Yesterday I had to re-evaluate the numbering system I used for the attributes because it didn't quite make sense to assign the Undirected attributes to the same numbers as their Directed counterparts. Nothing practically had to be zero and Duplicity kind of had to be two just because of its "two-faced" motif, for instance.
So, I thought about it a bit and redid the number assignments like so:
0
Synthesis
Nothing
1
Unity
Eternity
2
Machination
Duplicity
3
Fantasy
Frustration
4
Verity
Portent
5
Faith
Flight
6
Esteem
Desolation
7
Will
Ruin
8
Totality
Incongruity
I deliberately assigned Portent to 4 because of the "four equals death" thing in Chinese and Japanese culture. Ruin got 7 because of catastrophe theory, and Desolation got 6 because of 6 cardinal directions and the idea of a compass-related MB sounding cool to me. Incongruity had to be 8 to be in the opposite position of Synthesis, and Frustration just got 3 because that was the only slot left.
Now to go back and see if I can make the Lost MBs' digits fit these numbers the way I did with the Empowered ones. And also look at the other columns, I didn't so much pay attention to that in those though now I'd like them to match too.
I've always thought the concept of the New Years' resolution was a little stupid. [...] how can you know on the first day of the year what's most important to accomplish during the rest of it? You can't. You only figure that out as the year actually unfolds, and you have to juggle everything you want to accomplish with everything that's being involuntarily thrown in your face.
So, instead, [o]n my "fluid" to-do list, I'll attempt to put together a list of achievable or semi-achievable goals to strive toward completing this year, and periodically update it with any progress I make on them, no matter how small. Any progress. I guess this shows my programming geek side a bit, since it's kind of like a changelog?
Yeah, that works. I'll call it my personal changelog. Awesome!
Music
Stablehand - finish writing and add to archive
On the Lift to Ruin
On the Lift to Ruin - actually added already, seems almost done but could maybe use a bit more fixing (pretty much fixed now)
Hymn of Destruction - actually making progress on this again! If slowly.
Gears of Science - about half-done now maybe
Silica Heroine KRISTINA - kind of hit a wall on this one for no real reason
'Jinfèng's theme' - give it an actual title? :p Also actually finish the lyrics
'Ariana's theme' - give Ariana a theme in the first place after figuring out what her story is (I know it will involve "Knight Cat" but still have to work out the details)
Will I live to face another day?
Offensive Noise (Aiyalam's theme) (you haven't heard it yet but it's going to be a metal song, and possibly awesome)
Ferdisza, Vahyuata, Morsza (Yanha's song)
!!!*W A R N I N G*!!! (Nassak's theme) - started the ABC notation for the main melody but not making a lot of progress
Pantéras could maybe use some kind of song too, but probably an ambient one without words like Kate/Kris/Lance themes (Pantéras was demoted from main character status so not necessary any more)
Stories from Old Aluma
Legend of Kolonok - make vocals and also address that annoying "bug" where the drums keep getting screwed up on export even though it sounded fine in TiMidity
Anthem of the Hexestrians
Uncategorised
Drakefire go~! (remix of Jinfèng's theme, actually more for use in DCS than Stablehand)
'Kris anime ED' (you haven't heard it but I literally just spontaneously got the idea one day, what if Stablehand was an anime?, came up with a lyric for an ED, and started writing basically an anime ending song just like that)
'Weird untitled song that inexplicably reminds me of Telefang for no reason'
Incongruity and Duplicity Sing the Blues, reed organ remix - kinda optional
Theme for Red of some kind, possibly - optional, considering doing a new-age-ish remix of Lance's theme
Consider doing some songs that are just neutral ambient music and not anybody's theme song - actually doing this a little bit with Kate's theme song to tell the truth, makes pretty good background music if a bit overly lively
Had this idea for "album with odd in medias res titles", though with probably pretty normal-sounding songs (may or may not use the Cleverbad to help with this)
Tyrian - polish and add to archive
Rain of Violets
A Change of Winds - possibly rearrange with new string instruments as well as guitar, but low priority
Al Sad-al-Suud ni Inoru (Qamar's theme) - needs better instrumentation, I imagined something different pretty much from the beginning
Red Dragon Troupe/Jianglongdui theme
Hymn to Absurdity - it almost sounded okay but something about it just didn't seem right, so I'll probably need to fix it some
Wit Theme - I thought this was done, but I'm reworking it more jazz-style now to match a reworked general character concept.
Uncategorised
'Honou's theme' - I actually have a tune in my head and partial lyrics but haven't even started an ABC of this one
Helico's theme - this one is just an idea I haven't even started but I still think the concept is really cool so it's something I really want to do (it will basically be an original song but attempting to be in Stewart Copeland's style)
'Anyokurou's theme' - may or may not do, but having a real sitar to play makes this very tempting to give a try, and now that all the Tyrian songs are under the CC-BY-SA I could make it a libre alternative to one of my favourite songs ever (you don't understand how much I've wanted deep down in my heart to just use it for stuff, but you know, copyright and all; hint hint this is why I hate copyright)
'Yukibakuhou's theme' - ditto, not sure if necessary right now but man would a sitar song be cool and appropriate, and also again, possible libre alternative to one of my favourite albums
Possibly change all Tyrian songs to CC-BY-SA for now; on one hand not changing licences more than once was a good enough goal, but having them under this stupid BY-NC-SA licence for long periods of time for really no good reason is not really an acceptable side effect
Programming projects
Stablehand
Attribute quiz
Random OC generator (this could potentially be pretty awesome if I were able to get it finished; I need to get most of the main species that will be appearing in Stablehand designed though before it can really be complete, and it would be nice to get a minimal amount of background info on all the locales done too)
libretto
Eliminate the necessity to use shell scripts with libretto
Add audio export, configurable to any format timidity supports
Try to make libretto a plugin - optional; seems really hard to make jEdit plugins, surprisingly, dunno what's wrong with ant but something's not working
Fix this stupid bug where sometimes you have to click the assemble button like seven times before TiMidity actually comes up
Consider creating a "sequencer" display to make things easier to coordinate
Create a java program that transcribes notes played on a midi keyboard to ABC notes and integrates with libretto
If this works, also try to make it parse and guess note lengths
Other
I had a DCS demo thing I was programming - optional, updates are vastly more important right now
Finish "the big cleanup" of this blog's template
3D models
Directed MBs
Instigator
Nebuliser - the idea of modelling fluff makes me nervous, but they're rather cool-looking
Synergiser
Observer - in-progress
Ostentator - tried to make the foot but didn't get very far XD
Conductor
Insulator - pretty much just needs texturing
Postulator - why do I make my things so fluffy? But having a model of the wing-hands to pose could eliminate a lot of headache as far as drawing them goes
Other MBs
Adumbrator - I love this thing, this will probably get done really fast when I get to it
Vociferator - I'm not 100% in love with the way it looks in 2D right now but I bet I could make it pretty nightmarish animated
Transitor
Seuwayote
Salvager - you haven't seen this one but it's pretty neat
Veriasaurus - again worried about the fluff but could be interesting
Cloud leijonœrn - no idea how I'm going to make it look like clouds, but something to try when I get the Adumbrator to look right XD
Other
I started a model of Wyvera (squamæopard) but kind of gave up temporarily - optionally pick that up again
Try modelling a generic hexart/leijonœrn and maaaaybe a pardean - optional
Paint real-life Yanha sculpt, update Insulator "progress" entry on this site; also reminder to update the other one when polygonal version textured
Illusts
Stablehand
Team "TPMH" - Kate, Kris, Lance, JF
Design Ariana
Design Knight Cat (for Ariana storyline)
Red does not really need a revamp but practising drawing her would be good
Hughes (practise Sleipnir later, it's not too easy to practise drawing somebody who's literally a different person every time XD)
Hexarts - decide on a colour scheme for the "default" hexart - I dunno, I'm eh about the one I picked but at least I have one
Leijonœrns - design a few different varieties
Pardeans - clarify classification and try to design them
Squamæopard (I literally haven't ever made a finished drawing of this thing even though I've had it for like years)
New Destiny Attribute diagram and infographics - this is started but very partial right now
Design Nassak (have an idea but waiting to find a ref for something in particular) - found my ref, the eastern hognose snake
Design Pantéras
Finish the logo
MBs
Design the rest of the MBs to fill out the new chart
Make "finished" illust of Synergiser, revamping design a bit
"Granszata" Observers
Tenkai
Experiment with concept/interface/mechanics ideas for a re-envisioned version of Tenkai which is libre and also a spinoff of Stablehand (honestly this could be really cool, I imagine the "trainers" using the monsters as rôle objects and making them temporarily transform into different forms themed around each Destiny Attribute and you have to strategically use the right form and stuff; also, as a libre game with no stupid copyright barriers, any fanmons you made could actually become canon)
Consider finding/devising actual ways to program this
Design a handful of "main" beasts for this thing
Design a logo; already have a decent idea for one
Tyrian - Pretty much everybody needs a revamp, most of my drawings are so old XD
Main characters - especially them, I haven't even tried to draw Qamar ever
Important Artifices
Come up with a new, distinctive and interesting aesthetic style for Chayavana on the whole, more centred around reflections
Redesign main Chayavana in it, possibly
Story
Stablehand
Make good progress on introductory chapters for "TPMH" - would be nice to have them done, but just making really good progress on them is probably a more realistic goal right now even if I have a whole year
Tyrian
I had an idea that at the beginning of each chapter there would be an interesting but nonsensical little Artifex anecdote of some kind - draw some of those, no rush, but they'd be usable in the actual story and it would be nice to have SOMETHING done story-wise
Fan story
Get updating DCS regularly again, with a "post a sketch or whatever EVERY SINGLE WEEK and post updates when possible" schedule - yeh I dunno if this is gonna happen, the probability of this story starting up again is looking kinda bleak to be honest
Re-read BB and pick out the best quotes/all significant facts about the characters in preparation for making the first comic
Actually make the first comic - optional, re-reading will take some time
Other
Consider putting EVERYTHING posted on Sangkara (text, pics, whatever) except fan art under the CC-BY-SA - dunno about this, actually, since Tyrian is "not under any specific licence" now and it could create confusion about Tyrian stuff
Rearrange site navigation, relegating Tyrian stuff to its own page since having something I barely talk about front-and-center is kind of odd, and I'd be able to describe the story/link to the chapter opening things when I made them too - in-progress, a little
Rewrite the "legal story" page to be more intelligent and accurate and less clueless - in progress (the permissions part was always okay; it's just the story itself that needs rewriting)
Fix up this list with CSS so I can mark finished, new, and in-progress entries (wow this is suddenly getting meta...)
Hide personal changelogs on the main page of this site and maybe the chronological view, so my actual content shines through better
Do one better than that and figure out how to hide subsequent changelogs only when there's more than one - well okay, I guess giving all of them a label that hides them manually as they're written works too
Fix all of the creative commons tags so they're back
Despite my valiant attempts to explain what Stablehand is at least twice, it turned out people still didn't get it. So... I had to do it again (:p). Here's my newest explanation, reposted from my tumblr.
What is stablehand? Do you make it?
I do make Stablehand, or, well, will would be a better word than do, because I haven't strictly "made" any of the actual story yet. Though I do already have a whole bunch of things laid out basically in a rough outline of the final format in my mind, the project is still essentially in the planning phase; as it's going to potentially be a ridiculously massive and complicated project, I feel like I need to get a bunch of stuff sorted out pretty well before I begin in order to not have the actual story completely fall apart and/or have to be reworked from the beginning. Both of those things could potentially be really disastrous, as I think will be pretty obvious to you when I explain what the project is.
Stablehand is going to be, as I said on the About page (I'd recommend looking at that page as it explains the influences/central themes for the project pretty well, though it may need a little more revising) kind of a combination gamebook/webcomic. I've also described it as a visual gamebook and a visual text adventure. It seems like people may be having a little difficulty grasping this concept, so I'll stop and explain this a bit more.
Ok. You know Homestuck, right? Homestuck is a webcomic that emulates really old retro games kind of based on text adventures in style. It also has a teeny bit of a 'gamebook tease' element to it, as it gives you "commands", but the story is actually just linear instead of being a branching narrative where you can have different endings. (This really confused me at first to be honest, because not knowing what Homestuck was I was like, are there supposed to be other options? Is this like the impossible quiz, where I'm missing some kind of trick? XD and it took me like forty pages to realise it was really just a plain old webcomic. I was mildly disappointed though the actual story fairly quickly made up for it.)
Anyway, Homestuck tells a story in which there are many characters, timelines, and even universes. Infinite possibilities, right? But, it only tells one of them. It spends a really, really, really long time talking about just one way the characters can interact, develop, and accomplish things.
Ok. That's Homestuck. Now.
Imagine a story that's visual, somewhat like Homestuck, but where instead of just looking at one timeline, you could actually change things. Character's supposed to do X? How about he doesn't do X, or does Y instead. What if instead of slaying the dragon, he befriends it. Or instead of befriending the dragon, he slays it. Maybe there's no obvious route for the character. Maybe nobody including the character has any idea what to do and you just kind of have to pick something and hope it works.
This is Stablehand.
There are 12 characters, and each of them has a different personality, abilities, and background. Each of them might be able to become a whole mess of different things... or they might not, depending mostly on their attunements. They might be the kind of person who's good at strategising and leading (Ariana, Nassak), the kind that just jumps into things (Hughes, Kris), the kind that prefers to solve problems on their own (Kate, Lance, Sleipnir), or the kind that's... well, not a person at all (Yanha, Red, Shadow, Ssivyin/Ssiassi). But the thing is, their basic nature can also change to some extent. Not only can they have any balance of 16 defining attributes, but they can choose to switch to another attribute for every single situation if they want to (or not), which then will feed back into their attributes as statistics; their approach to one particular attribute, called an attitude, may or may not affect the results of this, depending. And attitudes, of course, can change too.
Ok, that was a bunch of terms. What was that all about?
Well, the real point of all that is when characters start archetyping, or developing ability sets and sometimes even new appearances based on their identities. Kris, for instance, is obsessed with the idea of "The Superpower" (an in-universe superhero) and has the ability to take on several different superhero personas based on each attribute. She's a little bit special though, since she has a "Versitotal" attunement. Other characters, like Lance, may have archetypes that are based on multiple attributes, or more on a specific theme not quite related to attributes. And yet other characters with a "Freestyle" attunement may explore a whole lot of different facets of just one attribute with their abilities, or not so much work within the attribute framework at all.
So, unlike Homestuck, you'll get to see, well, if not all of the possibilities, a whole bunch of the possibilities. And they'll probably vary pretty widely from character to character, too—sometimes it may be that most choices, no matter how strange or illogical, will result in a good ending for the character; sometimes (as with poor, poor Nassak), it may be that almost nothing can result in a good ending. This is really exciting for me because unlike with other story formats, I'll get to explore a lot more different facets of each character, as well as play with the idea of what it means to be "in character". When the characters can change their personalities kinda the way people do in real life if a little more quickly and dramatically, suddenly this idea of being "in character" changes a lot. It's no longer this restrictive thing where you can only do certain things with the story because the character description said so, but instead you start to realise that a whole bunch of different things could be "in character" for a given character at a given moment.
(I think it will actually be easier for me to write a story this way than the traditional way, to be honest, because when I wrote stories that way it was often hard for me to look at two or three different actions and ask myself which one fit the character better (but... but... the character could do any of those things and they'd all be in character! and they're equally awesome too! what do I do???). Now, I can finally eat my cake and have it too. And throw it out the window and stomp on it. And offer it to some friends. And make it into cake pudding. And so on...)
To make things even more concrete, here is a very rough cartoon of what the story format is going to be like (the character shown is Ssivyin/Ssiassi, but I just made up the scenario on the spot rather than this being anything I had planned for the story):
Like I said: you pick various attributes, it affects the characters and story. Right now I'm thinking I'll also sometimes present other choices that aren't as attribute-related, like which direction to go or something, in the same format but not using the attribute icons of course (:p). I'll probably make other stock icons for those.
Having said all that, now I hope you can see why I said "you'll have to be careful and try to see the big picture in order to get a good ending". I can already tell this is going to be a really complicated thing for me to create, let alone for my poor audience to figure out. XD
(I'd like to add though that while I'm making the story sound like it's really unintuitive, it's not really supposed to be unintuitive per se. I'd say that it's already more intuitive than Homestuck in some ways, particularly the attunement/attribute system. In my eyes the Homestuck Classpect system is a nightmare, and part of the reason I made the attribute system—though it was kind of a subconscious reason more than something I did deliberately—was actually to make something that was actually understandable and usable and wasn't a goddamn slurry of mixed-up tea leaves where you have to go off fan interpretations, who knows what kind of weird pocket of extradimensional space they were pulled out of 'cause I sure don't, to have any hope of understanding it. Whenever my friends talk about Classpects and try to fit themselves to them I actually get slightly angry just because in my mind I'm like, oh my god guys that system is too vague and badly-designed it's useless to even try to understand it much less fit into it why are you even trying! Urrgh. And the funniest thing is, it's not even like I'm jealous of the thing I "copied" being better or I wish they'd use attributes instead. Systems I can't work with just frustrate me. :p
...Sorry for the rather spontaneous rant about Classpects. XD)
Along with the main (gamebook) story and this idea of the characters and who they are and what they can do and become that will be explored in it, I'm also just generally goofing around and building a bunch of other random stuff around the idea/universe too.
One is this kind of... "anime retrolark musical/opera" thing, where I'm just writing a bunch of songs for each character and a number of other things in-universe. The songs are one good example of how I'm kind of just... creating whatever comes to mind, not really aiming for any consistent style. I want to write a silly narrative country folk song? Great, write it. I want to write something that's in Japanese and sounds like an anime opening theme? Great, write it. I want to write a heavy metal song? Great, write it. I want to write songs that sound a bit like the kind of thing you'd find in Disney movies? Great, write them. In a way I think it's accurate to call Stablehand kind of a collage of different genres and artistic media because while I do have an overarching "style genre" for it I call retrolark (in brief, basically take "fantasy steampunk", swap "1800s" for "1980s", and throw in some genuine surrealism), I'm kind of going crazy with the rather large diversity of the things I'm actually making for it.
Another thing I'm doing is modelling some of the various beasts in 3D, ostensibly for making animations for the songs or some kind of cutscenes or something, but in practice mostly just for the hell of it. And I'm also programming cool... erm, "side attractions", for my website like a random OC generator and a "life compendium" that will be... vaguely like a Stablehand Pokédex I guess (:p). I'm kind of aiming for this to be made for people to fanwork, to some extent.
Oh, and on that topic, as you probably already know, I've made both the main story and all the side stuff "libre", meaning that unlike most animation, games, books, etc. out there, you're actually explicitly allowed to make fanworks of them and even outright "steal" stuff from them, in the case of my licence as long as you attribute me and allow everybody else to do the same to what you made. I'm a huge fan of open source software, and I've always wished we could do the same thing with general culture more instead of getting caught up in petty arguments about whose whatsit is whose and what's "stealing". I've already made some fairly intelligible ramblings about copyright and libre stuff elsewhere, so I think that's all I'll say about that right now.
So. Basically, Stablehand is a gamebook, an open universe, and a bunch of random randomness based on the other two things. I'd called it a "comic" in [my tumblr] tag mainly because that's a word I felt like a lot of people would look at and immediately understand, even though it doesn't perfectly describe what Stablehand actually is. Awesomely enough I just found a tag replacer though, so from now on the tag will be "retrolark fantasy stablehand", which is the full title.
Ok, before I say anything else, let me get one thing absolutely straight: I didn't create this song, nor did anybody purposefully create it for me. The title isn't just a coincidence either; it had a different title, but that's my new nickname for it now.
Now, with that out of the way, I present Portent Rider. It was created by DavidKBD (source here), and I'm now reposting it places under the CC-BY-SA, because remix culture is a beautiful thing.
Portent Rider, along with a handful of others, is basically a historical figure in the Stablehand universe. But there's a bit of a twist as far as Portent Rider himself is concerned—unlike the others, I recently decided that he actually came from the future. Other than that I still need to work out his story, but one thing I've decided on is that he rides some kind of odd mechanical horse-ATV hybrid that's somehow as fast and smooth as a motorcycle. (Initially it was just going to be a mechanical horse, but when I heard this song it immediately evoked "motorcycle" so... :p)
I love this song. I mean, it's just the perfect theme for this guy. First it has that ominous buildup, and then those oddly dissonant sax chords as the main melody, and then it just slips into some silly kind-of-retro-sounding randomness that oddly fits with the general style of Stablehand and particularly these past guys' story. All in all, I don't think anything could possibly fit better.
Well, here are the Carp concurrent finally. If you hadn't noticed, I'd always just been scribbling vaguely fish-shaped blobs where they were supposed to go because I was for some reason dreading actually trying to make them look like fish.
But, if you hadn't known, April 1st is "Fish Day" for me. I don't really play pranks on people, so on that day I either submit something that's just kind of weird and silly or... in this case, actually related to fish. And so, I got up off my butt and actually tried to draw these guys seriously for once.
I'm not totally happy with the way these turned out (the bottom one looks weird, and... whoa how did I never notice I left the hind fins off the top one XD) but the theme I chose, where quadrilaterals are a big part of their design to match the Unity symbol, is likely staying.
Well, this is the Shikunbao. Like I said, my brain literally just kind of synaesthetically pulled it out of this song—as my handwritten note on the page just a little bit sloppily describes, "the song conjured up this exact body plan in my mind".
Shortly after "designing" it, I decided—again kind of subconsciously—that it would make the most sense as a mountain animal in an area either in or around Hinotoria because of its snow leopard-like spots. So, I thought about it a bit and decided that since a lot of Chinese names for animals are kind of just randomish but descriptive phrases, this thing would be called the "rock fist leopard", or Shiqianbao. In Hinotorian syllables that translated to Shjkjwnbaw, or Shikunbao. So... that's where its name comes from.
I also later got this idea that the Shikunbao would be somewhat self-aware and since the Hinotorians are associated with Unity, they would have somehow made some kind of agreement with them such that the Shikunbao are really willing to help them out, especially when they need to get through their rough, rocky habitat (but are still just about as cold and hostile as they were before to everybody else). I figured, Unity is a weird attribute and it needs some kind of wacky perks that go with it. Like having freaky yetimonsters at your command. :p
Ok, now that our patchwork roleplay has fallen apart (see this post), I think everybody deserves an explanation of what these two forms of Yanha actually were.
The "holey" one at top was Nothing!Yanha, or Nullified!Yanha to be more precise (Nullified means Lost-Nothing; there are going to be adjectives like that for every attribute-attitude combination, but as I'm still figuring out what to call some of them I haven't posted them yet). Due to... well, an accident (you know what happened if you were in the RP, but if not, I'll leave it at that), it ended up losing part of itself, and that shows as visible holes literally missing out of it. At first it didn't really know what to do and was just kind of suffering, moving and acting somewhat aimlessly. That's pretty much what the Lost attitude is—you just surrender to an Undirected attribute or try to ignore it and suffer.
A bit later on, Nullified!Yanha kind of started conquering its newly-gained nothingness, which allowed it to be way more durable and kind of be everywhere at once. At that point it was more Hardened-Nothing, which I sadly don't have an adjective for yet. But anyway that's basically what the Hardened attitude means, it's where you take an Undirected attribute that would otherwise be a disadvantage to you and turn it around to where it's an advantage.
The "swooshy" one at the bottom was Unified!Yanha, that is, Empowered-Unity!Yanha. (The Empowered attitude means the same thing as Directed did before; I renamed it just to avoid confusion between Directed attributes and the Directed attitude.) When one of the characters decided to sing a song to H-Nothing!Yanha, I realised that it could kind of use the song to fill in its holes, and that would make it Unity because I see rhythmic music, particularly trance music, as being kind of a Unity thing thanks to this faction called the technotranscendents I added to the project pretty early. If you hadn't figured it out, the holes filled in as black swooshes just to make Yanha look more like a taijitu (original, I know :p). It was also supposed to look slightly like Amaterasu but I don't think that showed through much.
Unified!Yanha still kept some of the abilities of H-Nothing!Yanha because they kind of applied to Unity too. It also gained new abilities, such as the ability to just kind of transform into any shape it needed to (it only got to transform into a boat but it probably could have assumed other shapes too). This is basically what Empowered means: you harness a Directed attribute to gain new abilities.
I think it's likely I'll use a similar design for Unified!Yanha in the actual story, though I don't know for sure.
The Votsal. I forget where exactly its name comes from, but it's a bad translation of something, anyway. As soon as I saw that word, probably thinking of this, I had to transform it into an iridescent green quetzal-like Hexartoid.
I imagined them as living in trees, so they have rotatable scutes that can grip branches. They're supposed to have the ability to do gliding jumps from tree to tree, which the "hood" of plumes (it expands and contracts a bit like a hognose snake) was supposed to help with.
These are another creature I somewhat synaesthetically created from listening to a song. I'm not totally sure whether I'll use them but if I do, they'll be MBs, and it's not unlikely.
As they're vaguely based on auroras, they have very bright glowing bodies. They're supposed to be very fluid, with any rings or such around them moving dynamically kind of like water ripples. Also, I'm probably going to draw them with small floating "hands" next time.
"Lightray eels" was just something I made up on the spot when I had to give the picture a name on my hard drive but then suddenly as I was typing it I realised it was actually a pretty decent pun. So... I guess that name's here to stay.
Ok, this is kind of a big one. We're talking practically two months, so there's a lot of stuff that happened in that time.
A bunch of this stuff is also kind of both scraps and good stuff at the same time, too, so I'll make separate posts to further explain things where that applies.
My friends and I had for a short while had a patchwork roleplay over Skype, which I made a number of doodles for. Anyway, this was one in which I drew two different forms Yanha assumed in the roleplay. More info about them here!
Some symbols for the main characters (embarrassingly, the only ones I have in a finished state). When I posted this picture I didn't really know how many main characters there were going to be, but now I'm fairly sure there will be 12, so this is about a third of the symbols done. A few slightly more peripheral characters like Knight Cat will probably also get symbols though, so maybe a little less than a third.
The reindeer, aka the colour-changing camo antelope
And then there are the griffins
It's like they have quadrupedal pterosaur wings but they're also bird wings with legs on them and I don't even...?
I kinda want to work that weird anatomy into some kind of leijonœrn subgroup to be honest.
These obviously aren't things I drew, but I thought they were worth putting here as a reminder to myself to make counterparts to these things in Stablehand. (I already have the Blazondeer, but the camo-antelope could easily be a real counterpart to it the way hexarts are to the Hlardraho.)
This is going to be the TOC for the fauna section in the guidebook, basically. Before this, I created an XML file to store the tree in and made the tree in XML, then I made a javascript to turn the tree into a nested HTML list [...] and used CSS generated content to create the lines.
I know this is kind of a quirky way to do things, but it has one really big advantage—I can retheme the presentation really drastically if I want to without having to rewrite/restructure the data itself, and since I can alter it at the HTML level I have more control than even with CSS. It's also really easy for me to just add a creature/clade to the tree by putting a tag for it into the XML file and have it look great immediately, way easier than it'd be to try to wade around in all those confusingly similar ul's and li's every time. [...]
*incomprehensible programming nerd babble*
Oh yeah, I'm working on this too. I hadn't been saying much about it because it's nowhere near a finished, presentable state, but eventually there's going to be a "life compendium" for Stablehand so you have all the important information about the creatures in one place.
First design for Ariana as made with the selfy generator (see this post for Lance, Kate, Kris, and white!JF). [Actually, I just added them in here this time. :p]
The scarf should be light golden brown but since it and the shirt were one item, 'tacky red it is!'. :p
I also decided while making this she would have an inexplicable fondness for silly-looking slacks. Plaid, polka-dot, spirals, stars... anything flamboyant and silly.
Also, she's a slightly different ethnicity from Nassak and JF, who are Hinotorian. It might be the one from this place near Hinotoria I've had a vague concept for and was tentatively calling Tulmashania.
(I've been thinking about it and I think Tulmashania may end up butting out my ideas for "Volitia" while also kind of absorbing part of them. How funny would it be to have this place that's like, from a sort of Mongol-type nomadic tradition but then they wiped out this really Western, European sort of a place and then just started acting like they knew their culture perfectly and yup, we are so totally the Spanish lion kingdom over here look at us we are so cool. But to everyone else they just come off as weird because they don't get it, and like, the only way they can get anywhere is still just taking places over so they kind of aren't making any progress at least as far as spreading their culture and ideas and are kind of jealous of Hinotoria for being so good at that compared to them.)
I don't know if I've posted any avatar generator things on this blog before since they're kinda nonlibre due to the fact I didn't make them, but here they are, since they're probably going to inspire my final designs for the main characters to some extent.
Also the thing about "Tulmashania" is pretty well decided now. It's definitely going to be a thing, and there's likely going to be a ruler named Guillaume, a prince named Pantéras, and somebody like "Ravenna" from my previous designs too, with everyone's personalities and appearances reworked just a little. I'm tentatively calling the country um... group? (I dunno what you call a nomadic civilisation okay :p) as well as one of its previous rulers Kskenghra.
This is really old and pretty outdated now (it was a little outdated even when I made the thing, as I was just kind of experimenting around with ideas anyway), but it was an attempt to make a timeline for the world. Back then I only had two main countries + one tentative one so... yeah. Hinotoria is probably going to be about the same shape though.
In this picture I was trying to design an appearance for one of the main technotranscendents (I think it was supposed to be Rotator Phoenix but I'm not sure). To the right, I was trying to design an appearance for a people in a faction called the "Qarismata" who basically thought they could perform miracles thanks to the blessing of Patriarch. I'm... not sure whether I'll be keeping them or not; the technotranscendents are here to stay though.
Here I was attempting to draw Stolen Heart and Arkturuse in a less derpy way than I had initially, and also design a wyvern (which is now called nycopteryx) and a way to present character pages for the human characters.
This is the Retrolark. The idea was that it would be Kate's rôle object (I haven't used that term for a while, have I?), and be able to at least look backward in time a ways. I don't think I ever meant for her to actually be able to change anything with it though. So... I guess it's kind of like the Pensieve in the Harry Potter series.
It's a pun because retrolark is the style for Stablehand but this is literally a retro-looking lark robot that can... retrogress. (Way to explain the joke, Takumi. :p)
Early archetypes for Kris.
Kris, for instance, is obsessed with the idea of "The Superpower" (an in-universe superhero) and has the ability to take on several different superhero personas based on each attribute. She [...] has a "Versitotal" attunement.
I... think that's all I need to say other than I'm probably going to redo all of them at least somewhat except The Chatoyant and The Reticulated. Oh, and the one I marked "Fantasy?" is probably going to be the one of Eternity called "The Sceptred" and, well, have a sceptre.
This was an experiment to turn an earlier parody character into a more serious character, because I made the mistake of actually giving him a cool design (this is the same place Nassak came from, if in name only, incidentally). Specifically, the original I'd quite creatively called Tatsuv was making fun of fan characters with random gratuitous animal parts by being "literally the dragonborn", but I liked the way his horns, mane, and tail were designed so I reworked him into a humanoid hexart. This is admittedly way more human than I imagined most humanoid hexarts being originally, but it's still well within the range of possible shapes. (In fact, from almost the beginning I imagined hexarts being able to be almost perfect humans visually but that being extremely uncommon. So.)
On the other page I was trying to design a handprint for the flag of "Hexartia", a country almost solely made of humanoid hexarts. (Hexartia is probably still staying in the final story, actually.) Also, my very first attempts to arrange the attributes on a cube. I think I've showed you wips of trying to turn the cube into a vector diagram already.
A page where I was just experimenting with logo design and then suddenly I got the idea for the votsal's appearance and had to draw it immediately, explaining why the thing is crammed into such a small space (:p).
a page where I doodled Portent Rider's horse (which I'm thinking will have a different appearance now), an alternate form for Ikazuchi (Tyrian, not Stablehand), and a doodle where I was quickly recording a couple of slogan ideas for SH's organisation (it may be hard to read but the idea is there's like a big picture of him with a quote under it, the way a company sometimes does when it wants to be 'motivational', but the quote just says "do your job" :p)
...Yup.
A recent attempt to revamp Wyvera/the squamæopard.
I dunno... I tried, but I still don't think it looked as good as my very first drawing.
Aaand that's about it. Whew, that was really a lot. I need to stop letting my drawing folder get so full of unfinished drawings.
(Seriously, Blogger actually isn't going to let me have more labels than this in a post so I've gotta start posting more often, or abandon labels entirely. -_-)
From today on, as I said on my deviantART journal, I'm going to be posting all the creature announcements and similar things here first before I post the pictures to my dA, since I now have a place on archive.org to put the images. It might throw off the download count on the page, but oh well. :p
Anyway! This is the Qualifier. It's kind of the opposite of the Evacuator, though since I haven't explained what the Evacuator actually does for reasons, that's not really saying much. Anyway, the Qualifier is a very complex creature with many, many different characteristics. Usually these characteristics have something to do with all the Directed attributes, or all the Directed attributes and all the Undirected attributes (which is what I drew). Practically nobody outside of its home... place has seen one, but within its home place, it's well known as being able to give some of its many qualities to other creatures. A little like a genie.
Actually that's a really good analogy, because it actually has a usually bottle or vase like thing on its back and it will give you what you ask for if you ask it for specific qualities. Unlike jinn though, it's not really malevolent or mischievous... as a general rule at least. I guess those are qualities it could have, though. I see them as being really varied in their qualities and potentially kind of unpredictable and shifting, but usually nice, agreeable, and silent.
The second thing is this. For a while I'd been sitting on a handwritten table of MBs, about identical to the one I already posted, which also had the Salvager, Crystalvox, and doodles of the Abyssals on it.
The Salvager (cracked, winged chameleon-like creature) is the creature of Hardened-Ruin. I'd decided that all the "Hardened" mystery beings would take Undirected attributes and basically turn negative things about them into positive things. So, the Salvager "eats" broken things through the mouth in its back, even things completely beyond repair, and spits them out good as new. It literally feeds on Ruin. :p
The Crystalvox, or "Henobia hrisala", is literally just a Volvox (big round colonial alga) made out of what looks like broken glass. It seems to have some sort of weird hive mind where different points on the sphere can experience sudden emotional impulses independent from each other but the sum of them translates into the behaviour of the whole sphere. It's hard to tell whether the colony as a whole is capable of self-awareness or conspiring against anything else, but it doesn't seem totally unlikely...
The Abyssals are actually based on a weird phenomenon I sometimes experience in real life. I've already described it here if you want to read more about it, but basically, when there are dark open spaces in front of me or I'm standing near the open door to a completely dark room, particularly if there are walls or similar surrounding surfaces I can't see well, I'll get this odd, unsettling feeling that there are these dangerous beings made of darkness that are hiding in unseen corners and crevices and moving along the walls and floor and they're going to attack me at any moment when I'm not looking.
When I described them in that post, I suddenly realised, whoa, this is a really interesting creature concept. How about I include them in Stablehand? My thought was that if I could convey to somebody else how legitimately scary these things are to me but at the same time, how cool the idea was to me out of context, that would really be something. And just maybe, if I fictionalised them and gave them a name, it might even help me stop seeing them everywhere. (...That last part didn't really work, by the way.)
Anyway, in Stablehand, Abyssals are really unpredictable beings with diffuse, shifting bodies that vary a lot in shape. They lurk in dark night air, in shadowed crannies, and in deep, dark chasms. This is one of their favourite places to be, hence their name.
At random, seemingly arbitrary moments, they leap out of their hiding places and snatch passers-by almost instantaneously, which are then never to be seen again. They seem to be able to project their presences such that everyone nearby can faintly feel their existence and their movements, but never has any idea exactly where they are or what their intentions are. Sometimes, they come completely out of their hiding places and allow others to see them face-to-face, but accounts of what exactly happens after are oddly... nonexistent.
Ok, here we go. I'd been wanting to do this for a while, but I didn't really know how to in a way that wouldn't become completely awkward and confusing. Now I've finally figured out something I think will work well and be clear and unambiguous.
I have a vague goal of making all the various animals [from Stablehand] completely open for anybody to use with no caveats, not even the all of... two? the CC-BY-SA I'm currently using for the story itself has. I figure, what's the use of creating a bunch of weird and colourful animals if other people can't reimagine, rework, and become them as fursonas or whatnot? It always disgusted me just a little that the term "mythical creature" had an expiration date on it, and while modern creators are making all these new and diverse species, our definition of "mythical creatures" remains small and boring since people in the modern era have had this idea implanted in them that they cannot create new mythical creatures, but only new intellectual property [...]. I say, let's change the definition of "mythical creature". Let's create some new open mythical creatures and start letting the modern world into it for once.
So, that's what I'm doing today. Releasing all the basic creature concepts under the CC0.
Why would I do this? Haven't I already made them libre?
Well... yes and no.
Yes, inasmuch as people are explicitly allowed to use them in absolutely anything, period, if they use the CC-BY-SA. No, inasmuch as it's still really ambiguous whether people are explicitly allowed to make things which are kiiinda my species and kiiiiinda not and whether they need to use the CC-BY-SA to do so.
So.... after thinking about this a whole lot, I finally decided the best option would be to make the species "public domain" so that there was absolutely no question about whether people were explicitly allowed to make things resembling them but not put them under the CC-BY-SA. The answer would simply be a resounding YES.
Now, the problem with that I'd been struggling with is that you aren't supposed to be able to copyright concepts for things, even though a lot of people and companies basically try to claim copyrights over characters and species anyway. The thing is, copyright is only supposed to protect "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression", not ideas themselves.
So, as tempting as it might have been, I really couldn't just release the species under the CC0, because that would basically kind of backfire: far from my goal of "expanding the definition of 'mythical creature'", it would send a message to other people that I believe particular species and characters outside of the context of any specific work are copyrightable and what they are doing is okay, and it would probably not even work in ensuring other people could use my species if any legal expert looking at it were in their right mind.
So, instead of releasing the species as "public domain", I'm releasing all "fauna concept/design documents", so that there are specific fixed works involved. Here's my fancy and official "certificate" saying that:
To the extent possible under law,
TAKUMI
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
Stablehand fauna concept/design documents.
And just in case this post ever goes through any kind of weird trauma, I'll state that today's date is April 19, 2014.
As to what pictures "fauna design documents" actually refers to, I'm gonna put all of them in this archive.org collection. That should eliminate any and all ambiguity; if it's there, it's a fauna design document, and if it's not, either it's not, or I neglected to put it there for some reason, or some accident occurred. If you have any questions, ask me.
So, tl;dr: All the Stablehand species are essentially public domain now. You can use them. You don't have to think of them as "copyrighted" any more. You don't even have to use the CC-BY-SA. Just use the goshdarned things.
I hope that puts it in a way that's clear enough for everyone to understand.
Of course, it's not really the same thing at all by now. Here's a brief overview of how it's changed over time.
Tenkai started life as something called "Aeromon". In the very, very, very beginning, it was a very thinly-veiled Pokémon imitator, that I believe was essentially born out of me creating what were basically "fakémon" but wanting to assign attributes to them that I knew Pokémon never had canonically.
In particular there was a creature called the "Crysterius" (crystal + mysterious :p) which was essentially a Starmie clone, but with waaaaay more arms to the point of being more of a spiky ball than a starfish and made out of translucent crystal. It had the ability to absorb things into it that then just kind of... floated around in stasis inside I think? But somehow it actually gained power from that, even though it wasn't digesting them. It was like... the more matter was inside it the more powerful it was, and it was kind of a portal to its own little pocket of space where all the things it sucked up lived.
Crysterius as a "fakémon", in a glorious RBY-style dex entry too. (Also, click it for a handful more fakémon/weird fakémonish things I made at that time.)An attempt to revamp Crysterius as a more "original" creature named Giosway. This was supposed to be from a Japanese word but I can't find the actual etymology again for the life of me. I think it may have come from a misreading of 玉瑛 (gyokuei) as gyosuei.
Crysterius was probably my most interesting fakémon, and I kind of started to form its own plot around it, where Crysterii were floating all around the world absorbing things into their cores with tractor beams, up to and including trees. I'm not sure, but I think this in particular was the thing that inspired me to split my creature creation from Pokémon into Aeromon in the first place, just because this scenario would create a totally different kind of world from the Pokémon world. So, I had that plot thing. I figured out that if Crysterius cores were good for storing stuff, maybe they'd be a good alternative to a Poké Ball (I might say Monster Ball, but that was before I actually watched Japanese Pokémon, so, yeah), possibly even better because the full cores at least could store so much more. I even made up this neat little intro gif for if Aeromon were actually some sort of gameboy game or... something like that, which you can see below.
The intro to Aeromon, "Ice Version". I was able to find the frames again but had to recreate the last part with the fade out and the title appearing, which is why it looks so... actually decent. XD
So what happened after that?
I just kind of forgot about the Crysterii and their little plot as I was expanding my creature roster. Don't ask me what happened there! In retrospect I think I didn't realise back then how awesome and weird an idea they actually were.
But anyway, I tried to develop the story. Not unlike I've seen some of my own friends of ages close to what I was then do today, I quickly decided I'd never be awesome enough to build anything as complicated as a game, or even as skill-requiring as a visual-type story for this (or at least not gather either of those skills quickly enough to be able to do either of those things before I scrapped the project), so I broke out the good old word processor and tried to novelise it. I think that was something of a bad decision, honestly; everything about the story was really rather visual, and a purely text format kind of took away what was cool about it, leaving only excessive thesaurus use and cringeworthy weeaboo-isms behind. I think I'm just generally really, really bad with text stories as a medium, to tell the truth, as it's oddly tiring for me to read them even though I can get through chapters upon chapters of dry biology and physics textbooks with great enthusiasm, and I've practically never gotten anywhere writing them either. Visual stories may take effort to progress, but in some ways that's kind of a quality filter for me, as it doesn't allow me to just let endless streams of substance-less words flow out of my fingers without a reality check as to whether I'll end up deleting them all later when I realise they're crap and don't convey the story I wanted to tell at all, and be back at square one. Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that text stories are not easier than visual stories, despite what you might be led to think, and thinking that will just make writing harder for you.
Anyway. By the time "Aeromon" had gotten to its novel phase, I'd realised the name Aeromon was already a Digimon name, and even though I didn't know anything about copyright at all at that age, I already knew more than enough to not want to deal with IP collision bullshit, so I changed the name to Adventures of Kurei (which amusingly enough abbreviated to AoK, and I joked that, well, now its name was AoK :p). It's interesting to note that ironically, in trying to pick a more "original" name, I literally just picked the name of some random Japanese-tutorial guy I was reading a page by (Clay/'Kurei') as the name for my protagonist, while Aeromon had been something I actually came up with off the top of my head. (Wait... no, actually, the protagonist wasn't actually named that. I just picked that for the title because it sounded a little bit like his actual name, but 'in Japanese'; I'm not sure I ever had any plans for anybody to call him that, to be honest. It's sometimes hard to explain the choices I made in trying to put together stories 7-9 years after the fact.)
A title image for AoK, showing "Protagon", the head of the "good faction", or something like that. There was also an Antagon but I never drew him, and I'm not sure I even figured out how to work either of the two into the story itself either. My plotting was a mess.
In a short while, AoK began to evolve into a sort of monster notebook project. Now, I mean that very literally—there was literally a physical notebook that I think even had a table of contents, which I was literally creating entries for various creatures in. It was overall a little bit like what I'm doing with Stablehand/Tenkai, though a lot less intentionally planned that way: instead of the monsters really being specifically designed to fit into both stories or either of the stories being designed around the monsters I was honestly just kind of creating them and sending them off into limbo not really knowing or thinking about where they were supposed to go. :p
Now, compared with what I'm creating now, the creatures in this notebook were really a little plain. Many of them were just "take a creature out of mythology/regular animal and add a weird add-on, particularly an element or single new body part, that then becomes the theme". In this category were "Wulfangs", which was literally just a wolf pup with visible protruding fangs that then became one of two unicorn wolves and then some random oddly-Halloweenish designs (these guys were kind of the "let's see how many weird but yet obvious puns I can get away with" line to be honest: Wulfangs, Wulfantom, Wulfury, Wulfantasy... Wulfuego-hielo because I was obsessed with foreign dictionaries :p); a thing named for the Acropolis that was literally just one face of a Greek building with two pillars as legs because I had to have an example of a "Cement-type" creature (this came from me dreaming that my randomly-anthro Pidgeotto's status incorrectly claimed he was Cement-type); and Javuu, basically a hippogriff but with improved Ditto powers because I needed a name for it and Javuu from déjà vu was the first thing that came to mind. A small handful of others, maybe 2 or 3, were essentially Pokémon ripoffs that were supposed to be alternate evolutions but of course since the actual Pokémon were not going to be in it they had to be distinct to make sense; one was named Far-Flung and was able to wield "Psy powers", whatever that meant (one thing I do know is that "by the way, Psy is not the same as Psychic", as my somewhat underline-happy teenage self so helpfully pointed out for a friend :p). Others, like Blizzarisk and its other elemental forms, were halfway between these two categories, and yet others like Pythoria had almost no visible difference from real animals save possibly no real species of that particular type of animal having that specific colouration.
Blizzarisk is a pretty good place to pause for a moment, actually, because it shows one of the major things I was trying to develop for AoK. I think at that stage my favourite Pokémon ever was Eevee. I LOVED Eevee and the fact it had so many different evolutions, and just like everyone else, I made and tried to draw my own Eevees to fill in the gaps and everything. I was so obsessed with Eevee and its different type specialisations that I wanted to literally turn everything into Eevee. EVERYTHING.
My old evolution chart for the Basilisk, screwed-up RTF text layout and all. I believe Hebikurai and "REGALISK" were supposed to go with King Cobra.Another good illustration of my love of Eevee.
There were exceptions, of course: some creatures like Wulfangs obviously were not subject to the Eevee treatment. Wulfangs I think either came from just being unsatisfied with Pokémon having only three stages, or wanting to emulate the evolution system in Telefang, where a small handful of Denjuu had like seven different stages split across different branches of a tree. There were a handful of things where I was trying really hard to give them different branches and "mod evos" the Telefang way even before I really knew how Telefang worked beyond what I'd read on Racieb's pages.
I was also trying really hard to make the rock-paper-scissors part of my elemental system be complicated and nuanced but I don't think I even had any idea what I was doing there because I didn't get very far on that.
Now, this kept sliding along chaotically until, guess what, I actually started learning to program and sprite! And then, for some reason, I had to start from scratch, because my AoK stuff just wasn't good enough or something. I think it may have been that I was planning to integrate a bunch of the AoK monsters back in later, but I just wanted to get my game working and establish its style and rules first.
In this stage of things, I had an almost completely different approach from what I'd been doing before. For one thing, it was now more based on Monster Farm than Pokémon and random fantasy stuff. For another, I had by that point entered one of the most gigantic weeaboo phases imaginable. A weeaboo phase so big, it was the size of Gojira, and not Godzilla. Everything had to be named in Japanese. Everything. And everything had to be inspired at least loosely by Japanese myth/tradition, if only actually related by name.
Accordingly, I called this new version of the project Tenkai. (This name was a combination of the kanji for heaven/sky (天) and monster (怪), that I then discovered sounded just like tenkai (天界), a word for heaven/paradise, so it was actually kind of a neat pun. I've stuck with that name because I still like it.)
Sprites for Tenkai, the Gojira-sized weaboo edition.
In general, in Tenkai, the monsters were somewhat more pet-like than in AoK in that hunger, health, lifespan, and damage as distinct from fatigue were all things, and you could train them to do things like perform better at different statistics and learn new techniques by combining techniques they already had. A major part of the game as I remember was going to be just trying to figure out all the different things you could do with each one and make it learn and make it become. (In a couple ways, my current version of Tenkai is probably going to very much derive from the way Gojiraboo Tenkai was going to be structured, given that really, that central idea of potential and different ways to unlock it is kind of like the premise of Stablehand, and an idea I really like in general.)
It's also interesting to note that this version of Tenkai, much like AoK before it, also had variants, but instead of elemental variants they were regional, much like in Monster Farm 3. Each one was like a breed the region was known for, and I was planning a system where you could breed monsters to get other variants that were sometimes combinations of existing breeds but other times "secret" creatures. I think I could have made that much cooler if it'd occurred to me to actually learn something about genetics and patterns of inheritance and separated this out into specific traits, rather than just mashing up appearances. :p
So, after that, about three years ago and one year after I let that version of Tenkai slide into the never-going-to-be-finished pile (six years, I think, since Aeromon began), I came back and rebooted Tenkai yet again, seeking to have more unusual and less overtly Japanesey stuff, and that's where Stähe (Stähe was actually revamped from the Aeromon stage), Kuryne (sort of a revamp of the dogs from the weaboo stage), Ajan, and similar guys came in. This time I was going to take yet another a new approach to variants, by focusing on habitat types and theming mons and their abilities around their habitat type, with the variants being themed around other habitat types. A major focus of this stage was making mons "realistic"—by this I didn't really mean "exactly like real animals" or even "immediately plausible in the real world" as much as just, you should be able to draw/model them in a completely photorealistic way, consistent with other animals, and no part of them should be so cartoon-stylised you can't figure out how it would "really" look. Accordingly, Stähe for instance lost its featherhands and got bulky pawhands instead.
Habitat type symbols, or as I called them, "attribute globes".Stähe, before and after.
Now, nine years after Aeromon began, I'm rebooting Tenkai one more time, this time as a libre monsterpet game. As I've already described, it will likely be a spinoff of Stablehand, featuring things like hexarts, leijonœrns, and the elusive "Heavenscratch" (a cœlailurus basically, except real), along with some new creatures designed specifically to be unusual and slightly unearthly, such as the Sonata snake. The variant thing is still alive, but I'm thinking of doing it mainly as different Stablehand attributes rather than elements or habitats, and having the monsters actually able to freely shift between the different attribute-forms; habitat types miiiiight maybe come into play too though, I don't know.
Anyway, stay tuned for more updates on "Heavenscratch Beastquest Tenkai", literally nine years in the making.
Oh, I forgot to say this anywhere but I finally figured out how to handle randomised outcomes in Stablehand.
For a long time I'd been debating with myself over whether it was okay to have any of them in the story, and I'd wavered between "yes" and "no" and "only if it doesn't actually affect the story". On one hand, they can be kind of interesting but on the other, they tend to be an absolute pain in most RPGs, and I was not sure a bunch of "save scumming" really belonged in my story format.
Well, I finally have a solution! I've decided that I WILL have them when appropriate, BUT, instead of actually randomising them, I'll do them as visible wedges on a pie showing the different probabilities (probably labelled by shade or something when there's a definite "success" and "failure"), which you can click on to select one. I think this is a pretty good compromise, because while the outcomes are still random for the characters, it eliminates the frustration of trying to re-roll for a good one. (Also, you'll at least know that it's your fault you got the wrong one and not the computer's. :p)
The other cool thing about this is that when you actually know that whoa, this event is really damn improbable! it may give you a different perspective on things. For instance, in a linear story it can be kind of hard to show that yep, character X was really genuinely doing something absolutely insane and really just got lucky, they didn't just succeed because they were that good of a Sue.
(Yeah, I can see Kris (or any Faith character really) ending up with a bunch of these... :p Let's not think about what the failure scenarios will look like right now)
Over the weekend, I'm going to be trying to weed all the unnecessary garbage out of my blog template (I started with a premade one, so there are all kinds of weird things in it) and giving the elements better, more logical names (or even changing the elements themselves sometimes—why are my post headers h3 instead of h1?).
So, if the site layout breaks a few times or looks really weird, that's why. It should be fixed by about Monday, and look basically about the same as it does now. It may even load marginally faster with a bunch of the meaningless filler excised from it.
