The first thing you might think could be what we thought.  He kind of looks like he’s all about Easter.  He had a very Christianity Orthodox look, and while we don’t have a problem with that, we were worried that it sent the wrong message, so we tweaked things going forward.

You’re not going to step completely away from the way that priests traditionally look, but this version that you’ll see below looks like they could be at least a bit non-denominational, which helps to let people unfamiliar with the art piece feel a little more inclined to enjoy it.  Right now, it looks almost like it could be a statue, were it not for the green crystal, but even then, who knows, it could be!

Our first splash of color makes things look that much cooler.  There is a lot that the color change added to the commission, and it absolutely breathes life here.  That’s important, because that is what Animus represents.  Now, we did mention Easter earlier, and the sort of pastel color reminded us of that a little too much, so we adjusted things for that in our final iteration.

And here you have it!  There weren’t too many things that we had to do to wrap this up, but you’ll notice the robes look like more of a deeper lilac, and we made it so that the green glow doesn’t spill over quite as powerfully as it did before.  The character looks great though, and we’re very excited to introduce him to the TowerSphere project.

This is not the last TowerSphere item that Sergei made for us, and over the next months, you’ll see more beginning to grace the Tellest website.  We hope to see you here then when that happens!

The post Character Art – Priest of Animus appeared first on Tellest.

While we’ve been working on some of the legendary characters from Tellest who just so happen to play TowerSphere, there are a gamut of other players and contenders who are a little less renowned.  They might find their chance to shine a little bit later, but it just so happens that now they’re not quite able to—usually—contend with the heroes of Tellest.  Of course, a good team leader can bring out the best in people, so never discount one of these contenders who have no name beyond their description.

Today’s contender is the Peritas Pikeman.  This bit of art gave us the opportunity to finally see the Peritas sigil applied to a character, and Sergei made it look awesome.  You don’t quite see it in the black and white sketch, but it certainly begins to show up later.  Instead, Sergei demonstrates where he aims to go with this character: someone with extra reach, who can attack other players and sphere-holders from afar.

With a tiny smidge more detail, you can see that the shape of things mostly stayed the same, but you can begin to see the details of where things will fit a bit better.  I love the sketch layer, but this slight detail shift helps to bring the concept to bear much more.

Sergei tossed us the detailed version next, and though we started with black and white, you could still see tremendous layers of polish placed on the Peritas Pikeman.  Before, everything just seemed like a promise of what could be created.  But here, Sergei absolutely delivers.  And this is without the color added to the mix!

Once we did have the color dropped down onto the picture, everything popped that much more.  While you could see faint traces of the Peritas serpent earlier, it really stands out here.  It all came together very nicely, and just like that, Sergei established himself as another great artist to have on hand for our newest project!

He even gave us an awesome background to throw our pikeman into, and it even had me thinking of stories that I could inject him into.  He’s not that far away from where Kelvin Drakos is learning how to be the Silver Serpent, after all…

That will wrap us up for today, but Sergei had a few other TowerSphere characters that he created for us, so we’ll be poking around at them in the weeks and months to come!

The post Character Concept Art – Peritas Pikeman appeared first on Tellest.

Below, you’ll see the first few sketches that we had Sergei work up for us.

He gave us a lot of options, but we ended up going for the one you’ll see below, which saw magic and effects practically pop off the screen.  Our four characters, Adelia, Dar Tania, Ahna, and Twee, represent some headlining characters from our distinct universes, but they also show up together here in a way that says that you can create such majesty by expanding your mind and your fantasy tapestry.

Here you can see just a bit more magic and tweaks to the formula to make it pop even more.  Side note: I love the juxtaposition of Adelia and Dar Tania side by side like that.  Watching fire and ice work together like that is so cool!

Each of us has spent time creating incredible worlds, and Sergei helped us bring this image to life in a spectacular way.  And this was just the tip of the iceberg, as we’ve expanded on the Persistent Fantasy Worldbuilders group somewhat considerably since its inception.  We team up on projects, offer insights on what works for us and what doesn’t, and more.  I’m looking forward to even more opportunities to collaborate with these tremendous people in the future, and can’t wait to show off new collaborations to follow!

The post Specialty Art – Persistent Fantasy Worldbuilders appeared first on Tellest.

We’ve got a nice collection of characters in this week’s feature who not only show up in Quantum Quest and Merge Dungeon, but also short stories, novelizations, and full-on Tellest novels.  In fact, our first character, Mordek Thunderfury, was in Son of the Storm.  Mordek was one of our first tests with Sergei for the new style, and he blew us away with the new look!  Mordek is a dwarf from clan Thunderfury who has magical acuity.  It’s not that common, so a lot of people are impressed with the dwarven mage’s power and his wisdom.

Moving on, we have the gremlin, Cravat Keeno.  He’s got a decidedly darker look here in Merge Dungeon.  He ended up being a cutesy character in the card game, and it may be that his appearance there (as well as his demeanor in the Kickstarter video) informed my take on him in the upcoming novelization of Quantum Quest.  Sergei went a different way with him here, and as we sort of treat Quantum Quest as a multiverse of sorts, we’re content with letting a more sinister Cravat show up in Merge Dungeon.

Lannis Jarl is the sole hero among this set who has not shown up in another Tellest property.  We had our first rhinotaur show up in the 2021 Halloween story, Blood in the Desert, but that was Noth Vox.  Lannis is from the same city as Noth, but not quite the crusader as his kinsman.  Lannis is a stout protector regardless, however, leaving him quite prepared to face whatever dangers are present in the living dungeon.

Callieflynn Xaxos is a rarity in that she’s an elf on her own.  Typically, the elves of Tellest lean on each other for community, having a shared past that is tumultuous.  Then again, Callieflynn is a relatively young elven maiden, and she’s one with somewhat darker powers, so maybe it was just a matter of time before she was driven from the familiar.  She showed up in Aaron Canton’s story, The Elf of Black Iron Lake.

We’re saving our most famous character for last.  Among this first set, Alicia Mane is understandably the best known, thanks to her appearances in three Tellest novels (with a fourth, the Quantum Quest novelization, on the way).  Alicia shows up in the original Tellest trilogy, where she begins to learn her powers.  Here, however, in the Living Dungeon, we get a more world-weary Alicia who knows what it takes to survive.  Sergei crushed it when he gave our noblewoman her upgrade.

Well, that is it for our first look at Merge Dungeon for 2022.  As I mentioned before, we have a lot of stuff to show off over the next year, so be on the lookout every few weeks for new characters from the series!

The post Merge Dungeon Art – Arena Heroes, First Set appeared first on Tellest.

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!

The post Merge Dungeon Art – Arena Dwarves, Elves, and Gnomes appeared first on Tellest.

So, we start off with a little green guy.  These things are hungry to merge, so they have a tiny little mouth, and almost look to have the face to go with it.

If you merge two small green slimes together, you’ll produce their natural upgrade, a medium green slime.  This one starts to show off some extra sludge appendages, a bigger mouth, and some cool little spots.

Once you merge two of the medium green slimes together, you end up with this big guy, who looks even more horrifying.  He’s taller and ready to grow.  Only with this large green slime, when you merge them, you don’t stay green…

Enter the small yellow goo.  Alchemy reactions mean that the slimes don’t remain in one form throughout their upgrade cycle.  This little guy is the start of something new, and he barely even has a face to speak of.

Of course, adding two of them together opens up their eyes a little bit.  They almost look frightened in this form, but that’s potentially just because they don’t have the size benefits that those big green ones had.

That of course changes when you get to the biggest yellow goo variety.  Not so frightened anymore, they’re ready to cause some damage.  Fun fact: we went back and forth about whether to call this set a yellow mustard.

Doesn’t this red blob kind of look like those candy dots you used to eat when you were a kid?  It makes me hungry just looking at it.

That sort of changes when it starts looking back at you though.  The medium red blob doesn’t want anything to do with your shenanigans.

And the large red blob wants you kids off his lawn!  Seriously, I’d rather not have to see this guy in my nightmares.

Here’s a good look at our first nine slimes all one one board.  You could get all nine of these relatively early on in the game, but can you imagine the work it takes to get to all 27 slimes?  Especially when it takes 10 seconds per monster crate?  It’ll be worth it though, I’m sure you’ll agree.  Our monsters are adorable and fun!

We’ll be back in a few weeks for round two of the slime chamber.  We have a lot more to show in our second set, including Sergei’s sketches for the monsters.  Should be a lot of fun!

The post Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon – Slime Time One appeared first on Tellest.

First off, let’s start by saying that sometimes, when you’re working with people from all over the world, you can run into issues where there are miscommunications.  We had some issues with that regarding our first set of backgrounds:

If you’ll notice, a lot of these are pretty tall compared to the last one.  The plains were the only one from this set that we could really use, because the adventurers wouldn’t scale properly to these for the sake of the cards.  They’d work out great for a different genre of a game.  A point and click adventure game would look wonderful, for instance.

In any case, we had to go on tweaking things to make them work out in a similar style to the original Quantum Quest.

Here’s another, closer look at the plains.

Next up, we have a revamped beach.

After that, let’s check out the desert.

How about a castle interior?  That’s a longer one, so that we had more options to show for our adventurers.

After that, we have a crystal cave.

And my personal favorite from the bunch, the mines.

So, each of our adventurers gets one of those snazzy backgrounds to choose from going forward, in addition to the ones that we have from the first set.  We already have ideas for the second expansion, if we are lucky enough to produce it.

For now, that wraps us up with all the things we wanted to show off about Quantum Quest’s first expansion.  Keep your eye peeled here as we learn more about the game, and begin preparing for a launch sometime in the next year or so!

The post Quantum Quest Expansion Backgrounds appeared first on Tellest.

That’s as diverse a line-up as any of the other ones I think you’ve seen in the Tellest sprites we’ve shown off so far.  We’ve got skinny sickly ones, somewhat attractive ones, and monstrous, “gonna-eat-you-up” ones.  But what makes ’em all tick?

Gaul Vash is a sickly, sniveling creature, who would be considered ugly by any race.  But with all that said, he still adds value to those around him.  As a mage from Kyramas, he’s prepared himself for sacrifice for years, and he’s just looking for the perfect reason.  Perhaps the mysterious dungeon is the one he’s been searching for.

Pash Ert, meanwhile, is on the opposite end of the spectrum, as far as trolls are concerned.  With pseudo-elven features, she’s a very attractive person.  Unfortunately, just as Gaul gives his life to others, Pash takes what she needs.  There is a natural law that she alters to meet her needs: when Pash is near others, she will heal faster, but others won’t heal at all.  She is a survivor from Skar’dell, after all.

Our third and final troll champion hails from Grim’s Hold.  Quirl Rockfist fulfills the stereotype of what a troll would look like. Long tusks and green, scaly skin might make her look unattractive to the fairer races of Tellest, but to her own race, she’s a tremendous beauty.  She’s tough as nails to boot, and would make a good ally to anyone she could prove her loyalty to.

Well, there you have it folks.  That’s the final race group shot that we have for our upcoming card game.  Now, don’t despair.  We still have a lot of stuff left to show off.  Serge did an amazing job with dungeon chambers and backgrounds as well.  We can’t wait to show them off!

The post Sprite Arts – Trolls appeared first on Tellest.

We’re wrapping up with two more villainous races, and the first one up is the rhinotaur:

Now, it’s important to note that rhinotaurs are technically not so evil as some of the other races that they align with.  Among the so-called bad guys, only the gremlins and the lagano are more easy-going than the rhinotaurs.  It’s just that these poor saps are generally really dumb, and easy to manipulate.

Side note: did you know that we have a good and evil quotient that we use to determine whether or not a race in Tellest is predetermined to be willing to work with another race?  Now you know!

Lannis is as classic as you can get as far as the rhinotaurs go.  He comes from the more well-to do city of Theria, and is employed as a guard.  Typically, these fellows are very reserved and tend to stay by themselves in the wilderness.  If they dwell with others in a larger pack, it usually numbers in an area less than a dozen.  Lannis, meanwhile, hangs out in a city with thousands of other rhinotaurs.

Noth happens to be one of those other rhinotaurs from the city of Theria.  He works in service to Cerox, the god of thunder among his people.  As a paladin in the order, he is meant to uphold the values of his people and the will of his deity.  So, when the whispers of Cerox told him to travel to the mysterious dungeon, he knew it was time to take up his axe and sword and go prove his faith.

Raia is our first rhinotaur from another locale.  Whereas Theria is a bustling city, Jecraskia is a more reserved landmark, meant for pilgrims and faith militant.  Those who travel there don’t often stay long, but Raia, an aspiring mage, finds her way back there from time to time.  She is good-hearted, and filled with wisdom, despite the limitations of her people.

Our final rhinotaur adventurer is Wrexa.  You’ve heard of a bull in a china shop, right?  Can you imagine a rhino in one?  In all honesty, Wrexa is a fairly competent thief.  When the going gets tough, though, she finds herself causing more trouble than she solves.  She’s not from either of the aforementioned places as the other rhinotaurs.  She comes from the slummier city of Ceros.

That about wraps up our look at the rhinotaur of Tellest and our mystery card game.  We’ve got one last set of adventure sprites coming your way soon, so keep an eye out!

The post Sprite Arts – Rhinotaur appeared first on Tellest.

We’ve already showed you the dwarves and the elves, both considered to be among the goodly races in not only Tellest but fantasy in general.  Today, we’re going to show you a dingier, less trusted race of the world.  Today, we’re showing you the gnolls.

How’s that for an assortment of different kinds of gnolls?  Just like the elves and dwarves, there’s not much that these five together besides their race.  It’s probably more apparent with them than with the others, because their attire and demeanor even seems different here and there.  So, what’s their deal?

Our first gnoll—both in this list, and that we had designed—goes by the name of Wherricks.  Wherrics is kind of unique in that he’s been stuck in my mind palace for about two years now.  I’ve written a story that contains him, but it hasn’t seen anyone’s eyes but mine. What I can tell you about him is that, while he looks like the quintessential gnoll here, he’s done a fair share of working with other races as well.

Rayas Vhirr is a gnoll with a more understandable look, I believe, than the rest of her comrades here.  She’s got a very tribal look, and that’s most likely because she comes from the deserts of Saveon. Hyenas inspired the gnolls, so why not?

Perth, on the other hand, is a lot more of a reserved variation of her race.  A bit smaller and not exactly packing heat, she goes against what you’d think of when you think of a gnoll. She’s willing to sacrifice for her friends, even at the cost of her life.

Here comes my favorite of the bunch.  Garreth Quarl is a bit of a treasure hunter—which already makes him jump up in my list.  Well… alright, maybe treasure hunter is too strong a word.  Perhaps crypt robber is more appropriate.  Either way, this is my guy.  You can also get a little bit of a Simon Belmont flavor from him, which I’m totally into.

And here’s our last one for the gnolls.  Feneece Clawgaze, Poor thing looks emaciated, doesn’t she?  But you should know this.  Looks can be deceiving.  She is just about the opposite of the healer, Perth. Crossing her could be the worst thing you ever do.

And here you have the whole gang.  Just like with the others, you’d probably find some similarities with this group, but they aren’t exactly a tight-knit group.

Next time, we’ll bring you a friendly bunch… but we’re not telling you who just yet!

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