Steve's Place

The re-release of the Classic PS1 versions of Myst and Riven required new trophies, which required new trophy icons, and so I got permission to get a little weird and illustrative with it—super fun getting to revisit this world with a little bit of Mignola mixed in.

(The Riven trophy icons)

The Riven half of the new trophy icons for the Classic PS1 re-release! My favourite world to draw, and super fun getting to draw some alternate universe Gehns for a couple of the bad endings.

(The Myst trophy icons)

Broadly speaking, prayer is a religious activity in line with the religious hegemon. Practices are deemed spells when they are Otherized by that religious authority.

Prayers = scale off of Faith stat (FAI)

Spells = scale off of Intelligence stat (INT)

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I've been pretty busy and that's kept my attention from posting here. Some of that is because I've been caught up freelancing again and that's meant a lot of heads down writing. It's nice to be back to that kind of work even if there's less and less places to do it. Most recently, I wrote about Life is Strange and the idea that this next game is "by the fans, for the fans." It's phrase that makes me worry a lot! and while it could be an amazing game, it got me thinking a lot about why we tell stories and if we *owe* characters anything. excerpt:

To give Max and Chloe the ending they deserve means playing a multiversal long con across several games, all of which is targeted at upturning one of the most talked about endings of the last decade of games. To give them the story they deserve means potentially bending over backwards in many directions to please fans and risk the developers not telling the story they actually wanted to tell. To suggest these characters deserve more is to imply their story was not complete by itself. It implies prior work, perhaps even the work of people not at the studio anymore, was flawed and faulty. To say that this game is the one for fans paints the other games as somehow not being for fans because they didn’t give what folks “deserved.” Characters don’t deserve anything, and I don’t think fans do either. The goal of a story cannot simply be to satiate the hunger of fanatics or to smooth out the ripples of a world. Even the most indulgent self-insert fan fiction arguably operates on higher goals than this; the writer crafts the silly tale in order to address something in their soul. You don’t write to fix a story; it ideally addresses something inside us. You don’t write because fictional characters need it. You write because you need it. You do it because there’s something in you that needs to be said.

"Horse but make it a lizard and give it bat wings and horns"

didnt know how to interpret "make it a lizard" so i wrote lizard and drew an arrow pointing to the horse so people know its a lizard. Also didn't know what bat horns were so I gave it a horned bat nose

"A body like a big cat but completely covered in scales, the head of a crocodile with the horns of an ibex, and the wings of a bat on its back"

On it boss o7, ive mashed all these animals together and threw scales all over it. This the dragon you saw?

"Take a lizard, extend the neck. Add a pair of bat wings to the back. Add horns and sharp teeth."

Seems like we're onto somethin' boss! Though idk how it'd be so fearsome bein such a small thing.

"Big-ass lizard with wings" "big lizard" "Giant lizard" "Big fucking lizard"

don't seem too special?

"Imagine a winged alligator that was 70 feet tall and aware of its existence"

i dont know if this is a dragon but it could definitely be some kind of god

"Dinosaur with wings and horns?"

Dunno which dino you were talkin about so i just picked a random one. Stegosauus :}

"Big snake with legs and horns that can breathe fire"

Ah. Hm.