We’re going to start off today’s post with some gnoll warriors.

In the Tellest universe, gnolls are pretty hardy and dangerous.  They don’t feature too much in too many of the earlier stories, but gnolls are having a Tellest renaissance lately, as they showed up in Aaron Canton’s Blood in the Desert (which featured Rayas Vhirr from Quantum Quest), as well as an early Aaron Canton story.  Another gnoll features prominently in the upcoming Quantum Quest novelization.  We’ve also seen them in the Dragonspeaker series.  Gnolls are about to make a bigger play in the Tellest universe, as a treaty has been in the works between Raleigh and Warus lately that will connect the two countries.  Now, can you imagine rough and tumble gnolls like the guys above traipsing through Atalatha?

Now, for a complete change of pace, let’s look at some pastel-colored lagano clerics.  We’ve also seen our fair share of lagano over the years, mostly from projects that Aaron Canton has worked on.  I’ve had lagano show up as a neutral party who ended up working with the good guys in Heart of the Forest, as well.  The lagano above are clerics in Merge Dungeon, but we also know that some lagano clerics have a wicked side.

Last, but certainly not least, we’re swinging back to some massive warriors.  Sergei developed these powerful rhinotaurs, who can switch out their axes with spiked hammers, and really cause some damage.  Rhinotaurs haven’t really been seen too much in the Tellest universe yet, outside of Quantum Quest.  That all changed, recently, when Aaron Canton took the QQ character Noth Vox, and made him the second leading character in his Halloween tale, Blood in the Desert.

That is all we have as far as generic adventures go in Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon.  But don’t forget, every ten levels in the game, you meet a hero character that’s got a little more guts and gumption.  Starting early next year, we’ll begin showing off hero characters, who have had a nice little glow-up from the card game.  Until then, have a fantastic New Year.  Looking forward to seeing you again soon!

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Let’s start off with the goblins.

Goblins in the Tellest universe are kind of used as the standard bad guy race.  Since orcs ended up slotted with the good guys, it made sense to have another race that could kind of fit that gap.  Goblins, therefore, kind of fill the role there.  We made some goblin warriors for Merge Dungeon, and Sergei gave us a few different things we could play around with, including the weapon type, the wolf pelt, and the loin cloth.

Of course, giving goblins a size promotion meant that we were missing a diminutive race for the “dark” races, and that was where the gremlins came in.  Since they’re a bit on the smaller size, they can hide in the shadows a bit better, so we gave the generic gremlins the thief class.  In this case, our gremlins can wield either a hand crossbow or a deadly dagger, and their outfits, including their cloaks, can change color as needed.

Finally, we’re swinging back the other way, and showing off some giant warriors.  The trolls of Tellest come in a lot of shapes and sizes, but on average, they can be pretty big.  This spiky boy wields ginormous weapons, and his loin cloth can be changed in a few different ways.  The armor color can also change if we need it to.

Well, that’s it for today, but we still have one more set of generic adventurers that I’ll show off before the end of the year (just barely).  After that, we start to look at the named heroes, some who have shown up in Tellest books and short stories!  Stay tuned!

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Well howdy folks!  We’re getting to a point now where Merge Dungeon has been out on Kongregate for over a year at this point.  While I’d like to think the mobile release is still on the horizon, there’s a decent amount of work that we need to do as a team to make sure that it is the best experience it can be.  Part of that relies on time, and part of it relies on budget.  But in the meantime, there’s so much Quantum Quest stuff to show over the next “however long” that I’m fairly certain it will take us well into 2023 if I do something like a three week rotation.  So, with that in mind, let’s start our slightly bunchier first couple of weeks, and take a look at some of the adventurers you’ll be fighting in the arena, starting with some non-hero characters.

Let’s actually begin with the tiniest of the goodly races, the gnomes.

You’ll see that we have multiple versions of the same characters.  For the “generic” characters, we wanted to have a few different options for color palettes, because we wanted to be able to give the perception that you’re running into multiple different opponents in the arena as you go along.  We therefore stuck to one class for the generics, and ended up with between three and four color swaps.  In later updates, we even went so far as to get weapon or armor swaps as well, which turned out pretty cool.  Our gnomes were clerics, and you’ll see above we had four different options.

Since we’re making our way up in size, why not go with the dwarves next?  Our dwarves were some of our warriors of the generic sets, so we gave them some shining armor across four color palettes.  You’ll notice that the beard colors also change, so that’s something.

We’ll finish off with our mages of this week’s set.  We opted to make our elves our mages since they seemed the most magical of the bunch.  You can see that Sergei gave us a lot to work with here.  The runic writing changes color, as well as the outfit, the amulet, and the staff.  Lots of stuff going on here!

That’s it for our first little showcase.  I’ll actually have more for you just before Halloween, where we see another sizable set of non-hero characters from the game, spanning some of our more colorful races.  Stay tuned!

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It’s been a pretty long time since we talked Quantum Quest.  Just six months ago we funded the game, and of course, it’s available to purchase now as well.

One of the things that you won’t be able to get from that link is a special exclusive set of adventurers that you can only get from us directly at conventions (or back when the kickstarter funded).  Today, we’ll show you the 18 Old World Legends that added a little pizzazz to our first ever tabletop game.

As you’ll see, each of the Old World Legends characters are heroes of myths, fairy tales and legends from Earth.  How they managed to cross over to the living dungeon is mere speculation for now, but they make for great allies.  Each of them has an ability of sorts, making them very valuable.  Our first adventurer is the one and only Aladdin, complete with the genie who grants him wishes.  That wish, in our game, is limited to determining who starts the game, but that’s only because of how small our real estate is on these cards!

Hailing from Greek mythology, Arachne leans into the whole spiders and their webs thing.  She can really make it a pain for other player parties if she lands alongside them, but only if she’s lucky.

One of my favorites, Blackbeard has his flaming beard and everything in this rendition.  Since he’s a pirate, we wanted to lean on a little bit of thieving skills, so if he lands on another player party, he can steal a mana from them if he rolls well.

Probably my favorite art from the set, Chiron gives a one-time mana draw, and has a decent health pool to lean on.

Dhanvantari is extra good at the heals.  He gets a bonus negate damage token if a player should be lucky enough to draw him.

The Lord of the Underworld, Hades, represents by having the power of life and death in his hands.  His ability can be pretty game-changing if used correctly.

On the other hand, the most powerful warrior we’ve seen thus far, Hercules has enough health to take on any of the gods and stand a fighting chance.

Heading over to Egypt, we see Isis here as one of the healthiest clerics we’ve had, and she has the ability to drain her own health to heal her allies.

She’s squishy, but Lilith is a powerful cleric.  She makes mage rooms more attainable, so if you can coordinate with a mage, you get a huge boost to productivity.

Showing off our first Norse god, we have the Trickster Loki, who can take the form of another adventurer when he’s drawn.

Medusa was one of our two kickstarter-backer-voted adventurers.  We leaned on her as a healer more than a warrior, and we implied that she used her petrification magic to heal while losing a turn.

Here’s another one everyone should know.  Merlin makes his Quantum Quest debut and has some interesting mobility that can help you make an attempt at a chamber you want to purchase, or avoid the ones you don’t.

Our Roman goddess, Minerva knows that pain equals wisdom, and is sometimes willing to take damage to inflate her player’s mana pool.

Morrigan is another of my favorites.  She has a pretty cool power, though she’s as squishy as the other magi in this set.

Odin was the other adventurer that was voted to the top of our list during our Kickstarter.  He’s got a unique talent that so far only affects a few of the chambers across our sets, but that could change in time.  Who knows, Odin could be a game-breaker five or six expansions from now!

Robin Hood is another one that everyone should know.  The Prince of Thieves is all about balance, which is a nice rubberband effect for a player that might be on the losing end of things.

Odin’s very own son and Loki’s brother is yet another of our adventurers from this set.  Thor is all about pushing on when there’s trouble.  He’s good to have in your team if you don’t want to lose any turns.

Last but not least, we have the very giving Zhang Guolao.  He’s a good tank with low health, but if he succumbs to the dangers of the dungeon, the rest of the party get a bonus health.

That’s it for our bonus cards from the Quantum Quest Kickstarter edition.  Remember, you can’t get these online.  We sell them in the exclusive edition at the conventions that we attend, so make sure to keep your eyes peeled to this website for news about the next one we’ll be attending.

If you just can’t wait and you want to get your hands on the standard edition, Quantum Quest is for sale on The Gamecrafter now.

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One of the things that you’ve seen, most likely, is the completed artwork that’s going on the Quantum Quest game box, and what we’ve used for our Kickstarter.  What you have not seen just yet is the steps we took to get there.  Let’s change that today!

Internally, we knew which of our characters from the game set we wanted to feature on the cover the most.  We voted on our favorites, and went from there.  I wanted some cohesion between the Tellest books and the Tellest games, so I reached out to Leo to do banner art that would have felt a lot like a front book cover anyway.

Obviously we had already had the logo in place, thanks to Francois.  Leo also had the benefit of looking at the card art we already had, and the bunch of art we had in place for Alicia.

Here’s something curious, and I hope Leo doesn’t take any offense to me teasing him a little bit.  Every time he takes a character that has red hair, he always makes it bright, fluorescent red.  I wonder if there’s something getting lost in translation between us.

After tweaking the hair, we had our semifinal cover.  It was fantastic, and it remains one of my favorite works that Leo has done thus far.

And here’s your grand finale, with the logo and everything.  I hope you like what you’ve seen, and are eager to see where we go with an eventual expansion!

If you want to check out the game on Kickstarter, just click this link.  Hope you like what you see!

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Over the past few months, Tellest has expanded beyond what I think I could have imagined.  With that exponential growth came tons of art, new stories and the beginnings of game development.  That last part is the part I want to talk about today.

I have always wanted to make games, since I was a little kid.  When people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them I wanted to be a “software engineer” – I guess I didn’t realize that the term “game developer” existed at that point in time.

In fact, as early as 2007, I was already “designing” the first game in the Tellest franchise – a tower defense game that explained a little bit of the Stephen Caista (brother to Zachariah) story, while simultaneously explaining how Blacklehn failed to push through the Sentinel Pass to Raleigh.

Now here’s the part that stinks.  Though I’ve always considered myself reasonably intelligent (however erroneous that may be), the concept of reading and writing code has always eluded me.  It may be that I just haven’t given myself enough practice, but with Tellest squarely under my belt, I think its safe to say that if I don’t win the lottery, or the books don’t immediately begin selling tens of thousands of copies each month, I won’t have the time to work on learning code in the near future.

So, with that in mind, I always knew that I was going to have to employ some other method to get my games out to folks.  I thought I could use a heavily GUI-based game design program, like Game-Maker or Multimedia Fusion 2, but I would have been severely underestimating my ability to program at all.  Seriously, I’ve tried and failed, and unless I want it to be a perpetual hobby with no real payoff, I understood the need to move on.

I could not do it by myself – I knew that I needed another hand (or two – or seven) to get projects like these complete.  After I purchased MMF2, I briefly worked on a game called Devour – you can see the concept art from three years ago – with a developer from Tasmania. That fell through, unfortunately.

But when the Tellest Kickstarter plowed through its goal, I had renewed faith in myself and in my little universe.  I reached out to Chris Crawford, and if you’ve been keeping up with us, you can see that we have some very appealing mockups in place.

Now, having art is one thing.  It’s a fantastic thing, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle.  If we want to make Heart of the Forest the best it can be, we obviously need a good programmer.  And here’s where we’ve met our first big snag.  Programmers are not cheap.  I found the one that I want to work with, and he is interested in the project, but we’ve agreed to wait until we have a little more capital in place before we hire him.  It just makes more sense to hire him in bulk rather than for little odds and ends here and there, where he could fall out of the groove that he’s in.

So what does this mean for Heart of the Forest?  It means that we’re going to have to wait a little longer for it to push into full gear.  I’m always the kind of person who wants to make the greatest version of something that I can – that’s why I’ve rewritten the first Tellest book over and over and over.  And that means doing this the right way. We’ll still have some art assets to throw up from time to time, but the charge is going to take place just a little bit further in the future.

In the meantime, I’ll be working on some of my behind the scenes stuff – storylines that need to be in place in the game for everything to truly make sense.  At the end of the day, we want Heart of the Forest to be a game that’s good enough to see on store shelves, and that means its got to deliver on all fronts.

Thank you for being so awesome and letting me talk a little bit about Heart of the Forest!  I hope we make the wait worth it for you!

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For some reason that is honestly beyond me, the name Black Furnace Games has always been in my mind if I were to have a development company of my own.  As of right now, that company is one person who is subcontracting to other people, but hey, this logo right here is going to be what you see as you’re loading Heart of the Forest (and all the other games I plan on creating)!

It’s such a simple thing, but I really dig the logo, and I hope you do, too!

Heart of the Forest is chugging along in the background.  We’re done our initial phase, which is cobbling together images for mockups. Now we’re moving onto our next phase of development, where we keep our eyes peeled for a Unity programmer.  We’ll keep you apprised of the details in the weeks and months to come!

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This past week or two, that kind of fell on me, too.  I’ve been in and out of doctor’s offices, trying to figure out what has been screwing up my stomach.  About two weeks ago, I started experiencing some nausea that wouldn’t go away, and it developed into what felt like persistent heartburn and cramps/bloating.  As best we can tell, I am not getting my period.

The Doctor at first suspected ulcers, which I still think are the culprit. But now I’m going in for more scans and lab work and its all just very exhausting.

Needless to say, it’s kind of kept me out of the loop as far as the interview processes go.  It’s not a total loss though, because the subject of the latest review wasn’t ready either.  So we’ll move on and try to figure out the next route.

Because of this, I’m going to make sure I don’t rely on a set schedule for interviews.  It’s too unpredictable, and I don’t want people to be let down when the inevitable does happen, and we have a delay one week or the other.

Instead, what I’m going to try to do is turn Wednesdays into kind of a catch-all day.  While Mondays are typically my blog days, when I have something interesting to talk about for Tellest, the middle of the week usually sees some awesome happenings in all of fantasy.  I can talk about the latest X-Men Easter Egg from the Amazing Spiderman 2.  We can chat Game of Thrones.  There’s a lot to dive into.

Today, we have a special treat.  I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been working on trying to develop the first Tellest game, and we’ve come further than ever with production.  It’s still, as I’ve said multiple times, in what I’d call the pipe-dream phase, but seeing it come this far has been quite liberating.

Here, for the first time ever to the public, is the first mockup image to Heart of the Forest:

Art by Chris Crawford.

As you can see, what we’re trying to do is make a bubble shooter with some beautiful graphics, fun mechanics, and, what I can best bring to the table, an awesome storyline.  I’m always very careful to talk about what’s going on, but we’re obviously looking at an iOS release as one of our platforms.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be bringing you more information on Heart of the Forest.  It’ll be kind of like a development diary.  As of right now, it’s being worked on by me, and an awesome jack of all trades, Chris Crawford.  We’ve been poking around, looking for programmers and musicians to add to the team, but we’ll save that for another post.

Hope that little taste has you interested for more.  I know it only made me more anxious to see one of my other brain babies take shape!

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