Harry Potter vs. Harry Dresden

VS.

Alas! I’ve finally finished reading the latest book from my favourite series, White Night of The Dresden Files. It took me several trips to Borders and about RM$50 worth of petrol money to read through all those chapters. Numerous trips, I was surprised the security guard didn’t kick me out for being ABONEY (Always Browsing Never Buying).

Once I get my hand of the Jim Butcher’s real paperback copy then I can start spending extra RM$50 petrol money on either his Codex Alera or maybe Robin Hobb’s latest. I’m getting tired of reading via Wikipedia (sob!).

For those of you without Sci-Fi channel or Torrent (what do you mean ‘what is Torrent?’), you wouldn’t have heard of its TV series either. The Dresden Files series highlights the life of one Harry Dresden, a certified wizard living the life as a Chicago private investigator. He helps innocent normal people fight against the forces of evil and the general public misconception that he does bunny tricks at kids’ birthday parties.

But then he gets involved in all sort of juicy magic mayhem; a vampires’ war, a Summer-Winter faeries conflict, a wizards’ council politics, a Christian knight’s crusade and otherworldly menace dripping ooze in his shoes. He also had to deal with the Chicago police, the undercover mafia, the globe-trotting mercenary, his semi-possessed ex-girlfriends (note plural), his gun-ho apprentice and a partridge in a pear tree.

All he wants is to pay his apartment rent on time, afford insurance for his Volkswagen Beetle, date a nice girl and NOT get shot/burned/thrashed/haunted/booed at every other week. To put it simply, think of it as an alternate Harry Potter, if Harry Potter was born in USA and there’s no clear Voldemort; everybody’s out to get him for two or three reasons.

I found the series long before Harry Potter Book 6, when I wasn’t looking for anything new to read. But MySis’s husband left his books behind after her little family moved to their not-so-new home and I was hooked from Dresden book one.

I liked the similarities between HP and HD, the latter story is much deeper, more adult, more mystery-involved and more wise-ass talking. If you’ve read HD, you can see how often I try to emulate Jim Butcher in my blog entries (hehehe!).

There are an unusual number of similarities between HP and HD stories. Unable to find a Pensive and needing somewhere out of my head to put this (and to spoil your HD reading pleasure so you better stop reading now), I’ve made a comparison list. So if you haven’t read HD, you better stop reading now.

Both are orphans.
Both are wizards.
Both have issues with the narrow-minded body of goverment.
Both have close ties with a family of seven children (and a Molly in each).
Both have a godparent going through prison.
Both have teacher-student issues.
Both have girlfriend issues.
Both are out to protect innocent people from the forces of darkness.
Both are outnumbered, outgunned and underminded.
Both have werewolf friends.
Both have former pretty visions of their never-met parent shattered.
Both have allies ready to fight to the death.
Both are acquainted with a large intelligent cat.
Both use Latin verses.
Both often get bad rap from the press.
Both are used to non-technological environment.
Both have a piece of unwanted evil magic within them that they can't get rid of (yet).
Both get bullied a lot in their earlier childhood.
Both have normal humans acquaintences who just don't like them. Really don't like them.
Both felt betrayed by their idol-teacher at some point even though it was for the best.
Both nearly got killed sometime in their past.
Both knows places to shop for wizard parts.
Both seem to have problems holding on to their wands.
Both are acquianted with a girl with multi-coloured hair.
Both are rescued by a big dog once.
Both knows a big cat who is generally on polite terms with a big dog.
Both have enemies that uses dead people.
Both are responsible for an enchanted sword at some point.
Both have the normal human communities kept in denial.
Both are already doing rescue work before the body of goverment approached them.
Both had a chance to deal with a huge thundering female lizard.
Both had hidden in an accomplice's old family house.
Both had problems with their hair at some point.
Both carry a significant scar-mark at some part of their body.
Both have half-human allies.
Both had problems at some point with an overly-righteous member of the body of goverment.
Both have a smaller-sized magical creature under their service at some point.
Both had said smaller-sized magical creature who liked to dress in odd things.
Both had discussed plot-based mysteries with a disembodied female while taking a bath.
Both had been commented to have their mother's eyes.

Harry Potter may have sailed into the bright sunset of ‘The End’s but Harry Dresden is still going strong at book 9. The author plans to write all the way to Book 20 and a finale trilogy. In full, the author is planning world domination starting by having an entire shelf dedicated only to him in every bookstore.

Hmmmm...

That’s alooooooooot of petrol money to go back and forth between house and bookstore. Maybe I’ll just find a job there instead.

Of Two Ice-Masters

Since school is starting again, I have access to the Internet more often now. The ‘I-have-to-go-to-school’ excuse can now be implemented again, leaving my little brother to do the laundry. Not that I’ve ever did laundry in a long time anyway but house-chores will be house-chores.

In between registering new courses and writing up the game proposal for my thesis project v2.0 (my new supervisor is a phD! I shall dub him ‘Dr. Visor’), I had a few minutes to squeeze a search-and-drool on DeviantArt for this week’s image.

Guess what I found?

This ‘bishounen’ is property of artist Yue-iceseal. You can tell by his link on the image itself so I won’t bother linking to his site address (haha!). Like a lot of the best imaginative artist, Yue-seal attributes this image to a character he envisioned. He used as in a role-play game forum.

This character he drew is an ice wizard and it got me thinking of my own ice-mastery character in my Imaginary-World-Ideas.

In my game project, Unlocking Pandora, Niq Hillshire a character who uses the ice-blades and the ice-flows as his combative and augmentive spells. Per see, he isn’t a full-fledged ice mage; he’s a sword fighter. An ice mage is my other character from an older story, the Wolf and the Wildflower, prologue to my game project.



This is Cedric No-last-name (also by a DeviantArt artist). He’s a covert operative for a mission of life and death (obviously); aka secret agent. Here’s a little game story spoiler.

Sometime between the end of the Wolf and the Wildflower and prior to Unlocking Pandora, Niq and Cedric met and the latter was taught ice spells. Niq was a younger, moodier guy than Cedric. Despite all that, Cedric knew Niq’s potential. He offered Niq a chance to go to the water-magic Region and become a true ice-mage.

But then there was trouble in Niq’s hometown and Niq had to turn Cedric down. The two separated and never crossed paths again... until the events of Unlocking Pandora that is...

Often I wondered if I had written Niq’s fate differently. If Niq Hillshire had taken up Cedric SecretAgent’s offer and became a true ice mage, Yue-iceseal’s picture would have portrayed him best.

Niq Hillshire had always been a lone wolf. A childhood incident had dulled his attachment to other people. He’s a hard-worker and high-achiever since he’s afraid to be dependable on others. If Niq had joined Cedric and ignored the trouble in his hometown, I suppose he’ll be a greater loner, a brilliant but guilt-stricken mage.

And that was a long ago decision. Niq didn’t abandon his family. Along the way, he learned sword fighting an in turn, he created his own ice-mastery spells; the ice-blades. His unique craft would be tested in the events I have plans for in my game project (oooo, hype...).

Better late than... okay, no excuse.

It’s the mental grinding time. I got 3 days including today to submit my assignments and my second thesis application and work up a schedule for next semester AND try not to fail any subjects this time. I’m running out of money as it is. Not that I’ve haven’t been running out of money anyway. Money, money, money. The root of all stomach-aches.

So it’s to my surprise that a week had already passed since I gifted you fellows the eye-candy for your desktop. I could say that I had to rush around the various Image Galleries, Personal Galleries, Hosting Galleries and the Galleries R’ Us sites to look for something you guys might drool over.

But actually, I had a back-up of supplies.

Oleg Karrasev, copyright 2001, from his/her private gallery. I found this in the distant past when I was a member of a writing group that tags other members to continue their stories. It’s still there but since I’m no longer a member, I won’t advertise (I’m a b**ch that way).

But the nature of the writing group had intrigued, thus the idea of surfing for images that would visually inspire to aid in story development. This flower by artist Karrasev (by the way, Google thinks ‘Oleg Karrasev’ is a virus. Heh) was for a story of which a ‘jewel of the forest was the secret to a saviour’s powers’. I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

For my own story of what this image represents... nothing. Nah, I didn’t really have anything to pin it to my Imaginary-World-Ideas. Maybe a piece or two to one of the more magical realms of the World but really, I just post this picture here just to share.

After all, sharing doesn’t cost money and I had time to spare. Well, yeeeeeeah I was suppose to post this image up yesterday but better late than... okay, no excuse.

Now go decorate your desktop or something (hahaha!).

Game Project Update: The Storyline.

Since I had a little time to sit back and think non-stressful thoughts that might aggravate my fever (heh, more aggravating actually), I had time to play some of the 1001-or-so downloaded games I’ve haven’t had the chance to play. On the top of my list was Aveyond. I had always wanted to try it out but only recently I’ve cracked a full-version file out of it.

Aveyond isn’t a new game nor was it made with any high-tech type of game engine. It was made in ye’olde RMXP, released last year by Amaranth Games, a sequel to a previous free-to-download project, Ahriman’s Prophecy.

I’ve played the older, free-to-download game ages and ages ago and though the gameplay was good, the storyline was nothing super, just the average linear concept. But Aveyond was something different. Not patient enough to take the game on the scenic play, I opened the spoiler guide to read the rest of the storyline.

Heh.

Oh, come on. It’s not cheating when I just want to know what things play out. Look, I’m just skimming through the plot puzzles, the NPC facts, the... er, okay, I’m cheating. So might as well get it all out and say that I cheat at a lot of PC games. If the game I’m playing has no cheat codes, I’ll look for a trainer. If I ever had the chance to get a PS3, I’ll buy Gameshark port as well.

All and all, I don’t play games for the gameplay (which is a sin not to enjoy gameplay, a blasphemy should my buddies in GW heard me). Instead, I like games for the storyline.

Cheat codes help me breeze through the game so I won’t have to spend so much time on it, thus enabling me to proceed with other games and more new games in the least amount of time. There’s no shame in being a game whore.

Which brings us back to Aveyond. It’s not the game itself that make me decide to adjust the storyline of my own game project, Unlocking Pandora, but it was the deciding factor. A lot of the better games had been chosen by the public as best-to-play have multiple endings segments. Like the visual novels Tsukihime and Fate Stay Night. Heh, even free Flash Games comes in multiple endings (see my previous entry, Other Age).

My game is divided into 4 chapters; Act I, Act II, Act III and Act IV. Storywise, the entire project is done, right down to the words uttered by aimlessly working NPC (non-playable-characters) in the villages/outpost/seaport/mouldy cave.

But since I wanted to convert it into a more choice-based oriented plot, this is going to take a lot of thinking. Especially since I’ve already cemented halfway through Act I. Fortunately, I don’t think it’ll be anything too dramatic.

Though the game focuses on my female protagonist, there are other characters that will play equally important roles in the plot; thus, deserving of their individual endings. So depending on player choices in certain situation, frequent use of that character in battle and/or tasks and so on and so on, the final Epilogue will be of the most chosen supported character’s ending.

This is going to be a major challenge since I’ve created nine characters (including the protagonist) which mean I’ll have to outline ten endings, an extra as the chief ending. I think I can pull this off from theory to coding. I don’t think it’s going to dramatically prolong the work either.

Ooo, some of the GW-ers is going to squeeze milk-money out of this one. I once proclaimed to the forum boards at large that I’ll never do a multiple-ending type game (due to it’s being an overused concept).

But as this is a case of Classic-Not-Generic, I must bow to the tried-and-true reason. I just wish I didn’t like it so much.

Eccentricity Galore.

The thing about having that empty period between the last class of the semester and the day of the exams (note to self; 22 December at 2pm) is that you suddenly found the freedom to do something you’ve been planning forever to want to do.

Like driving to Borders and read the books for free for hours. Play computer games until your eyes bleed. Or, I don’t know. Get naked. Hide under the bed covers in the middle of the day. Turn the air-conditioning at full blast. Use your-, er, wait, don’t use your imagination.

Instead, feast eyes on this pretty image this week.

Heh, I cheated. I’ve presented two images. Step up two character images of which I’ve found and fell in love with. The first one is from the artist Michelle Chuang for the book, Legend of the Vampire. I found this beautiful work of hers in, yes, CGSociety.

The second is a work titled Winter Wolf by Heise, which you can tell since the artist stamped his name right in the middle of the picture (oh gee, I can only guess why...). His was discovered during a random browsing of DeviantArt.

The What’s-The-Deal-And-Why I liked them is because they both match very perfectly in the Imaginary-World-Ideas I had floating in me for some years. In fact, these two I’ve unofficially chosen as character art for this novella I was working on for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) two years back (failed to complete by the way) called The Wolf and The Wildflower.

The female is character Roberta Warrens, Countess of Knightley. She had humble beginnings as an armourer’s daughter but now lives in a bustling capital city of a magical nation and holds a high position in the echelons of society.

She had worked hard for her position but she holds many secrets; most of them concern her late husband, Earl of Knightley himself. She has much skill in dual-armed combat with her tri-metal swords.

The male character would be the real main character of the story. His name is Cedric, one part mercenary, one part secret servant to the controversial foreigner, Duke of Sagecrest and all other parts soon to be revealed in the story.

He’s trying to secret a package across the border and he needed Lady Knightley’s illegal smuggling operation to do it since he himself as a foreigner was unused to the nation’s environment. He’s really a ice-mage and a political agent to boot.

And I’ll let you fill in the blanks yourself. I will tell you this though; The Wolf and The Wildflower story is the prologue to this project. Maybe once I build enough skill points in ‘Time Management’, I’ll complete the story and post it up here. Oh and this doesn’t mean I’m backing out on next week’s image, no worries.

Just to let you guys know, if I ever do have problems updating this blog for any reason (such as busy, on leave, death in the family, eating pizza...), I'll post this image:



On another note, I have not yet started on composing a story for the December’s Dream image. The week has been either incredibly hectic or absolutely boring. You know... the feeling you get when every mental capability is just too blocked to function properly. Kind of like writer’s block, on the life-sized scale which encompasses your, er, life.

And attitude. I think. Whatever.

I plan to start on it as soon as I’m done working on my assignments, which can take between two days to never. I just have the full complete idea in my head but trying to put it down into a structured composition needs some oiling on the old creativity door in my brain.

I had to have it locked shut for duration of project-making, for a good reason. There a monster in that part of me I need to keep it down; most difficult was during NaNoWriMo last month, which I sadly have to decline participation.

But, hey! Since I could hardly keep things in my own head anyway, what do I know? I’m hiding naked under the bed covers in the middle of the day with the air-con at full blast. Make up your own stories about me then we’ll talk about the eccentricity to exchange in ribbon-wrapped idea boxes.

Game Project: Unlocking Pandora

I’m in one of the most non-productive stages in my life right now, aka Empty Days. Non-productive, yeah but it sure beats the bad days and I’ll be having more of those in the coming weeks. Still, I am thankful for how things had turned out.

For starters, I nearly struck a silver Wira while driving around Kelana Jaya this morning but managed to stop in time. Never saw a partially bald man gone so white before. I left the T-junction quickly, with 5+ witness drivers meters away behind me even though we're all driving at 5km an hour.

It wasn't my fault but I'm not going to waste this blog entry describing in ridiculously detailed scene on how he should have noticed my blinky turn signal, especially since he was on the road the public used to turn left instead of going straight forward. I'm saving it to bored to death the traffic cops.

So instead of committing 3rd-degree murder, I decided to fill a little more of the day's void by building up a bit more of the game project I’m working on, ignoring the fact that I might have better things to do, like kill a cockroach or something.

To get a clearer definition just so you guys can see my pride on how cheap my project it, I’ve rounded up the usual background system and resource checks:

-RPG Maker 2003 (game engine)
-First Seed Material and etc (sprite graphics)
-Monta’s Monsters (monster graphics)
-Moutamsi Music and etc (music midi)
-A1 Free Sound Effects and etc (sound effects... duh...)
-And more etc, etc, etc since I haven’t bother to properly catalogue where I got these from.

Take note I'm writing a copy-and-paste from my old topic in GW gaming community but I'm going to make it as simple as a tourist brochure written in badly-printed Jawi. So if you don't understand, do ask me or, as the Travel and Adventure channel taught us, improvise your brain.

So without further ado... Quickening presents...

Game Systems:
-Menu System and Character Battle System (Action Time Battle).

-Map-based characters' actions such as field shooting and etc...


-Member switching in Character Battle System.


-Class Choosing (There are 3 variations; Offensive, Defensive and Support. As the story procresses, your members will have to choose one out of 2).

Story:
The main heroine is Keea Winston, a student of The Academy who's about to graduate as soon as she gets her thesis done. The magic class she had chosen, Soul Energy, is rare, difficult and mostly useless so she had to travel to a place called Stony Village and study its history and runes with permission from the local experts.

But Keea's presence disturbed a locked secret and her unique aura trapped the guardian spirit into her body. Without the guardian spirit, the imprisoned evil entities started to leak into the forests of the island, awaking all manner of savage and vicious beasts, threatening the population from unknown and long-forgotten nightmares.

Now possessing what is called Fighter Spirit, Keea infused the magical energy with her own and sought to rectify her mistake (and save her own life) by searching for two other guardian spirits in two other sealed chambers before the evil entities reached them.

Her actions though, went not without notice by numerous high profile personalities, such as the Society of Aqera, the Nobility of the neighbouring country Sun Valley, the Circle of Casters in The Academy and also the reclusive agents of the Dark Enchanters.

And even if Keea managed to survive through all that, there's the secret of the spirits themselves...

Characters:

Name: Keea Winston
Role: Female protagonist
Background: She's a final year student of a magic university and she only needs to do one last task to graduate so she could later return to the Academy as a junior lecturer. Yet often of late, she dreams of an unknown golden-haired woman playing a sad tune on a harp. She thinks that one backwater island, home to the ruins of Pearl Temple, holds the answer to this mystery.
Skills: Soul Energy


Name: Jake Langley
Role: Wise old nag
Background: Langley was Keea's first tutor in the craft arts and he remained one of her oldest and dearest friends. His true background, however, is shrouded in mystery, other than he has been travelling around the region for centuries as a freelance consultant and tough bargainer. So far, it is believed that Keea was his only apprentice, a favour to her long-dead father.
Skills: Elemental-infused Soul Energy


Name: Niq Hillshire
Role: Obligatory anti-hero
Background: Niq is the headsman of Stony Village, a growing community that was once filled with outcasts and refugees. He takes his role very seriously and was most protective of anything of value that came out of the Pearl Temple ruins. He is quiet, rebellious and unconventional but without him, Stony Village would have turned into a lawless thieves den instead of the peaceful yet sorely overlooked society it was.
Skills: Ice Flows and Ice Blade


Name: Anita of the Aqiaka Clan
Role: Annoying curious faerie
Background:

Enough said.
Skills: Planthood and Floral Wrath


Name: Montgomery Suayunu
Role: Wiseass
Background: Before he became a mercenary for hire, Monty was a soldier of the Aqeran Sniper Unit and before that, he was a boy raised in a military community on the notorious Aqeran-Sun Valley borders. Constant fighting and battle conflicts gave him a devil-may-care approach to all things that wants to kill him, including his friends. He and Niq are old buddies, despite the wide difference in their personalities.
Skills: Long Range and Metallic Bombs

And also 4 other members yet to be discovered. Oh my!

Some of the main NPCs (Non-Playable Characters):
Mr. Usana: "Knowledge is the most dangerous kind of weapon to give to your foes."
Baba Yaga the Witch: "History never ends. It always comes back either to haunt us or repeat itself."
Princess Regent: "Bribery is the lowest form of begging."
Lord Protector of Aqera: "My duty before my life unless my heart tells me otherwise."
Lord Sagecrest: "My kid is too pretty to date your hero."
Lady Emerson: "Let's face it. The best kinds of trouble are always inherited."
Rilselq: "Dreaming is natural. Not everybody does it but everybody should."
Bernadette: "Sometimes, you gotta come back full circle to start all over again."

Screenshots:







Larger 640*480 pixel Pictures:
http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/9200/unlockingpandora011kd0.png
http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/9476/icedragons01ea3.png
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/8431/temple01road20fixdf4.png

Progress at the Moment: 5% Done
Mood to Work:

So yes, this is a summarised version of the game project I'm working on. I intend for it to be a free-to-download because it's obviously made from an overused game engine (I just need to weak some custom coding) and from a free graphics site. It'll be vulgar of me to sell this since I got so much of it for free. And I'm only vulgar to people I want to cheat money from.

If there's anything I like to waste time other than playing expensive games, it's building cheap ones. Expect this to come sometime exactly one year from now (hey, quality control-lah!).

In the meantime, I got to see to a car that had a surprise attack from a silver Wira and check if the breaks and tyres are still passably safe to, I don't know, maybe to run into another near-crash again.

Introducing Me

In the light of my most recent attempt to achieve numbness of emotions then posting about it in here, I've realize that I have yet to actually introduce myself. Well, since I don't really want to introduce myself, I suppose it's all polite courtesy for my future self when she re-reads all this (I'll be 30 and gray before my time and she'll go "Giirl, you're a pathetic imbecile." Not that I except she could be better than me seeing that I created her.

And in so creating said future woman, let's define current woman. I'm in my early twenties, at the age where I should be maturely able to leave home and go build the nation or something. But I can't . I'm stuck here because I haven't graduated yet and I took the full bachelor degree course instead of doing diploma first and earn a bit of pay.

Along the way, I gained a few 'F's'. My folks think that the stupidity lies in the school. Maybe they won't admit to themselves that their slug-a-woman (wow, sounds like a bad comic book heroine) had actually blown thousands of ringgit in depression.

Woah, did I just said depression? I mean stupidity. Yes, I'm not depressed, I'm just stupid. No I'm not anorexic, I'm just stupid. No I'm not suicidal, I'm jus-... well, you get the idea. Around here, emotional problem means that it's an embarrassment to the family.

Sure we can all say "Oh, she's just having a slight fever. Let's get the Panadol," but the fact reminds that we're a society that abhors emotional problems. It's unstable. It's a weakness and God only knows if any other family member might be suffering from the same thing but had not yet manifested. Not good for the breeding stock of the rich and dato'ed (Dato' is kind of like a Malaysian knighthood, though its value had decreased somewhat for years).

Again, I've said that I don't care what people think about me, but mostly I was referring to people I won't see ever again. Goodbye-Aunties I call them, never around to say hello, just following *Mak to meet, greet and then say goodbye, it was a very nice wedding/function/party/whatever-social-event-please-don't-invite-my-mother-if-you-think-she-might-drag-me-along-again.

I do, however, care a little bit of what people might think of my family. Just a very small bit; Il have to do a CAT scan of my brain if I need to look if it's still there. I try not to expose them to trouble if I have to, especially since I caused it.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that the trouble would disappear. They do, however, have a bad habit of growing to massive proportions. Usually when that happens, I divert their attention to something else until the storm blows over. A cheap and dirty trick but if it works, I don't care.

Next to that, I'm also a slightly appreciative person. Especially about art. Not art as in museum gallery but art as in computer-affiliated cyber galleries. Check my December month's image. It's a nice pretty image which the original I got from CGSociety.
If the original artist knew I'm using this image to enhance my blog, whoopsie then. But it should be not as opposable as the image had been shrunk a lot to fit the blog page so the quality is kind of lest=s dramatic than the original.

I like pretty images. I would look all over the Internet for particularly nice images worthy of decorating my PC Desktop. Sometimes, I write a short story about what I've e found. Expect the one for December sometime around December (duh!). I'm not an artist myself (there's a school horror story in here but I won't bore about it to you. Yet) but you don't have to be a chef to know classy food from fast-food.

But most of all, I like to write. Fantasy fiction mostly, about my magical imaginary world. I have it slightly more structured as time goes along. It's a great way when you can't afford to own a Warcraft account and much faster to zone your head out too. In this cyber community I'm in, they're all cool on making plain vanilla old-school RPG games. Kind of like Final Fantasy before it took to worshiping the 3D religion.

When I'm not wasting my time on building a cheap game one coding line a day, I waste in writing about my imaginary world. I got some of the basics in the right places, mostly the technicality of magic and some minor histories. I've always wanted to write a book since Enid Blyton corrupted my childhood and I still do.

But I have no place for my fiction to get expressed. My mom calls my fictional writings as 'mengarut' or nonsensical. Sufficiently, family support is that very last thing I would ever ask of them when it comes to my most precious thoughts of all. I just don't think I could stand their oh-so-overwhelming concern.

That's what this blog is for, a place for my thoughts. It's true because I said it so and it shall be so (cue God-mode moment here, bear with me). And when it comes to keeping my private thoughts safe, I feel better believing that my future self would actually be thinking, "Girl, you're an okay imbecile."