Many, many years ago, I was sitting outside of one of the buildings on the campus of SUNY New Paltz with one of my spiral bound notebooks, scribbling down ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This wasn\u2019t a new thing for me. Every couple of weeks or so I\u2019d just go someplace random and just start writing out everything that came to me, not quite stream of consciousness but close enough. I came up with dozens of game ideas that would unfortunately never see the light of day, story ideas that were never explored, and random sketches of things that were more doodles than anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But one of those sketches was for an underground facility, specifically the entry chamber that was linked to the surface by way of a very long elevator shaft (which had checkpoints on the way down). The premise of the location was that there was some ridiculously virulent disease that was airborne (with a very long lifespan). There were no zombies or anything like that, just people who eventually just exploded after the disease had run its course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also had been working on writing a science fiction story about a protagonist, who was psychic, trying to broker a deal with some corporate figure to obtain a mineral called \u201cAzure\u201d that greatly increased her abilities. She was being hunted by a robotic creature sent out to \u2018silence\u2019 her and her abilities, which she couldn\u2019t see because it had no mental signature to detect and it had a cloaking device.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It had all the makings of an 80\u2019s style killer robot sci-fi action movie. To the best of my knowledge, I\u2019ve been able to burn every copy of this story in existence, out of shame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m convinced that my purgatory will involve having to sit and listen to monstrous figures read, out loud, anything that I wrote while in high school or college.\u00a0 It would be more agonizing than all of the butt-spiders, but I digress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some time later, I hit upon the idea of designing a science-fiction role playing game. I was already elbow deep in a very intricate fantasy role playing game and I wanted a project with a completely different format, rule-set, and presentation to switch back and forth on. As with many of my projects, I got about 70 percent of the way done with the project before everything fizzled out, but there was a very different reason for this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had the bulk of the rulebook completed. What was lacking was the artwork. I envisioned various styles of artwork, be it pen and pencil sketches or computer graphics, to pepper every single page or so. The sketches I had plenty of, but the technology to create the computer graphic artwork just wasn\u2019t quite there yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is back from the days of Poser 2, and while I had already thrown my lot in with the Daz3D community, the technology to create amazing, photographic quality artwork didn\u2019t exist. They existed as pictures in my head, and I wasn\u2019t willing to just publish with sub-standard artwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just before the Covids, I had been discussing with a contact of mine about the game, and they were curious to see what I had already done. I gave them a physical copy for them to look through, and they dropped off the radar shortly thereafter. I had a lot of other things going on at the time, what with the apocalypse and all, so I really didn\u2019t give it much thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fast forward to now, and I get an e-mail asking me just what I needed to do to complete the work, and what kind of time-frame I was thinking it would take to get done. I looked over my project and said it\u2019d probably take a couple of months or so, but I\u2019d need to update a number of my software packages\/resources to get the necessary artwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then they sent a check to cover the expenses that I estimated for the building blocks for the rest of the art. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am now working on Savalon: Evolution full time thanks to the backing. I didn\u2019t quite think I\u2019d land a deal like this, but here we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the next few weeks I plan to post different status updates (artwork, in particular, but a couple excerpts of the ruleset\/fiction that I\u2019m writing\/revising). I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d get an opportunity like this, but here we are!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hope all of you are doing well and had a safe and healthy Thanksgiving (if that\u2019s what you celebrate). I know I\u2019ve got a lot to give thanks for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Have a great rest of the week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many, many years ago, I was sitting outside of one of the buildings on the campus of SUNY New Paltz with one of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":713,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,23,22],"tags":[16,48],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}