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I took a week off on Thanksgiving break. I thought I could write some narrative on the plane, but ended up sleeping the whole way. Y has been dealing with projects and exams, too. But here’s a cat picture to make up for our lack of progress 🙂

Code

Nope. No code for the last month.

Art

Y has been busy with other projects but she managed to finalize Claudia’s portrait. She also wrote a blog post on comic art, in case you missed it!

I might start working on a world map soon, just for the sake of telling the story better. I might also be able to showcase results in this section soon! Read on for more details.

Narrative

For the past three weeks I wrote a grand total of 319 words. You know you are desperate when you are checking word count every ten minutes. The problem is that the story is at the point where the protagonists are about to leave the starter town, and I have not yet figured out what the larger world look like!

In other words, I need a map to continue telling my story. Not just any map though, I want a realistic piece of land worn by wind and rain. I want naturally formed steep canyons and lush plains and snowy ridges and gushing rivers.

Initially, I searched up erosion algorithms (here’s an interesting article about generating fantasy maps, and here’s a paper on multi-layered terrain erosion), but these turned out to be arduous to adapt to my own use. They aren’t interactive in the sense that I can’t quite author the final landscape to match what I have in mind.

I recently found World Creator, which looks like a mature product for generating and editing landscapes. I’m going through the tutorials to see if it can do exactly as what I want it to do. I’m hoping to create a convincing landscape, then generate a drawn world map out of that (complete with country borders and major settlements). Finally, I can import the result, pixelate it, and make it work with my tilemap system in Unity.

Meanwhile, the story will have a bunch of placeholder for landscape descriptions.

After 12 years of secrecy during which not a single employee dared to leak a word, Valve announced a new Half-Life game! If this isn’t patience, I don’t know what is.

The original games in the series, Half-Life and Half-Life 2, were pioneers. Each brought about an explosion of new ideas of how games could be. I hated first-person shooter games until I played Half-Life 2. It was completely different from other forms of storytelling that I didn’t know existed. Its cutscene-free, seamless storytelling technique and its fleshed-out sci-fi setting engrossed me deeply. The Half-Life franchise was the sole reason that made me want to work for Valve.

Then there was silence. It was quiet anticipation at first, but as years passed without any mention from Valve of a new game in the series, the silence became deafening (in the form of memes). Half-Life 3 became the biggest conspiracy theory in the game industry. It was the single title that shall not be uttered – the Game Which Must Not Be Named.

I expect great things from it – possibly the singular title that will usher in a new age of virtual reality gaming.

Coding

Another fortnight of no coding. I’m glad that I kept a coding log which will make getting back to coding much easier. I plan to finish more of the story first, before working on the tilemap again.

Art

Y was pretty busy for the past two weeks, but she still managed to finish some portraits.

Here is Claudia, who undertook sword training together with Felix when they were children. They are now traveling together as adventurers.

And here’s a sketch of the mysterious character I mentioned in the last update.

Felix and Claudia are the second pair of characters I’d like to introduce to the story. With their visual design semi-finalized, I might be able to convince Y to draw some comics revealing their relationship.

Narrative

I managed to squeeze out 800 words, about 2/5 of the bit I wanted to write before getting back to coding. Stating the word count reminds me of the time I used to write essays. In reality, writing essays is probably easier than making up a story…

I realized that I was unwittingly influenced by Dan Brown’s writing style. Namely, I tend to write relatively short sections from various people’s view. This is probably going to be annoying when translated into gameplay, but I really enjoy this form of storytelling. Upon visiting his website, I realized that he wrote a new book, Origin!

For reference purposes, I bought all his books…even though the only one I haven’t read is Origin…

Time to reveal another bit of the Continent!

Promptly after its founder Lepton Antima passed away, the mourning Empire was under siege from Gemia. The Void, without a second wielder, would be as useful as scrap metal in stopping the Gemian elite magic corps – or so the Council of Five thought. They quickly ordered troops to be mobilized toward Antima.

What awaited the Gemian army was death. For inexplicable reasons, the Gemian magic corps could not fire a single spell off, as if the Void was present on the battlefield. The defenseless Gemian army was massacred by the charging Antima forces. With heavy losses, Gemia called off the offensive.

This was the first of many times when the Void Barrier repelled the neighboring country’s invasion attempts.

Excerpt from A Brief History of Antima

I started a YouTube channel for piano, and I even bought a microphone for this endeavor. As a result, I didn’t write a single line of code for the game in the past two weeks. Instead of feeling bad about it, I felt refreshed taking a break working on the tilemap code.

I did, however, make considerable progress on the story. I fleshed out two more plot-heavy characters and I planned the details of the next couple of chapters. Basically about how our carefree protagonists got knee-deep into the whole mess between the two countries at war. More on that in the narrative section!

Art

I got a couple of semi-finalized character portraits to share! Y has been pondering on the character designs for ages. We had countless back-and-forth discussions on how the male characters should look like, and I think we finally reached agreement.

So, without further ado, here’s Edge (20), the protagonist of the story.

And here’s Felix Mendel (26), who used to be a child prodigy sword-wielder.

Narrative

I really want to focus on the story for a bit, because ever since finishing writing the first chapter of the story back in March, I barely made any progress on it. I keep telling myself that I got the whole story arc plotted out, but there is no content to it! It’s like writing an interface without any implementations and calling it a job finished!

A major blocker for writing narrative happens when the protagonist encounters new characters. How should they act? Why do they do what they do? What are their objectives? What are they thinking? Do they have another side beneath their facade? The questions are endless, and they are all important details to consider. The story cannot progress with empty actors.

So I took some time and brainstormed two more characters central to the rest of the story. A suave guy who just hit 60, and his carefree, mysterious daughter who’s in her mid-20s. I probably can’t reveal more than that without accidentally let out spoilers, but Y might have portraits on them in the next update!

Fun little story. I had a very clear mental image of how the old guy should look like. In an effort to convey that exact image to Y, I promised her I would draw a sketch. I then proceeded to grab my pencil and notebook.

I then Googled “how to draw anime character” and landed on a WikiHow article of the same name. Gotta love WikiHow, they got a guide for everything. After an intense and extensive drawing session, I got this:

I then remembered why I have an artist and closed my notebook…