NaNoWriMo Riding the Dragon Week 3

So my vacation started this week and I made a lot more progress. Ellen and her friends graduated from college, Jason is working for the Sherriff's Department, and Ellen is starting her own fashion business working with the other changelings to make purses, swimwear, and knits(cait sith love yarn and mermaids have aquatic interests). However, just as the core group is getting their act together, the rest of the city has begun to fall apart as the werewolves and wizards go into all out public war. Oh and we had a strange interlude where the dragon took on human form and we got a visit from the ghosts of Alistair and Tom.

That sums up the progress so far, back to work for me. Don't forget to play the beta version of 7th Moon the RPG at 7thMoon.co

NaNoWriMo Riding the Dragon Week 2

I have very little time to take a break from writing my book because I'm behind, but fortunately, my vacation starts next week, so I might get caught up. I am not going to waste time talking about the election, I may get back to that after NaNoWriMo when I have time, but I'm figuring I may just give up the blog, I'll just power through this month and we'll see where we are in December.

This week I dealt with Ellen's birthday which was not happy because it was the morning after a big fight with Nathan...a really big fight, epic even. Ellen spends most of her day taking care of the new changelings in town, which is kind of funny, then ends on a creepy note. Now I'm working on funerals for the Alpha Werewolf and the Archmagus. The werewolves and the wizards are not gettign along very well and tensions will continue to rise.

 I kind of lost time on Wednesday because my mind was distracted, and unfortunately it was my only day off, so yeah, this is all I got. So, that's all for this week. Last week I made my pinio abot Trup pretty well known, it's not worth rehashing, I know everybody either already agrees with me or they refuse to change their minds, but lettign my feelings out here is just a waste of time right now, so I'm going to enjy the therapy of writing and playing Mobius Final Fantasy which I will probably be blogging about in December.

NaNoWriMo Riding the Dragon Week 1, 7th Moon the RPG, Trump and the election

As you can guess from the title I'm squeezing in a lot this week, and yet, I really need to get this over with quickly because I need to get back to writing Riding the Dragon, the final book in the Magic of Rochester Trilogy. So far I'm only on chapter two and we're resolving what should have been the final confrontation between Ellen and Nathan. The enchantment that kept them on peaceful terms has expired and the fight has begun, but rather than settle the conflict in one final battle, new problems emerge setting up for the most challenging year of Ellen's life, but since I'm still in the processof writing, that's all I can say right now. Well, I guess I'll also say that Alpha Wolf Tom and Archmagus Alistair die leaving Jason and Ralph to step up to leadership, but it's even more complicated than that because they appear to die at the hands of the opposite faction, which may mean war...

Speaking of conflict among leadership, the election is this week and I am terrified we could possibly end up with Trump as president. I don't normally get political, I usually deal with entertainment, so instead of getting all political, I'm going to go over some entertainment info that happens to be relevant to the Republican candidate that is, unfortunately Donald Trump. Donald Trump had a show called the Apprentice, which, when it started, was a good show. The economy had just recently taken a sharp downturn, and when Donald Trump, one of the most famously rich people, famous for being rich, proposed that he would hire an apprentice to work for him in a reality competition, this was a big deal. Jobs of any kind were hard to come by, so this was a great opportunity, especially when the job is a chance to get in with the wealthiest company in America. The idea was that about a dozen people would do a day's work in a variey of different jobs, and the worst one would get fired each week until the very best would remain to get the prize. The best season, in my opinion, was marketed as street smarts vs book smarts. At first Trump favored people with business degrees who fit the position Trump was hiring for on paper, but this season, half of the contestant/applicants were people who had gone straight into the workforce and clawed their way up to the top without the academic prerequisites. What was most impressive about this season was that despite expectations, the college graduates did not sweep the competition, but rather the two teams remained neck and neck to the very end. It proved the show's premise, that anybody could make it. One scene stood out to me, early on, the street smarts team won their event and got rewarded with a dinner with Trump at an exclusive wine cellar, and one of the contestants dropped the F-bomb describing how awesome it was, to which Donald replied that he thought such language was unbecoming. At the time, this led me to believe Donald Trump was a respecable businessman worthy of respect. Then came Celebrity Apprentice. Celebrity editions are ratings grabs for floundering game shows and Jeopardy and Family Feud are about the only shows that seem to be able to work with it without destorying their integrity and ultimately becoming self-parodies that only buy a year or two before they get canceled anyway. The worst part about the celebrity edition of any game show is that the basic premise of the genre is that regular people get to win money and expensive prizes that they would never normally get, but celebrities don't need any of that because they are already rich, so they play for charities, and in turn, nobody wants to totally make fools of celebrities who are nice enough to donate to charity and shortchange the needy, so the whole thing becomes ridiculously easy, emphasis on ridiculous. Celebrity Apprentice took the show from giving ordinary people extraordinary opportunities to making us realize how inept actors are a everyday jobs and that they get overpaid for their total lack of skill. The worst part is the show never went back to it's original format, which I feel was important because it means that the endeavor that started out helping regular joes get ahead in business became about fame, particularly Trump's fame. Also, I'd like to point out how he clearly doesn't have the same level of public restraint he had when he told one of his employees not to swear. I dont know if I misread that moment and gave him more credit than he deserved, or if his time working on TV with Mark Burnett corrupted an otherwise decent man, or at least a man who could keep a decent public face. In any case, I just hope my readers take some of this into consideration, does Trump actually care about America or is this just the next step in a scheme of self-promotion?

Speakign of self-promotion, 7th Moon the RPG is up at 7thMoon.co not 7thMoon.com, that belongs to someone else and is unrelated to my project. Right now the game is online and apparently using my laptop as a server, which means it will only work when I have my computer on. The good news is that I will have it on to write for NaNoWriMo for most of the month and I can guarantee it will be up every Saturday night from midnight to 3AM while I'm live tweeting with Toonami, the bad news is I have to work during the day until my vacation starts November 16. I should be able to keep it up all day through about 10-11PM November 30, and also Wednesday and weekends starting between 9-10AM. Otherwise I can't promise the server will be up before 5PM. I am working on another solution, either an alternate server or republishing it as a downloadable game that can be played offline. Before I go that far, I want to beta test and debug any issues, so please bear with me, play the game when you can and leave comments about issues.

Remember to vote, if you live in Greece, NY I will be voting at the Methodist Church on Maiden Lane which is also a Pokestop and Pokegym, so I'm going to hang around after voting to drop three lures and fight at the gym for an hour and a half while the lures run their course, so feel free to chase pokemon and vote.

7th Moon RPG

I've been working hard on this and I'm too tired to talk about it, so rather than waste time describing it, how about you just play the beta and tell me what you think.

It's on my new website, 7thMoon.co and you can cut straight to the game here.

Enjoy.

7th Moon RPG update #1

I know I said I'd take break while working on the game but I needed a break from working on the game and felt like sharing, As it turns out making the elements was easy enough, but figuring out how the events actually work is harder. The maps were easy enough, I've got Japan as the overworld, and a really good version of the Shrine of the Golden Dragon, which is one of the pictures I'll show later. There's a dungeon generator that helped me deal with some more difficut areas I wasn't sure I was going to be able to map out. The characters were the easiest of all, I knew what they needed to be and put it together. Right now there are six playable characters, they can all equip armor, but Kichiku and Douji can't use weapons and only Hidariude can use accesories while only Keisei can use head gear. Hidarude and Keisei's extra equipment adjust their stats appropriately enough for character development, but because of Kichiku and Douji's equipment restrictions, their base stats are adjusted to increase at a faster rate. The characters are pretty balanced I think, it's just a matter of balancing the game around them for a good experience. Right now the trick is figuring out how to put in the story which is proving dfficult because a good wad occurs in just one place and the system is set up to add events by location, which means I need to figure out how to place a series of about five different scenes all in one location with a system that will only let me show one scene. I'm sure I'll figure this one out, there has to be a way to make this work. Until then here's some preview scenes.

RPG Maker

After the convention last week I went to Steam to get Undrtale and found RPG Maker MV on sale and downloaded that to make 7th Moon into an RPG. This has proved so addictive I may have to suspend the blog for time until I'm done with it. In fact, I'm writing this on my family's computer while I wait for my laptop with the software to update, otherwise I may not be taking the time for this at all.

Some may think RPG Maker is too primitive to create a decent game, but that's what makes it fun to me. I love old school RPGs and the graphics were a part of it. The graphics may have been the worst of their time, but I feel it forced them to make up for it with mechanics and story. I feel so strongly I actually hated FF7 when it first came out just because of the polygon graphics, I felt like they sold out. Indeed, many fans notice quality has been shaky with the series ever since, and I believe it's because graphics got better and more effort when to making it look good than play good.I have since forgiven Square Enix and embraced FF7, but I still love old school RPGs and their super deformed midget sprites, and making mine for my main characters with the character generator in RPG Maker and knowing what they will look like when I'm done.

Okay I'm afraid that's all I have time or patience for, hopefully next time I will be presenting you with 7th Moon the RPG!

Star Trek fan films

Roc Con was fun,getting off to a great start with Vic Mignogna walking by my table and signing my copy of Broly the legendary Super Saiyan, and I purchased a katana for a decent price, and that was before it actually got going. Then I was playing Pokemon Yellow and finally beat it using Ash's Team. But I digress I need to get on to a more pressing issue, Star Trek Fan Films.

Vic presented "Embrace the Wind" episode 7 of Star Trek Continues, his fan tribute to the classic series. The episode, which he describes as "topical", is about appointing a new captain to an unmanned ship and it's between Spock and a female named Garret. The question driving the episode is whether the federation is ready for a female captain and it's pretty easy to tell that Garret represents Hilary Clinton. Kirk is rather diplomatic in his support for the female captain, but he is driven by the selfish motivation of keeping Spock on his ship instead of going elsewhere, while Spock actually experiences the same motivation and everybody seems to support Garret until Kirk discovers that she may have a skeleton in her closet that makes her unsuitable and has nothing to do with her gender. It's a tense courtroom drama and I don't want to give away the ending so I highly recommend looking it up and watching it yourself.

Afterward Vic had a Q&A session with a moment where he had some trouble regarding how CBS is handling this property. They have rather strict guidelines mainly that nobody can make money off of Star Trek but them. Vic has been content to work within these guidelines, but some other fans haven't been as cooperative and things have gotten harder. I found out from another artist who had done promo work for another fan project that this other project was the root of the problem. We had a conversation about it and I realized CBS really needs to handle Star Trek fan films the same way Amazon has handled Kindle Worlds. I've talked about Kindle Worlds before so I'll skip to how it fits in here; CBS should start a website or alternate channel (YouTube, Netflix, something like Crackle) that airs these fan films. Just let CBS review everything for suitable content and distribute it on their channel and fans can pick which ones they like. The whole thing could be covered with ads for canon Star Trek works and other similar CBS properties, and if anything proves to be popular enough to be profitable, CBS can split the money with the fans who actually made the fan film. A model like this seems to be working for Amazon, and if CBS were smart they would try this. I don't know if anybody else is doing anything like this, but I think it would be a smart move for CBS. It seems like everybody has a website, but not everybody has worthwhile content and TV network websites can be among the worst. Having truly original content like this would be a great way for CBS to stand out and fans would love to know their work could be approved as at least semi-canon.

Live long and prosper!