appealing to me at the moment, but I will keep thinking on it.

The final step was fairly easy. I sliced one of the cardboard boxes all the way up, making it into a single flat sheet, and attached it around the edge of the — now shortened — shoulder plate to make a tube, and pulled it together on the bottom after cutting a number of slits to achieve the trademark taper of Bender’s barrel chest. I fit into the costume just fine, but the armpits are pretty far away from mine. Even if I shrink the top shoulder plate a little more, I am going to be hard-pressed to reach all the way down to the fingers on the arms, so I expect I will be operating those with some simple puppeteering.

I’ve now moved on to 3D modeling the helmet. This Wednesday, I will be continuing that and testing out some small printed pieces that will confirm dimensions and assembly fit. I will also be playing around with the internal mechanics for the hands, and a couple of other expressive features over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that very soon! If you would like to support this project, or anything else I am working on, check out the Patreon page! No matter what project you choose to support, you get access to all the same perks and behind-the-scenes streams. If that isn’t your cup of tea, it would mean the world to me for you to share this post and anything else you like with your fellow creatives! Thanks for reading, it’s been a blast as always. I’ll see you in the next one!

Summon the Leviathan! | Sculpting in VR

Hello there! Playing catch-up this week as I fell behind on my edits last week. Which reminds me, I have some file conversions to do…
With that started, I can proceed. This week the video was another update on Everbound. I have been working on some models for mobs and NPCs, in fact, over the couple of years that I have been talking about this project, that’s most of what I’ve accomplished. Gameplay has barely been touched, but that changed as of today, which I will write up a post about very soon! For now, we will talk about progress on what may be one of the most important creatures in the game: a Zenith known only as the Leviathan. At some point, I may do a lore post about the world, as I have quite a bit to say about that.

The Leviathan is a massive, aquatic exoskeletal creature, I heavily leaned into the bug theming as things progressed. By the time I reached the end it was really starting to look reminiscent of a centipede. This first image shows me starting to design the mouth. The large, protruding arm-like structures are for defense and food collection. Large, armored jaws fold in to close the mouth completely, although it rarely occurs. Further back you can see the rest of the mouth, there is a large bowl-shaped section filling out the bottom jaw, and what looks like a… well… there is a uvula at the back of the throat. The mouth continues quite far down, as is visible in the image, so the whole edge ended up getting populated with those little arms like the ones at the top. The arms got larger as they went down, with the second to last set having a shielding panel and more dexterity.

The eyes ended up being very spider-like. I think it adds an alien look to the face. It feels like it’s looking everywhere and nowhere all at once. I love it. It’s also just very creepy, which is a main goal for this model. In the world of the story, this is the biggest, baddest beast you can find. Intended to be seen fairly early on and every so often throughout your playthrough, the Leviathan will stand as an Everest for players to take on after they have gained all the strength they can from the rest of the world. It can be killed, but not easily. Not necessarily either, this game will be about choice, and like any other you can skip this one or try an alternate tactic.
In this image there are tendrils coming from the mouth. Those are mostly aesthetic, and will likely be luminescent in the final design. I made a fairly annoying error by adding that feature too early. I should have waited until the sculpt was done, as their shape causes them to sweep back past the other panels on the body, which put them squarely in the way of just about everything else I had to do.

For the underside of those jaws, I did my best to make them look very fleshy and foldy. The rest of the body is armored, so the soft underbelly should be very visually distinct. On a smaller model, I generally would not include that as an actual surface detail in the mesh, but rather evoke the material with textures and normal maps. In this case, however, we are dealing with a seriously gargantuan creature. For scale, the player will be around as tall as the third smallest arms at the top of the mouth. At that size, if the texture isn’t present in the model, a player will notice. Honestly, I don’t even know how I’m going to make this thing work at close proximities, but boy will it be cool if I can.

As I mentioned earlier, the tendrils were very in the way while I was working on the remaining panels. I also found that I started to run into performance issues as the model became more complicated. Running the VR modeling program, Medium, along with OBS, a plug-in to stabilize the VR output, and Twitch to watch chat, my computer was starting to strain. Especially with a creature like this, I think the lesson is that it should have been done in sections. I should have stopped after making the front segment with the face and the straight section behind. I then should have made a separate model representing a body segment. That way, for animation, I can duplicate and alter that body segment and parent it to different points along the surface of the tail section. I likely will still do that, actually, although it will mean repeating some work…

As it stands, I think the model looks very promising. It’s creepy. If I saw this thing from a distance I would think for a while before approaching, and that is exactly the vibe I am looking for. Next time you see it, we will be working on animation for our hard-shelled friend here, and possibly an additional creature for the game. This week I started working on NPC controller scripts in Unity and I will soon be back to testing out some of the player recognition features in my chatbot, so if you want to follow along and participate, please do join over on Twitch! Don’t forget to watch the video to see the project in action. Thanks for reading, it’s been a blast as always! See you in the next one!

Cardboard Bender Helmet! | Building a Bender Costume Part 1

Hello, there! The Bender Project is officially underway and off to a spectacular start! Last week I assembled the basic structure of the helmet out of cardboard, as a way of getting my head around the shapes involved in making this costume work. There will be more to see this week, so make sure to check out the stream this Wednesday to see an update on that! Also, make sure to watch the video when that goes live on Monday. For now, though, let’s walk though the first stage of this process!

The first step was to roll out the cardboard so that I could have a nice, round cylinder as the foundation for the head. While I was rolling, I made sure to press very firmly into the table and rock the cardboard roll forward and back to really work the bend into it. It makes a spiral, with the middle having a much tighter curve compared to the outside edge. To combat this and try to keep an even cylinder, I put the middle of the spiral on the outside when I closed the cylinder. I held the tube around my head to get a proper size, and tried to include a little bit of wiggle room to account for different materials in the final build.

The resulting shape was fairly solid, but not perfectly round. The solution to that was to cut out a cardboard circle with the same radius as my tube and attach it on the inside to hold everything in the right shape. Eventually, that worked but not without cutting the disc a little too small and leaving me needing to shrink the cylinder to fit. I suppose I could also have cut a new disc, but who has the time? Long story short, at this point any wiggle room was gone, and the cardboard was up against my nose.

With the tube adjusted the disc fit perfectly and… the helmet wasn’t perfectly round. Unfortunately my method of using a string tied to a pen to draw my circle left me with imperfect results, but it was good enough to get by. I placed the disc about 2 inches from the top of the helmet, and taped it into place, leaving plenty of room below for my head. I cut out a space for the mouth, and it was beginning to look like that would be the best place for my eyes to line up so I could see.

The helmet felt much more comfortable with the mouth hole cut out, but there would still be a panel covering that opening. That panel would actually be inset, leaving me with even less room. It was becoming clear that I would definitely need to scale the helmet up slightly in order for this to work, but that’s a problem for another day. For the time being, this proof of concept was looking promising.

The visor was much easier than I was expecting. I used the edge of the tube to trace arcs into the edge of two strips of cardboard, and folded the rest around to meet up on the sides. Just a little bit of tape was all I needed and the silhouette was really starting to take shape, but we were still missing the signature chrome dome.

This was a much more challenging undertaking. The helmet had a few inches of opening at the top to support the dome piece, and since this build is purely practice and research, I decided things didn’t need to be perfect or pretty. The top part of the new shorter tube was cut into strips, and those strips were curled over to meet each other at the top of the head.

The first attempt to close up the top of the head left things a little bit short, but all I had to do was cut the strips down a little further, and everything closed up perfectly. I was happy with the shape, but the size was a little bit wrong. I ended up needing to shave two or three inches off of the top of the head, and push that support circle on the inside a little lower, and suddenly everything came into alignment. Fortunately, having less room inside the helmet wasn’t an issue given the fact that my head will be lower down anyway.

At this point, I was able to get an idea for how much extra height this costume will add. It doesn’t seem like it will be an issue, but I should really be smart about how I attach that antenna or I am going to be gluing that on all day long whenever I use this thing. As I write this, I’m thinking it may be a good idea to attach the antenna with a magnet, and have some sort of internal safety chain. That way it can get knocked off without being lost, and repair would be a snap. Literally.

Pictured above: Man happy about his recent robot murder. This picture really gives you an idea of how big the head is compared to me, and what size this bender costume is going to end up being at the end of the day. It’ll be a bit extreme, since he’s only around 6 foot or so in the show, but I think it’ll just make the cosplay look a little more dramatic and draw some extra attention. For that reason, I’ve been considering a gold finish, a reference to Futurama Season 4 Ep. 15, The Farnsworth Parabox.

Overall, we are looking at an almost complete success. The next step will be to build the shoulder plate, which I will be doing over on Twitch this Wednesday at 4 eastern. Thanks for reading. It’s been a blast, as always! I’ll see you in the next one.

Building a Better Store

Hello, there! Sorry for the radio silence, and shout out to Korcenton for keeping me honest on the blog posts. I took a week off because my parents were in town, and since, I have been continuing this process of streamlining what I do on the channel. Apologies in advance, this one is going to be a long-winded meta-post about learning to run a social-influencer-whatever-presence because that’s most of what I have been focusing on lately. Don’t worry, this week I’m going to be working on a Bender Rodriguez costume for Halloween (and conventions hopefully) so, stay tuned for that!

The big hiccup this week was about the store. At the time of posting this, it is actually offline. Haven’t had this situation since launching on Squarespace, but it’s not their fault. I really like this hosting service over the previous one I was using. I can sort of blame the printing service that I use, Printful, but if I’m being honest the responsibility mostly lies with me. For starters, I selected the cheapest option possible that delivered a quality product, and to be fair, I will say that the stuff I got from Printful has held up nicely through multiple washes.

By the way I’m not sponsored by Printful, or Squarespace, or anyone actually. I just wanted to say something honest and nice before I kinda bitch about their services a little bit.

The thing about trying to go for cheapest print shop with a quality product is that other things… like customer service and feature development, for example, might not be as good. Printful’s site functions, but you have to poke around a bit to find shipping rates for products. When you do, you find a clunky list of dropdown menus covering all the product categories, each containing a small table of countries and shipping rates. Why this can’t be displayed along side other price information displayed next to products via a link or dropdown menu? I’m not sure, but maybe it’s there and I just missed it. It’s more likely than I care to admit.

After sifting through the menus for a while, I was able to get a spreadsheet built organizing my products and the prices for shipping. For each category, there is a starting rate for the first item and a lower rate for additional items. Makes perfect sense, so I go to plug that into Squarespace. Except the pricing system in Squarespace’s store is, like, missing features. Setting aside the fact that built-in integration with Printful should mean the pricing—with all taxes and fees—is passed through to the customer seamlessly without any backend bullshit, the backend bullshit doesn’t even work the way it intuitively should.

You can set a shipping rule in a Squarespace store by selecting the countries it applies to. Then, you have two options. For the group of countries you selected, you can either have:

A) Flat rate shipping, including two different rates for first and additional products, but the same rates apply across all products, or
B) Shipping by weight, which would apply more if I were shipping things myself

There was also a third option to have FedEx, USPS, or whoever calculate shipping for your products, but that costs extra money and still likely wouldn’t be very accurate to Printful’s rates, which should just be passed through to Squarespace while the order is happening. The end result is that I end up doing my best to calculate a shipping rate for each region that keeps me in a profit range of $2-$5 or so depending on Printful’s shipping rate for the product. I thought that worked, and I was sitting pretty with my basic product line and not really pushing it in the stream. However, when I started plugging the merch store, and I got an order, I found out I was missing some information.

One big one is totally on me, as I did forget that Printful would charge me tax on every order that went through. That said, $5-$10 worth of additional fees for shipping to certain countries, and some products that don’t ship outside the US at all, feels like something that should be in bold type somewhere. My pricing matrix did not protect me, and I would have ended up owing money on the order if the whole thing didn’t roll over because mugs are apparently only for Americans, according to Printful. I ended up having to build the whole price matrix again, and this time my baseline costs are not calculated on my end. I am in the process of going through every single product in the store and running a test sale in each region I can ship to. It’s been a long process and it’s not over, but when I’m done and the store is up I suspect I will share it in a blog post, just so I can be fully transparent about what profit I get and where, as I know for some that may impact their decision.

It looks like there is a new feature which may work in a roundabout way to fix my shipping problem. I’ll try to post a mini-update when this situation is fully resolved, but that’s not all that needed addressing this week. I’ve been looking at simplifying and streamlining the channel, and one fun thing that came from it is the return of the blue screen. In previous set-ups, the blue screen was the bane of my existence. They work great, but mine isn’t a real one. My bluescreen is a nearly-chromakey-blue sheet of fabric that has a stitch in the middle where I brought two pieces together to make the whole thing wider. It’s not exactly an optimal scenario, so I’m working on improving it. More on that when I get it set up with lighting and a track to hide it away and everything, but that’s it for now. Thanks for reading! It’s been a blast as always. I’ll see you in the next one.