Cefen’adiel isn’t technically a city, but an illustrious forest that has seen some tremendous chaos over the years.  The central hub of all the events in Heart of the Forest, this home of many races is technically considered the throne of an elven kingdom that has long watched over it.  Thus, the white citadel in its northeastern reaches is the symbol at the heart of its sigil.

We’ve done things slightly different this time around with the sigils, so you aren’t going to have the metallic and chipped paint versions of the artwork.  We do have the new “tapestry” variety, however.

Stitched onto the fabric, you could see this hanging on the walls of the citadel, or brought along with ambassadors to neighboring realms.

It could also double as a battle standard, though I’m not sure if the elves of the White Citadel would care to carry such a thing into war.

Of course, we also have a more traditional canvas background like we saw in our prior versions.  The variety of colors throughout these different pieces is astounding.

Then we come to my favorite take on the sigils.  I made sure to pester Francois enough to get him on board with version of the sigils that looked like that painted cave look, which for some reason just speaks to me very much.  For some reason, the White Citadel just looks fantastic in this style.

Bonus: I didn’t forget about making the phone screen versions of these sigils either.  If you’re looking to represent the forest in southwestern Daltain, now’s your chance…

Now, as I’ve previously mentioned, we’re just beginning a new set of these sigils.  We have another four on the way throughout the end of this year.  Keep your eyes peeled here, and we’ll have more to show off in the next couple weeks!

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With a couple of great reviews, and more sales for the launch weekend than any of the books I’ve written since As Darkness Falls, this book is what I would consider a pretty big success!

Kelvin has left his country behind. His mentor, the elf Icarus Callatuil, has prepared him for a journey to Draconis, where old allies will be able to better train him for the hardships he is sure to endure in his life. But when he arrives on those distant shores, he discovers that the elves of Cefen’adiel may need him as much as he needs them.

A darkness arises in the forest in southern Daltain, and Tarenda, queen of the elves, decides that a stranger to the lands such as Kelvin can better serve their purposes as an investigator. 

What will Kelvin do when he must trade his training exercises for real dangers?

We’re also running a contest for a Kindle Paperwhite because of how good the book is doing out of the gate. You can find the details for the contest in the book itself—just check out the end of the Table of Contents (though there are also rules on the Tellest Facebook).

For now though, head over and pick up my newest book. Check out Heart of the Forest on Amazon today!

The post Heart of the Forest Has Released! appeared first on Tellest.

Today, we’re going to begin showing off the finalized covers of our new properties.  In addition to the five books that are serving as sequels, we’ve also got three books that are starting their own storylines.  One of these is a brand new character, but the others star an established character at various points in his life.  We’re going to take a look at one of those two now, so buckle in!

Heart of the Forest stars a younger Steel Tip than what we’ve seen in the Child of the Stars series.  This book—a novelization of an unreleased game—demonstrates the secret prince’s first foray onto mainland Draconis.

Leo started us off with a lot more green than we typically see, except for what we had of Awake.

After establishing a few things, Leo puts a tighter emphasis on some of our characters.

Heart of the Forest feels like a classic fantasy.  There’s a narrative that plays very well into a videogame, and it feels a bit simpler and more concise.  That’s not to say that there won’t be surprises, but it’ll be a book that I think any fantasy reader will be able to get into.

There’s a little more panache put into place in this third iteration of the cover.  You can see much more clearly here that Heart of the Forest has a lot of focus on characters of different races.  We are getting into this a little more in this second set of books, but nothing expresses it so much as this novel.  Leo was up to the task, giving us goblins, werebears, gnolls, lagano and humans.

And here you have our finished take on the piece.  The front cover is more refined, and certain characters have been added.  We lost the lagano that we had in there, but things just felt a little too cluttered. We think it was for the best, but rest assured, the book is going to be jam packed full of more races than you typically get in a Tellest book. It’s going to be a fun little adventure, and I can’t wait to show you more as we draw closer to the release of Heart of the Forest in early 2018!

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As many of you know, last month was November, which for a lot of people means not shaving your mustaches and beards.  For some writers, it means one hectic 30 days of trying to reach a goal that might seem impossible: 50,000 words.  For some people, NaNoWriMo is a breeze.  For me, I knew it was going to take some special attention.  I did away with my notebook for this particular adventure, and just wrote everything on the computer.  My goal was 1667 words per day—I met them most days, surpassed them on a couple of days and missed out entirely one or two days because of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and other things.

I knew that I couldn’t do it by myself.  Though the story had been brewing in my head for years (more on that later), it had been part of a different medium.  I needed a little push to think of it as a real story in the Tellest universe.

That’s where RedPear came in.  While I wasn’t ready to commit 100% to it being a novel, I wanted a cover for this story.  She agreed to give me an interim cover, which, when it’s completed, will inform the final cover that we’ll likely get from Leo if he’s up for it.  But first, we started with some sketches.

These were both ones that we ultimately passed on.  Even though I love all the things that RedPear does, we could only choose one, and we ended up with this one:

After that, it was only a matter of fleshing it out.

It’s amazing how much of a difference RedPear can make with just the lineart/sketch phase of her work.  She did a really cool job letting me know where we were going with the final piece.

After that, RedPear did some nice coloring, giving our ranger those verdant greens he’s known for.  She also did some foreground and background work to make the piece pop even more.

All of that work culminated with the final variation, where Steel Tip aims at the foreground, ready to protect the forest of Cefen’adiel.

So what’s Heart of the Forest about?  It’s the novelization of a game that I’ve been working on for a while.  You may have seen the sprites from our earlier attempts at putting it all together.  If nothing else, this is going to make the story in that game all the more impressive.

While I was successful in “winning” NaNoWriMo, this story still has a long way to go—20 chapters are so, actually.  But it’s my aim to make sure that a new chapter is written every week for it, and able to be seen on our Patreon for the uberfans of Tellest!

The post Art – Heart of the Forest Cover by RedPear appeared first on Tellest.

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!

The post Where is the Heart of the Forest appeared first on Tellest.

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!

The post Black Furnace Games appeared first on Tellest.

There are still plenty of things going on behind the scenes, and I don’t want anyone to be left out.

One of the things that we are going to start on in the next few weeks is the arrangement to have the audiobooks begin.  We’re starting to small, with the Tales of Tellest, first and foremost – they’re up to snuff, and smaller morsels for potential producers to get their hands dirty with.  We’re actually auditioning Mageborn presently, and hope to bring you news on that front in the next couple of days or so.

Hopefully, once we have the Tales of Tellest properties properly narrated, we’ll have The Bindings of Fate ready to produce as well – following those rewrites we’ve mentioned before.  If the audiobooks sell well enough, we’ll be able to slip right into the bigger, chunkier novels (and give our narrators a decent amount of work)!

We’re also still chugging along with Tellest’s first game property. Chris and I have been tackling new things each month, and on our priority list for July is an interface that will really pop when the game is ready for release.  These are just mockups, but I think they’re really putting us in the right direction.

You can see we also used some of the previous art we’ve had the privilege of receiving from Paul and Joman in the past.  While it looks great in this little project, those are just placeholder for now.  There’s a good chance we’ll have original art in its place in the final form, most likely from Chris.

Tellest is coming along faster every day, and we have a wonderful audience to thank for it.  I really do appreciate all the opportunities you’ve given me, and am happy to continue showing it!

Cheers,

Mike

The post Back from Otherworld appeared first on Tellest.

One of the things that I would love to do is make sure my interviews are moving forward at a decent pace.  I’ve had a couple of great authors lined up for a while now, but life seems to be getting in the way a little lately.

Last Friday, my grandfather, Arthur passed away at 98 years old.  You obviously expect the end to be near at that point, but it still came as a big surprise to us.  I’ve also been dealing with health problems of my own.  Mine aren’t too serious – just the kind of nuisances that can sap your creativity and productivity.  Since the weekend following Easter, I’ve been having stomach issues that have been unexplained, and I’ve been going from doctor’s appointment to doctor’s appointment, from lab work to CAT scan, and it’s all just been very taxing.  To round out everything, yesterday I was admitted to the hospital for a new emergency (again, nothing life threatening).  I’m the proud new owner of a kidney stone.  So on top of everything else over the next few days, I’m also going to be heavily medicated.

I’d like to apologize first to the people I was supposed to be interviewing.  It was in my mind that I was going to be able to hammer these out week after week, and I’m being shown firsthand that sometimes its impossible to stick to schedule.  So with that in mind, I’d also like to apologize to the readers who come to this site expecting scheduled content that sometimes goes awry.

That’s not to say that I’m going to leave you empty-handed.  Even though the interview schedules took a detour, some other things are right on schedule.

Here’s another sneak peek at Heart of the Forest:

As you can see, we’ve got the map of our game there.  It’s got a gorgeous hand drawn feel to it, and it very ably puts our story into full effect.

And of course, we can’t have that map without an avatar for Steel Tip.

Keep checking back for more updates on the game, as well as the return of those interviews, starting with one featuring J.S. Morin next week!

Cheers!

-Mike

The post Life’s Little Detours appeared first on Tellest.

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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