CrazyHoundGameDesign

  This week's World Building chapter is about the structure, scale and layout of the Great Ark. Following the first few chapters where I thought about the history and purpose of my fictional flying castle, and the antagonists of my fictional world, the Demons and Beasts.  After setting the scene for the existence of the Great Ark, I decided to explore the structure in more detail, setting boundaries for how big it was or how the different parts of it were organised. Now I could have decided to make it massive, 100+ floors, each floor 100 km wide, or 10 km tall.  While making it "bigger", or more expansive, might have given a lot of flexibility in telling any number, or types, of stories in my fictional world, I want to be able to build games set in that world.  This means that I can't just make it infinitely large because I would never be able to build it.  Even the source of the idea behind the flying castle, Aincrad from Sword Art Online has 100 floors and eac...

  Over the last few weeks, I've noticed I might have actually bitten off more than I can chew with the variety of things I want to consistently work on.  Between an unpredictable day job and needing to take time to live as well, squeezing everything in can be a challenge. As a result, while I was wanting to try and be methodical in my approach to progressing and improving my skills, I have not really been able to find the time to actually practice the so called fundamentals.  However, I think I am improving in some areas as I continue to try and create my drawings.  The PenUp challenges have been interesting exercises to try to complete, and while last weeks picture was too late for the submission deadline, I think the resulting picture was better than the vast majority of things I've done before.  The next one is well under way, and with my aim to try to improve my drawing of people in an anime or manga style, coming up with little scenarios for scenes that can...

  The Antagonists In my last World Building post I tried to explain how by asking and answering questions about an imagined thing, you can help add depth and purpose to whatever is being created. In my own example, the world of Goroesgi, a floating castle with multiple levels and environments, the first couple of chapters were aimed at giving the floating castle a purpose and reason to exist.  By asking myself questions about the floating castle, and answering them, the expansion of the idea created a world for the castle to exist in, and a reason for it to exist in the first place. Included in this expansion was an acknowledgement of the existence of different factions that shaped the history of the imagined world and allowed a reason for the existence of the floating castle. To be able to expand the ideas and suggestions raised from the first chapters, the same process of asking questions and answering them allows the world building to continue.  However, instead of foc...

  Background I do not generally see myself as an AI user or necessarily as an advocate of the current implementations of AI systems, however I dream of a day where personal AI assistants exist that are light on hardware requirements, responsive to user interactions in a way that feels natural, but also still have the capacity to respond to complex queries and requests. The theory I include here has been logically checked with Google Search’s Gemini AI, so it might be incomplete or otherwise ineffective, but I have no way of checking or testing my theory myself and would highly appreciate some feedback from experienced AI developers as to how much potential there is in my theory. I understand that my theory might not actually hold weight and that Gemini’s responses to my queries might be incorrect, or influenced by the positive reinforcement that can be built into AI models to encourage engagement. The outlined theory is kept at a high level to compress the primary ideas and th...

  Theme: Gummy (as in the style of sweet/confectionary) I would like to be able to say that I was able to make and enter my picture into the challenge on the app, and I know this post is a bit late as I was planning on making it yesterday evening, but "finishing" off my picture to as much as I could do took me until 4 am this morning. Without any further explanation, here is what I was able to create on the theme of Gummy. The idea for this was picture came from a desire to want to extend the theme to include drawing a person, and aiming for the anime style.  On the one hand I think it works for the most part, on the other, I still feel it looks novice.  From drawing this I learned several areas that definitely need to be improved.  As for the idea and framing, I think it mostly works, but shading, body proportions, perspective and lighting all need some work. Working on this picture over the last 2 weeks has also taught me how long it can take to really create the k...

  In my first post in this series I talked about the way I think about building a world and how I think about expanding it from an initial idea into an actual fictional world. With the whole reason for this series being to share how I go about creating a fictional world, I didn't think it would be fair for me to explain my process and just leave it that. So, using my recent project as an example, I plan to share the world I've been creating through this blog series. This post and other future posts will include chapters from the document I have been using to record my thoughts on my fictional world to hopefully illustrate how, by starting with a single idea, I'm working to expand on it to create a world and all that being a world implies. My hope in creating my world is to create a resource, and a setting, that I can use for any number of creative projects.  Also, by setting projects in my fictional world, I hope to be able to create games and stories set in that world that...

  This week I've learned a couple of things and realised a few others about where I am with my art and where I would like to get to.  In the last week I haven't really finished anything I can share, but I have done a few things. So to start with what I've been up to with art, after getting the majority of my new blog headers finished, I noticed that a new PenUp challenge has gone live.  The challenge this time around is "Gummies", as in the gummy sweets we likely all enjoyed growing up.  When I was thinking about what to draw, I had just finished watching more YouTube videos discussing how to actually improve, when I decided I would like to be able to draw an image of a girl being fed by gummy bears standing on each others shoulders to reach up to her.  This idea would allow me to practice drawing a person, and the idea is progressing, but I am seriously noticing my shortcomings when it comes to drawing people, and they're all the normal problems; proportions,...