World of Agrobathe

As I was going over the major races created for the RPG, I decided one that was missing are the Fae or faeries. They will be known as the Fae and will live mostly in Elwood with the Elves and Goblins. I’ve also been working on improving my cartography skills to improve my overall world map. Right now it is an interesting, yet sad little map created in Fractal Mapper. Wanting to keep the land masses that I currently have, I think I will be rending out a huge image of the world and then digitally paint the rest of the map in Corel Photo-Paint suite 5.

So this project has fallen by the way side and the PHP game version has been placed on hold, along with a 3D version of the game. I’ve decided to flesh out the world more and create maps, characters, locations, and stories in prepartion for a novel series based in Agrobathe. I’ve also renewed my efforts in painting/drawing fantasy recently and plan to attempt to illustrate the world of Agrobathe and its inhabitants.

While researching the worldbuilding topic, I came across a very interesting blog that recommended using a personal wiki to take notes and flesh out your world. So I accessed the server and installed WikiMedia (same wiki that www.wikipedia.org uses). After a bit of configuration I locked out new users and the ability to edit the pages and now have an online private wiki from which I have beyond to worldbuild Agrobathe in ernest.

I’ve begun organizing the world into categories and topics such are Magic system, Religions, Cultures, Towns/Cities, Nations/Kingdoms, Land masses, Planetary information such as hours of the day, days of the week, weeks in a month, and months in a year. With Agrobathe having two moons, I’m working this fact into the Magic system on the planet and how it effects the tides and waves, which effects ocean travel in a way not seen here in Earth. There is now Nogard the City of Dragons and an entire kingdom made up of full size dragons that rule their area of the world as a loose knit culture.

Regarding characters, I programmed a character generator over the weekend that creates random characters and names them based off of gender and race. The name database is going to be so huge I’m still entering data for it and I have 9 races worth of names to come up with. At current I estimate when done the database will contain around 50,000 first and last names. Not all races having last names, this number could had been much higher. Stats wise I going over the Dungeons & Dragons system with the added attribute for Luck. I have yet t0 code the psychological engine, however, I have plans to which will randomly generate wants, needs, passions, traiths, and flaws for each of the random characters.

Not a lot to show to the public yet, but for world creation it will really helping things come along and I love the wiki factor which encourages me to fill in the blanks and add more content, which has become a daily process. Once I have enough of the world fleshed out I will start my progress on writing the first fantasy novel, which I hope to get published or just self-publish myself. After that, depending on sales, I’d like to turn it into a graphic novel and then a screenplay. Somewhere in that process a game should start to form as well. So little time for just one person to do all the creating, writing, graphics, and music planned for the world which is Agrobathe.

Coming up with new Fantasy names was a bit harder than I initially thought it would be. But I have nailed down the names of all to continent names. Who lives and control where and about 50 names for villages, towns, and cities to scatter around the map. For the Aquanauts, I’m thinking of just having one large underwater city. But may have a few small villages scattered on the near by island for them too. So far the world of Agrobathe has the common lot you expect to see: Dragons, Humans, Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, Goblins. This along with a few races created just for Agrobathe: Aquanauts, Mylars, Dylars. That translates fish people who can live both in the ocean and on land, but prefer the sea to dry land. Cat headed people who might resemble something you would see out of Ancient Egypt. And dog headed people who might remind you of Anubis from Ancient Egypt as well. Once I have the names in place this will help with the formation of lands and world history will begin.

Eventually got around to having enough money to get updated music composing software. Now, I’ll have the chance to start composing music for both the game and an Agrobathe fantasy theme CD album. I’ll be taking inspiration from the various sites around Agrobathe. Feels good to be working on music again.

That’s right, after much internal debate, I’ve decided to put the PHP Agrobathe game on hold in favor of bringing the game to you instead as a Stand-Alone 3D RPG for Win/Mac. I will be using the Torque 3D game engine to design and create the game. Will most likely be looking for freelance artist and alpha testers later. If you’re interested leave a comment on this post with contact information. My New Year’s resolution for 2010 is to get Agrobathe out as a 3D game.

Have been world building, but not blogging about. Just a short update that I’m going back over the map of the World of Agrobathe and starting to shape and form the lands. So far the major continents each have a race majority belonging to Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Dylars (Dog headed people), Mylars (Cat headed people), Aquanauts (Underwater Sea People), and a great vast wastland known only as Land of Dragons. Recently purchased book to help me plot out a more realistic world called –A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture. It has a good section on mapping your world. Not happy with the default graphics that come with Fractal Mapper, I have started to make my own. Still not as pretty as I would like the map to be, but its a start in the right direction. Once I have the mountains, forests, hills, grasslands, jungles, swamps, glaciers, and deserts of the world mapped out, I plan to start laying down rivers, lakes, ponds and inland seas. So far the only plotted city I have so far is for Bora located on the Human continent. I suppose I should come up with names for the various continents and Land of Dragons is a bit too descriptive.

I’ve begun work on the movie set for an upcoming Webisode based in the world of Agrobathe. It will feature a Wizard puppet, who introduces shorts films in his Wizard’s tower. I haven’t decided where in the world of Agrobathe this Wizard will reside, but the short films will cover various places. For the films themselves I plan to use a wide array of styles: stop-motion animation, CGI animation, live action, and puppets. Each short will be a self-contained story.

To get a behind the scenes look at how pre-production on the movie set is going you can see a few castle walls below that I built and faced with EPS Foam, which I plan to carve/paint into stone castle walls.

I will post more once I have started the carving/painting process. This is the worldbuilding I enjoy the most, where you actual build a place set in your world.

I took most of October off and now that the Holidays are here, I’ve found a bit more time to work on the Game Master section of the game. At the moment I’m coding the interface that will allow GMs to create pages and give them options for creating their adventures. As always I’m improving the code and design as I go along. Some of my original game designs were not fully fleshed out, which is good because I’ve changed a bit now. I’m also debating if I should just stick with Storybase (Choose Your Own Adventure) type gameplay or eventually create a 2D Graphical action type gameplay as well. For now I’m just focused on the Story-based gameplay.

Provided here is an early 3D look at the world to be known as Agrobathe. This is the place in which the novels, movies, and game will live. The land masses are semi-set with 3 large continents, 3 ice islands, a few large islands in between and a large assortment of arpegigo islands making of the rest of the land masses.

This is only a starting, undiscovered islands may later be introduced but I’m working through what I have now. At the moment, I’m going back over the map in detail with Fractal Mapper. I’m working on adding rivers and streams and detailing the land masses a bit more with mountains, breaches, forests, hills, etc. The first two Human cities I plan to place are the fishing town ‘Bora’ and the mountain village of ‘Gildenhide’. These will be placed far apart, Bora will be within the borders of the main Human kingdom and Gildenhide hide will reside within a neutral area. But it’s remoteness will make it act more as a free city-state.

With the map underway, work has begun on the creation of nations, kingdoms, and how the rest of the inhabitants see their world. Once I have more details and maybe add a few names on the main map, I’ll post a full display of the entire map. Till then.. I continue to build the world of Agrobathe.

Town of Bora

Every place has a start and for the World of Agrobathe, that place is the small fishing town of “Bora”. This was the first town created for the World of Agrobathe. It is a small coastal town where the main economy is fishing. Everything a starting adventurer should need can be found here. The primary race is human, but there is also a good mix of other races of fishermen and sailors who walk the dirt roads.

The map itself was created in Photoshop CS as part of a tutorial on how to make fantasy maps from scratch. Since this was my first one and I was creating a lot of tools for future maps, it took about 12 hours to make over a 3 day period. With some of the instant art out there today, it may not look like much, but a lot of time went into its creation.

The next town I plan to create is the dwarven town of “Gildenhide”.

Why no map of the world you may wonder? Oh, I have created many maps over and over and just can not get it right so I throw it all out and keep starting over. I’m using software known as Fractal Mapper. With it I will be able to map out the entire world of Agrobathe and then zoom down into detail and generate region maps on the fly. I plan to incorporate these into the game and later to be used as maps for novels that will be based in this world. Once the world map is finished, I’ll place the towns that I already have around the various areas and build back-story and history as to why these places exist and how they came to be.