Screen Shot – Moe The Cat Person Checking the Cave in the Faer Kingdoms.
- Category Archives Screen Shots *
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Here’s my colourful pirate Cat Person “Moe” checking out the massive cave in the Faer Kingdoms – with, I think, a bit of precious gem quality rock behind him. ~~~ Jim
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Screen Shot “Faer Kingdoms” Stream Before Adding the Waterfalls –
-A series of cascading waterfalls will dazzle anyone who stumbles into this area. I almost deleted this whole area – Where I made a lot of early mistakes and hadn’t learned how to do anything the ‘easy way’ – This would be an area in the ‘Faer Kingdoms’ – the Newbie Friendly parallel world where creatures related to the tiny flying Healer-Sprites and other creatures from Earthly Fairy Tales pop in and out and ‘originally came from’ We made things more colourful and bright there and don’t allow player versus player attacks anywhere in this ‘dimension’. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Screen Shot – Very Early Development – Carving Ravines and plotting the Road, looking back toward the Port City.
— More Very Early development here – Stretching this area as far as we could – Then connecting two areas, one much higher than the other, we began to pull deep ravines down out of the ‘mountains’ that would be a lot more like the Younger Rockies than the Older Appalachians – The dark blue in the upper right hand corner would be the ocean. The sea port area looks really tiny from here. But I think we made a pretty good transition between the two areas. We’ll know later – And I hope we don’t have to do a lot of ‘tweaking’ to smooth out slopes that look great from one angle and then don’t quite connect from another. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Screen Shot – Very Early Development of the Road from Birken to the Capital City of Aerendel –
Early development of the road north from the port city of Birken to the Capital City of Aerendel with its castle and secret entrances to the ‘The Anomaly’ – a series of tunnels and portals that can link to other worlds, other times, completely different realities – Some dangerous, some silly – & even some where ‘adventurers’ can have homes built and expanded over time. The hills will be modified as buildings, forests and forts will be added. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Screen Shot – Birken, The Port City – Before Adding the Docks and Buildings
Basic Beginning View of Where the Docks will be in Birken, with Megrory’s Pub just out of the scene to the left. There will be sailing ships and Customs Agents and thugs who will knock newcomers unconscious and rob them blind and Travelers’ Aid Society People who will give basic newbie weapons and armor and advice and directions – and Constables who will arrest anybody who doesn’t have a Bounty Hunter’s License or Bribe Money. and opportunistic thieves in the lock up who will escape and set locked up newbies free to divert the constables as they make good their own escapes.
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Game Development – Sunset in a parallel world
“Sunset in North Shamrock Island, in the Parallel World” – This is a second parallel dimension inside the game world. It’s a dimension that is under attack by ‘unknown adversaries’ that previous quest winners are invited to visit to learn who or what may be attacking – and why, and what ‘they’ want and if they might gain access to either the Faer Kingdoms or the ‘Real World’ of the game. Here, in this screen shot, the setting sun hits moisture in the atmosphere and creates a yellow glow in the west. The first questors to find this dimension will choose a name or some kind of designation to identify the whole dimension. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Screen Shot – North Coast Cliffs and site of a future flowing waterfall
Cliffs and the site of a future waterfall on the north coast of Shamrock Island in the ‘Faer Kingdoms’ parallel dimension. The building in ruins is a place-holder. It was an example of an asset that came with the Hero Cloud. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Screen Shot – Shaping Mountains and putting in a road.
Here we are zoomed way out to get a look at how the world building is progressing. We were shaping steep hills to put in a road from a coastal city – Birken – to the Capital city with its castle at – Aerendel – in the hills at the base of a mountain. & Here you can see the brown fog as night is falling. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Screen Shot – Just before sunrise in Absentia – in the ‘Real World’ dimension of the game world.
Absentia Pass in the game’s ‘Real World’. The yellow glow is supposed to be the pre-dawn sun lighting up a morning fog. This was when we were first experimenting with the colour sliders. We had no idea what colour the fogs would be. Here, early morning fogs were yellow, and at the same setting – late evening fogs were brown. ~~~TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – A Young Faer Elf –
This would be a young, fully grown Faer Elf. Faer Elves are natives of the Faer Kingdoms. Their average life span would be about 5,000 ‘earth-human’ years. When they’re older they generally appear more ‘spindly’, less ‘healthy’, and not very friendly. They have been described as being extremely peevish, cranky, able to change their looks to appear creepy, unfriendly, dangerous, and just plain weird. No one knows why, but as they get older, they often turn to exploring the world beyond the Faer Kingdoms – possibly out of boredom – and find students they feel an afinity for. They will teach their students spells and practices from the school of ‘Faeromancy’ – a generally non-lethal form of ‘Nuisance Magick’ like the spell that will leave everyone within fifty meters stuck about three feet deep in a rancid, sticky pool of something that smells so bad many victims throw up and cannot fight, can barely breathe. The sticky liquid looks like ‘chicken soup’ but the noodles act more like electric eels that shock and bite. Most Faer Elves can also ‘morph’ into cats. Not big cats, ‘domestic’ sized cats. These cats can look like they died several years ago and nobody told them about that yet. But most of them look very ‘average’ and not at all remarkable. I would suggest you never kick or throw anything at any cats anywhere in this game. You never know what kind of spell it might hurl at you. ~~~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – More stuff about that Cave –
After doing extensive work to get the cave to look right we messed around with ‘painting it’ because some of the colours were supposed to indicate the presence of minerals and possible gems, and after all – it was supposed to be part of another world, a parellel dimension inside the game – a place you can get to visit or stay in after you learn how to find and activate the portals – which happens as a result of a quest. A wizard type teaches you how to recognize and activate the portals. — We still did more ‘landscaping’ inside the cave after the colors made a few ‘glitches’ obvious, we worked the ‘erosion tools’ to get rid of most straight up and down cliffs and pulled some stalactites down and pushed others back up when they were blocking the pathways through the cave. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – Working on the interior of a cave.
This is a bit of the detail inside the huge cave in the “Faer Kingdoms” – We had to make sure the characters could actually get through it. And then we wanted to make it look as realistic as possible while still being as fantastic as possible. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – Manipulating bits of landscape.
— This is the old ‘client’s look. This is one or two generations back. What you’re looking at is a piece of an area being ‘created’, stretched, resized, and soon it will be shaped, texturized, maybe painted, and moved into place. That bit of landscape that is hovering in dark space there might end up being an off-shore mountain that you can’t get to from here- Or it might be flipped upside down and manipulted to become the ceiling, the inside of a cave – what you’d see if you look up inside the cave. If anybody playing your game can see the coutside of the cave, as in, a mountain or hill- you have to ‘create’ another piece of landscape, size it, texturize it, shape it and very carefully move it so it is right-side-up on top of the upside down cave interior – And you better fly all around your mountain or hill and go inside your cave and make sure everything did fit together right. These bits are only visible from one side. Your character may be able to walk through a wall it can’t see until it turns around and then it wouldn’t be able to get back. As a developer you can ‘turn off collisions’ and walk through walls and fall into a black void, or a white void, or a grey void, or a pink void- or all kinds of different coloured nothingness, that never looks like anywhere you’d want to stay. And I’ve actually lost a couple builder characters that way. You can now restart them in a safe zone and move them back to the area you fell through – making sure collisions are back ‘on’, or you’re in ‘flying’ mode so you can move up and down and around and in and out and then rise above a spot you’d like your builder character to fly down to and land. But sometimes weird things happen, like part of the character might be invisible, or gone. This can be traumatic. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – Advanced Cave Building
—“Advanced Cave Building” I was scrolling through old screen shots and this one stood out. It really looks spectacular when viewed full size. & ‘building a cave’ is no simple task. You have to flip one section upside-down to work on it and add the textures and so on, and later spend hours making sure the sections line up right and make danged sure that no part of one section protrudes through another. This is a huge cave in the “Faery Kingdoms” section of the Game. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – Fox People
Fox-Person Looking right at us. It wasn’t easy to get the look right to have the people who were supposedly evolved from Foxes look different enough from those who’d supposedly evolved from Cats. But we think we did it. What do you think? We’ll work on the tails some time in the near future. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – A Delvahrian
We’ve been calling these guys ‘Delvahrians’ – We didn’t want to call them ‘Dwarves’- They’re taller, larger and more robust than the ‘Ottarians’ [ Ottarians believe their race evolved from Otters- Delvahrians believe they were the first ‘intelligent’ life created by whichever ‘God’ they personally believe in and weren’t quite sure Who or What created Elves – and all those other races who began intruding into their lands after they’d been there, believing they were the only intelligent life – for thousands of years- living mostly underground in caves and tunnels they made beautiful through their own hard work. ] They can see in the dark – they are very hard workers, have no ‘gift’ for magic, other than Religious Magic – And they have definite ideas about the finer points of the various Religious Sects’ dogma. It is not unusual for Delvahrians to break into fist fights over interpretations of things like the finer points of ‘Non-Violent Theory’ and things like that. They are semi-resistant to alcoholic beverages and comsume vast quantities at celebrations. They’ve only recently realized that many of their offspring, who had been expected to work in the mines as soon as they could walk, had died of loneliness, and have been secretly seeking advice on how to nurture their young from Ottarians, – and they have a ‘soft spot’ for Ottarians, whom they credit for saving their civilization in a crucial battle against incredibly overwhelming numbers of the Ghardra (goblins) and they have developed the belief that Ottarians can actually die of exhaustion if anybody ever forces them to do a normal day’s amount of work. — The Ottarians go along with that belief and practice having ‘near death experiences’ when they want to knock off early and go home and play with their kids. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – Absentia
“Absentia” – From the beginning, I wanted ‘my world’ to be different from almost every other game world I ever herd of- I knew ‘gamers’ who wanted to develop characters and role play with what I’d call ‘elegance’ and finesse. And I knew rabid gamers who wouldn’t be happy unless they could kill everything in sight. I couldn’t imagine why both these groups, and anybody else, whose tastes I probably couldn’t imagine before I ‘met’ them- shouldn’t be happy with the same ‘game’ One city could be a slash and hackers’ paradise. Another city could be under ‘Divine Protection’ and nobody could attack anybody else within its boundaries. I envisioned a city for people I knew who’d played ‘Sims Online’ where designers and developers could hang out, ‘own shops’ where they could upload, display and sell their wares and innovations within the game. I thought it would fun to call their city ‘Oblivia’ and surround it with a deep dense fog, and explain that the residents have no idea there’s anything beyond their city’s borders. Somebody told me there was a place called ‘Oblivia’ in the Pokemon universe. While I was grumbling that somebody stole my idea, the wild and crazy love of my life – And my ‘drafted’ artist who was learning to use Maya 3D – grinned, “Call the city ‘Absentia’ – I like the idea that I could tell people that I’d be in Absentia -” And this Elf warrior has just stumbled upon the hidden pass that leads to Absentia. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shots of the Day – Looking for the originals of these two:
This is a view that only someone building a game world will ever see. We set the clock in motion and were linking areas together, jumped from work to ‘play’ mode to see how we were doing and got this view. Of a section of the ‘Faer Kingdoms’. I just spent way too much time looking for the full size original screen shots of this view and the one to the right. Hopefully that image will remain on the right when I press the “publish” button. Whattaya think? Wanna be a game world builder when ya grow up? ~~~ TaleRocker 
Another sight ‘civilians’ will probably never see. When you’re building a game world, you can turn off collisions – which means you can walk through walls, and walk through hills, and sometimes fall through the world and acquire an intimate knowledge of a different kind of ‘Hollow Earth Theory’. The solid ‘ground’ out there is a relatively flat area on the other side of a mountain range, and my builder character poked his head through the mountain. You might be able to see my partner in crime’s avatar – right of center on that flat section. – He looks like a bit of a dark vertical upright line. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Photo of the Day – Building a Stream = First Attempt
This a photo taken of a computer screen, before I knew how to take mulitple screen shots and get them right – & This was my first attempt at putting a river, or a stream in my first area – with ‘bridges’ that were actually single planks made huge and mostly hidden under ground. This would be in ‘the Anomaly’ section of the game – a bit of the Faery world – Where time is different and everything looks different than in the more realistic sections of the game world. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – Valhalla Valley Undergrowth
“Leafy Undergrowth’ – I believe we were adjusting the size of the ‘background’ leafy stuff that will eventually be below whatever we ‘plant’ here in this valley. ~~~ TaleRocker
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Game Development Screen Shot of the Day –
Tosha, the Ottarian (left) and Xamantha, the Faax (Right) – After putting her through the racial morphing process Tosha, when viewed from the right angle, reminded me of a family friend ( Mary Ellen S. ). These two Builder Characters paused for this portrait while positioning trees.
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Game Dev Screen Shot – Late Spring (?) Snow in a Glacial Valley
Snowy slopes in Glacier Valley.
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This Morning’s Photo = In Game Races = Still under development.
Cat Person, left, Fox Person right. We’ve been calling the Cat People ‘Khatzen’ and the Fox People ‘Faaxen’ ( Had help from young nephews with those names ) Might change one or both. Cat People are tribal, communicate with each other with ESP, bot not with ‘outsiders’ Do not use magic except for ‘religious magick’ – Fox people are magic obsessed, sometimes become unbalanced because of that. Also have a ‘strange’ moral view, where Thieves are respected as much as priests.
