some mystery children

I’m not saying who they are. You have to wait for the game in December to find out!

what makes a good photo (game-wise)

I’ve been converting photos into characters, and some are easier to convert than others. But not always for the reasons you might think. The above photos seemed like they would cause problems at first: there are two photos, which is good, but in one the person is wearing glasses, and in the other she’s pulling a face. However, that doesn’t matter so much – I am sure the ancient Greek gods knew about lenses, and maybe some gods wore glasses for fashion reasons? And the face happens to fit a particular character who could shout at one point in the story, so I can use them both. (Normally I only use one photo per character, because converting them takes too long, but this one was easy to do.)

The best thing about this photo is it’s taken in daylight, so everything is very clear and not grainy, and no shadows.

This other picture was the opposite: at first it seemed like it would be easy, but it ended up taking ages, and that’s why the result looks a bit odd.

The person had again sent two photos, which is good (more photos means makes it easier for me), and one of them had a very interesting expression – the one I used. Plus the eyes in the photo were very clear, so I thought this would come out looking really good.  But then I noticed that the top of the head was missing!

I tried just drawing hair on, but that looked silly. I tried adding hair or crowns from other pictures, but they either weren’t at the right angle or did not fit that expression.

So I tried using the second photo, but it was much less interesting. Plus the hair was very dark and against a dark background, under artificial light, so there wasn’t enough color information to enhance.  The low light also meant that after processing a lot of subtle details were lost and the face just looked flat and wrong. The first photo looked much better.

Another problem with the good photo was that it had strong shadows, They made it look even better, but the minimalist look of this game works best without shadows. I managed to get rid of the shadows without losing the detail, but it took a while.

The real problem was still the missing hair. I finally found some that would fit, but it looks very untidy. Then I started looking for a suitable body. The untidy hair plus the expression meant that only one body really fit – the one you see. It’s not as dramatic as Zeus, or Apollo, or Neptune, but you have to remember that the Greeks had all kinds of gods. And it was the best I could do with the artificial hair! Actually I quite like it though – it has character. I do want every god to look unique.

In summary: the best photos are:

1. the whole head (or even better the whole body)
2. in daylight
3. with either a choice of photos, or one photo that’s exactly how you want to look.

If you don’t have any photos like that, still send them in anyway, I can always do something with them, but sometimes I need to be creative!

Well now you know.

PS thanks for all those who have sent in photos so far. It really helps to give the characters more personality.

Prometheus bound

This is Prometheus, punished by Zeus for stealing fire from heaven to give to mankind. I should probably change the left leg (his right). The line looks right before the chains re added, but after the chains it just looks odd.

The funny thing is, when I finished Prometheus’ face I found, completely by accident, that he looked exactly like a real person I know. The trouble is, this person is the complete opposite of Prometheus in almost every way. I keep trying to forget that

The god Apollo (edited)

This is another character from Genesis of the Gods, based on photos kindly sent in by a visitor to the site. I’m not making final decisions about who is who until November 14th (the closing date for submitting photos) but when I saw this gentleman I immediately thought Apollo! (Or maybe Poseidon, since one of the photos looks like it’s taken in the sea.)

Keep the photos coming, folks!

Edit: the arm and neck looked wrong, so this is version 3 (version 1 was the short legs version that was only online for about five minutes)

Eros, version 2

Now with less weird face, better proportioned arms, and better tailoring.

Eros firing arrows

An animation from Genesis of the Gods.  Eros is looking worried because he spends most of the game fighting for his life.

Hmmm… maybe I should make his right arm a little shorter.

Conflict, and why I prefer Scooby Doo to Jane Austen

Caius raised the important point of Peri being in conflict.  Skip this post if philosophy and literary theory bores you!

There will still be conflict

In the new faster stories (starting with Caesar) Peri will be usually part of the story (e.g. as the Fool in King Lear or a townsperson in Julius Caesar)and will comment on the story. She will not usually have any separate subplot of her own. Does that mean she will have less conflict?

I think she will have just as much conflict as the main character, because these bit part people are usually the people who suffer the results of the hero’s actions and mistakes. E.g. the whole country suffers when Lear or Caesar take a wrong turn. But the emphasis will be on the main story, since that (a) is the best story, and (b) is what new users expect. I won’t be devising extra problems as with GOG. In GOG, Peri has her own specific Peri-centered plot/subplot, but in future stories she will be mainly concerned with the plot of the main story. This should also make continuity easier, so it matters less which order people play in. Although the first three stories can be played in any order, it really makes most sense if people start with Les Miserables and finish with GOG. Future stories will makes equal sense in any order. The first three stories just give the back story for why Peri and co are hanging around.

You will still get to know Peri

We will still learn more about the everyday life of an angel – I enjoy adding that stuff – but it will generally happen as gentle asides, and not angsty ticking-time-bomb moments.

I don’t like creating conflict

I don’t like creating conflicts in stories. Because to do it well is extremely difficult: most conflicts are either entirely negative (e.g. most wars) or easily solved in more productive ways (e.g. everything else). I prefer cooperation to conflict.

Don’t get me wrong, ALL stories have conflict, but the best ones do it in a very clever way. Enter The Story will be focused on the conflict in each classic novel, and any other conflicts will naturally evolve in subtle ways. I will not consciously inject fake conflict. Instead I will make the kind of game I would buy.

Even comedy can have good conflicts

Even apparently shallow comedies can have great conflict. Here’s one of my favorite comedies: Moby Duck: one of the Badtime Bedtime Books. On the surface it’s about a giant duck terrorizing the world. But that’s not the real conflict (because giant ducks don’t exist).

The real conflict is that a world DOES exist where crazy stuff could happen! That’s what satire is about – pointing out the very real conflicts that exist in society. The story takes it to absurd proportions, but the underlying conflict is real: (1) people can do anything if we try, so why don’t we fix the world? (2) good intentions and hard work can lead to disaster, (3) people (like the policeman in the story) really can miss the obvious, and (4) it’s a lonely and dangerous life to be the only person who notices; etc.

Another conflict inherent in the Badtime Bedtime Books is that “other people know stuff I don’t.” The books are aimed at children who feel they ought to at least know the basic concepts of classic novels, and they educate the kids through comedy. Moby Duck has all the essentials of Moby Dick but without the fat. And let’s face it, we’re all ignorant, we can all benefit from this kind of compressed education.

Gentle non-violent action = good conflicts

I love action stories written between the Victorian times and the 1960s. Back then people knew what REAL danger was like. And look at the stories they wrote, what do we see? Guns were used only occasionally, people were optimistic, it was generally low tech. Even when they had star ships they were low-tech star ships. The conflicts in those books were powerful because they were real. They were written by and read by people who knew how conflict really works. I’m thinking of books like Sherlock Holmes (the conflict often involved death and the class system) or early science fiction or Boys’ Own style adventures (like the early Dan Dare for example).

Examples of bad conflicts (warning: a bit of politics and snobbery ahead)

In contrast, modern westerners seldom have direct experience of real conflict – we live in a safe and gentle age. Even soldiers are statistically unlikely to be killed, and some even command robot drones from their armchairs. In the real world the most dangerous thing we have seen in a generation is three thousand people dying in 9/11. Well in previous generations that many people would die in every large city every year simply of malnutrition, disease, or real wars. (In the Third World those numbers still apply of course. More people die of starvation every three hours than died in 9/11, but poor people apparently don’t count. )

Since we know nothing of real conflict our entertainment tends to be of the video game variety – carry huge guns and kill everything. In the real world that is not only not funny, it’s so absurd as to be uninteresting. In the real world technology is seldom the answer, things go wrong, a single bullet change everything, being poor is worse than being shot, etc. But to people who don’t have the experience or haven’t thought it through, absurd fake conflict feels exciting.

You don’t have to play violent video games to see absurd fake conflict. In a world where millions are starving any story that involves conflict over one person dying or someone’s personal relationships is pretty uninteresting to me. And even if we forget the millions starving, these books are still pretty idiotic.

Good conflict is very hard to write

Even the greatest classics sometimes fail to have convincing conflict. For example, yesterday I listened to a radio production of E.M.Forster’s “Howards’ End.“

The story involves rich people and poor people, lies and immorality and hypocrisy and friendship and death. All the classic conflicts. But those conflictsa are petty and meaningless because they are overshadowed by a REAL conflict that they sometimes talk about but do nothing to address: the class system. They pretend to address it but in the end embrace it as the foundation of their happiness.

I wanted to shout at the radio, “stop messing about with your trivial conflicts, and sit down and think for a moment! All your problems are caused by the class system! You will never have peace or happiness until you face the real problem!” But no, instead they stumble from predictable crisis to predictable crisis, making zero progress. Then it’s all wrapped up in a deus ex machina at the end: the crucible character conveniently dies, killed by the bad guy who is then conveniently sent to prison and everyone lives happily ever after. You call that conflict? They completely avoided the real conflict then it magically disappeared! I call that stupidity (not seeing the real problem) and nonsense (solving it with lucky accidents).

And that is one of literature’s BETTER stories. I don’t for a minute think that any conflict I invent for Peri would be any better. So I’ll stick to adapting the classics, and will not add my own contrived conflicts. I will only add stuff I personally enjoy, and leave uncovering the true conflict as an exercise for the reader.

Politics and Prejudice (Jane Austen fans should skip this bit)

Jane Austen’s books are the same. All the silly, shallow conflicts (e.g. will person X marry person Y) are irrelevent and contrived compared with the vast unexamined conflict. Why, exactly does Mr Rochester or Mr Darcy have an income of ten thousand pounds a year? Because the peasants on “his” estates are being bled dry, that’s why! Every time a Jane Austen heroine has a happy life it’s at the expense of the misery of a thousand other women. I find Jane Austen’s books deeply unpleasant and her conflicts vacuous for that reason. I will probably adapt one at some point, because maybe I’m wrong and besides, I’m interested in what other people find interesting, but I’ll race through it fairly quickly.

(For the record my interest in workers is purely capitalistic – a landed gentry is fundamentally inefficient and inhibits wealth creation compared with a meritocracy.)

Examples of good conflict

I am not saying that all classic conflicts are bad. I am saying that the real conflicts are often below the surface. Moby Duck is an example of this. Shakespeare is another example. So is Les Miserables – it deals with real issues of poverty, justice, wealth creation and judgment. Dante’s Divine Comedy is another example: religion is clearly very powerful, so in what ways is it true? How is it or can it be a force for good? What is good? Hesiod’s Theogony takes religious questions to their foundations: where do gods come from? What is our connection with them? Which if any, are worthy of worship? And if so, how?

Obviously different people get different things from different stories. A story that bores me may be a life-changer to someone else. Stories that I enjoy are often boring or shallow to others. That’s another reason for sticking with the classics – they tend to entertain on many different levels.

Summary

1. I do not want to create contrived conflict. Either I will find it stupid nonsense or other people will find it dull.

2. I will rely on the classics, because these things have passed the test of time.

3. My personal interest is in packing in as many new ideas as possible. I am not convinced that long taking more time over a book makes the ideas any better.

4. Even light hearted stories can have very deep conflict.

Conclusion

My heart is with Classics Illustrated meets the Badtime Bedtime Books, not with what is laughingly called “hard hitting drama”. I’m following my heart.

PS

Sorry, but I can’t resist another example to illustrate my point. Today’s example of a Great Comicbook Moment is from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.  It’s supposed to be a great moment because we care about the character and she is in real danger. Well that’s one view. Another view is that no horror story ever makes sense when you examine it, and this story was popular for one reason only – adolescent boys can look at near naked bodies and say it’s meaningful art.

If you want your horror to have REAL conflict and deep issues the I recommend classic Scooby Doo (the old stories with fake ghosts, not the forgettable new “milk the franchise” version). This is why old Scooby Doo had real depth and thus outlasted the other cartoons:

1. family loyalty – the gang, where people who would normally have nothing in common can work in happy harmony (the conservative, the hippy, the intellectual, the bimbo, and the dog)
2. deep, deep friendship – Scoob and Shaggy.
3. rationalism – the ghosts are all fake.The conflict in Scooby Doo is not between the ghosts and the gang (there is no tension – we know who’s going to win). The conflict is between the real world, where community, friendship and rationalism will save you, and the nonsense world of imaginary fears that fills us with hate and confusion.

If you want Big Themes, if you want deep conflict,  you won’t get better than Scooby Doo. But if you want shallow surface details then E.M. Forster or Jane Austen are O.K. to pass the time.

box shots and other art

I’ve been updating the banners page to say “every three months” instead of “every six months:”

but then I noticed that I didn’t have any box shots for Genesis of the Gods. So I made some. And while I was at it I made box shots for Julius Caesar. And the box shots require the main character to be on the outside, so I spent some time creating Prometheus (Genesis of the Gods)

and Caesar himself.

So here they are.

These, and everything else, can be seen on the banners page.

another god – with a human face!

The face photo was leaning back, so I had to find a leaning back body

Note the head size. A human head is about one seventh the height of the whole body. So the full size head is the correct size. But it doesn’t look god-like. To make a body look more powerful, artists normally shrink the head. See the Hulk for example: his tiny head makes his body look even bigger. What do you think – which picture looks best?

All god bodies now done, just waiting for heads

Actually, I think this head loks pretty darn good already. So when I start adding heads I’ll start with the ugly faces first, before replacing the pretty faces.

I”ll decide what god goes where on November 14th, the deadline for sending in photos.