Perilous Jack and the Frost Potion

The Perilous Adventures of Jack the Dragonslayer is a series of Choose Your Own Adventure™-style sprite comics hosted on SmackJeeves.com and featuring sprites ripped from the Final Fantasy™ and Super Mario Brothers™ video games. The stories, characters, settings, and illustrations are mine, but the sprites used to create the illustrations are the work of the talented designers at Square Enix® and Nintendo®.

Perilous Jack and the Frost Potion is Volume One of a five-part series called The Abduction of Princess Vasilisa. In this volume, Perilous Jack returns home from an adventure to discover that Princess Vasilisa has been abducted by a Cloud Giant!

Giant (Fire)

But before he can face the giant, Perilous Jack must fight his way past the guardian of the giant’s castle – a Pyrohydra.

Hydra (Pyro)

But as everyone knows, when you cut off a Hydra’s head, two more grow in its place. Hercules used a torch to seal off the cut necks of the Lernaean Hydra, but that trick won’t work on a creature of flame . . .

Only a Frost Potion can help Jack past the guardian of the castle. And the only Frost Potion for miles is in a monster haunted labyrinth, under the guardianship of the terrible Bull God. A most perilous adventure!

You can read the sprite comic here. When you’re finished, check out the flowchart below (Spoiler Alert!)

Frost Potion Flowchart (Detail)

Flowcharts are practically required if you’re doing a Choose Your Own Adventure™ – style story. There’s no better way to avoid dead ends and illogical loops, plus they look nifty. I did this in Visio.

The full-size flowchart for Perilous Jack and the Frost Potion is here.

A Model of Human Psychology

This came to me in a dream one night. The concept is difficult to convey with 2D graphics; a 3D animation might be more suitable. The upshot is that the outward manifestations of personality are the result of the dialectic between the base desires (common to all humans) and the psychological filters accumulated through life experience (unique to each individual).

Any suggestions for changes to the model, or ideas for how to make it visually more effective?

 

Logo Design

The first five logos in the gallery below are the result of a project I did a few years ago to teach myself Adobe Illustrator. I chose a typeface with an evocative name (Algerian, Crack’d, Chalkduster, Caduceus, Eccentric – you can tell I didn’t get far in the alphabet) and designed a logo inspired by and utilizing the typeface.

The sixth logo, Petal + Stump, was an prototype I developed for a garden blog a friend was contemplating doing. After downloading numerous free fonts from the internet to play with and working for about two or three hours tweaking the design, I discovered that garden writer Valerie Easton had already published a book called Petal & Twig. So much for that idea. But the experience was worthwhile. The typefaces in Petal + Stump are PetalGlyph by Stephen Knousse and JF Wildwood by Jester Font Studio. I did Petal + Stump in Inkscape.

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Board Game Spinner

I designed this after I first had the idea for a Perilous Jack board game. I’m still debating whether to use it with The Curse of Numerian Nine, but I’m not convinced it works with that game. We’ll see how Numerian Nine evolves.

I did this in Inkscape, with a little bit of touch-up and prep work in MS Paint. The typeface is Hobo. The sprites are all ripped from Final Fantasy ™ by the good folks at VideoGameSprites.net

 

The Curse of Numerian Nine

The Curse of Numerian Nine is a fantasy adventure board game I’ve been developing. The game is for two to eight players and it is set in the Kingdom of Numeria, on the world of Malkat. I did the board game map in Campaign Cartographer 3, with symbols borrowed from Dungeon Designer 3 and City Designer 3. I’ll add the finishing touches in Inkscape.

Here’s the premise of the game:

Continue reading “The Curse of Numerian Nine”