Michael DeAngelo's Blog, page 6

Blast from the Past – Tellest Revolution

I’m a huge believer that you have to appreciate where you’ve been to know where you’re going.  And while I’m not too keen on the goofy things I did when I’m younger, I’m not entirely embarrassed by them.

Case in point, when I was just getting started with the Tellest universe, I had also happened upon the mighty Newgrounds.  Some of my favorite artists were Splashkhat and Randy Solem.  I’ve actually since had a chance to work with the former, even though what we’ve done has never seen the light of day.  Khat was the creator of the epic Final Fighting Fantasy, and the late Solem was the creator of Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom, which was a beautifully animated tale of the Mario Bros. in a world where consequences are more permanent than what we see in the games.

Tellest Revolution was my first (sort of) foray into sprite animation. I had a trial of Photoshop that I used to create some terrible cartoons. It was a lot of work, and it came during a time when I should have been more serious about making money, going to school, etc., but it was too interesting to pass up.

The short-lived cartoon series was my way of marrying the Tellest stories with their eventual appearance as medieval superheroes. Heck, the intro even had an X-Men Saturday Morning feel to it.  We used sprites from Final Fantasy games, and music from the incredible remixers at OCRemix.

There were ultimately 7 episode halves that released, each rough 7-15 minutes long, and the more work I did with it, the better I understood the program.  Around episode 4-2, my photoshop must have run out, or my computer must have bricked, because everything simply stopped.  I don’t recall any place where those files might live on, and it was on a computer that was at least 10 years old, so it’s probably a rusted old piece of junk now.  In spite of that, I’m still strangely proud of the work I did – back then, I had a very generous score on Newgrounds.

I always think about getting back into things like that, but now that Tellest has evolved the way it did, I’m afraid we might be in danger of copyright infringement.  For one, I doubt I’d be able to get away with reworked sprites.  And even more crushing, I’d find it hard to believe we could use the music that made the series so catchy.

I’m not going to link to the videos, for several of the reasons cited above, but a little search on the internet will turn them up.  If you do happen upon them, I hope you appreciate them for what they are!

Tellest Patreon

Did you know that Tellest is on Patreon?

Chances are, you don’t even know what Patreon is.  It’s kind of like an internet tip jar.  If there’s an artist, or a musician, or maybe a novelist that you like, you have the opportunity to follow them on Patreon, and if you really like them, you can pledge to them so that they can grow their particular brand a little bigger.  A lot of times, this gives you access to content especially catered just to you.

For Tellest, what I like to do is treat my Patreon project like a monthly magazine.  Every weekday, I try to get a new piece of art from the world of Tellest up on the internet.  It’s a nice way to go behind the scenes, and it lets people see the art before it is scheduled here on the site – something I can only do once per week. At this point, we’re more than three months ahead of schedule on the Patreon page, and that’s a cool way to give back to the people who are interested in Tellest.

The nice thing is that you get to make the call.  Do you drop in a penny a month?  A quarter?  A dollar?  More?

Each level gives you some more access, whether it’s seeing the art much sooner, reading the margins of the books that I’m writing (which gives you some idea of how my mind works), or even getting the chapters and sections of novellas and short stories much earlier than the rest of the readers.

Best of all, when you pledge to become a patron, you’re helping to expand the world of Tellest (or enhancing any of the other projects on Patreon).  You’re helping us fund more art, or find new writers to push past the borders of the established lands.

If you’ve followed Tellest for a while, and you like what we do, consider checking out the Patreon page.  Even if you don’t want to pledge, or don’t have the money to, we try to make some of the content available free of charge, just to help strengthen our community.  We’d love for you to be a part of it!

Awake Releases on Amazon

Hello out there to all you fantasy readers!  Just writing to tell you that the fourth novella in the Tales of Tellest series has released on Amazon today.

Thank you so much to all the people that made its release possible.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Pendrich’s Ravenwinged Helmet

Hello all!

We have a different kind of treat for you today.  When we started the Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, the plan was to try and utilize the talents of our dear friend Noemi Gonzalez, should we get to a particular stretch goal level.

We didn’t reach that goal, but the campaign’s loss is my gain (so sorry – but not really).  This weekend, I was treated to a gift nine months in the making:

 

Now I’m obviously not the best model for this awesome crocheted helmet, especially in the morning, but I just couldn’t not share the awesomeness that is this gift.  Thank you so much to Noemi Gonzalez for her excellent work!

Tellest Pixels 3

We’re rounding out the Tellest Pixels feature here on the site today. Over the past few weeks, we showed you what would have happened should we have succeeded with that initial Kickstarter – we were going to give out awesome little 8-bit inspired buttons.  We also showed you a second set more recently.

So far, we’ve seen the oldest heroes of the book series (Kaos, Dirk and Steel Tip), and we’ve traveled to Atalatha to see their champions (Alicia, Zachariah and David).  Today, we’re rounding out the biggest heroes from the second half of The Bindings of Fate.

Here, you can see the characters that we were introduced to once Westwick was discovered in the book series.  Christopher and Holklund were specifically found in that town, while Kaos and his companions happened upon Anson and Adelia on their way to stop Blacklehn from destroying Atalatha.  They’re all featured from top to bottom in the order they appeared in the book.

There’s a couple of interesting things to note here, too.  I made two versions of Holklund – one with pupils, and one without, to denote his power to see through other people’s eyes.  Anson is the only character besides Dirk not to be presented without a weapon or a spell.  And Adelia took me 16 different tries before I was finally happy with the version of her I ended up with.

 

So, that’s it for Tellest Pixels.  It was a fun little side project, but I mostly wanted to focus on the young heroes of the stories.  That isn’t to say there aren’t more that we could do.  You’ve got the Knights of Virtue, the antagonists, and everything from the rest of trilogy and the series to follow.  If I get a lot of positive feedback on these, perhaps I’ll consider adding more to the list!

Tellest Pixels 2

So, after our last Otherworld absence, I thought it might be fun to highlight what almost was, and make it a nice three week (spread out, of course) feature.

Last time, we showed you a couple of our earliest heroes (Kaos, Steel Tip and Dirk).  But we wanted to focus on a locale this week.  Atalatha is a huge part of the story for Tellest, and with that in mind, we worked on three heroes from the glorious city.

 

From top to bottom there, you have Zachariah, Alicia Mane, and David Garus.  These ones are a couple of the ones that took the most work, because we were outfitting them so specifically, and we gave Alicia, for instance, some magical abilities.  David’s just a smidge taller than all the other characters, too, to account for his size.

Stay tuned for our final feature on Tellest Pixels in the next couple of weeks!

What Could Have Been – Kickstarter 201

A lot of you might not know this, because this site wasn’t nearly as large as it is back in January of 2013, but our successful Kickstarter this year wasn’t actually our first Kickstarter.  You see, we tried to run a campaign for the third book in the Child of the Stars trilogy, The Enemy Within.  It was very touch and go, because the book is so large, and required a lot of editing, which is why one book was gunning for such a huge campaign goal.

Needless to say, the campaign stalled – and for good reason.  I don’t think I managed it right, and I think toward the end, I was actually glad that we didn’t meet our goal.

That said though, I think there are some things that we really missed out on because of that.  I’ve always been a big fan of retro games – stuff from the 80′s and 90′s, as you can see from the development we’ve put forth on Heart of the Forest.  So one of the things I was really excited to do was release some 8-bit button pins that you could clip to your bag, or a mirror cozy, something that was just quirky.  I actually had our whole A-list lineup of heroes.  Here’s just a couple of them:

 

Obviously they feel like Megaman.  But I think they turned out really well, especially Dirk.  What do you think?

What Could Have Been – Kickstarter 2013

I lot of you might not know this, because this site wasn’t nearly as large as it is back in January of 2013, but our successful Kickstarter this year wasn’t actually our first Kickstarter.  You see, we tried to run a campaign for the third book in the Child of the Stars trilogy, The Enemy Within.  It was very touch and go, because the book is so large, and required a lot of editing, which is why one book was gunning for such a huge campaign goal.

Needless to say, the campaign stalled – and for good reason.  I don’t think I managed it right, and I think toward the end, I was actually glad that we didn’t meet our goal.

That said though, I think there are some things that we really missed out on because of that.  I’ve always been a big fan of retro games – stuff from the 80′s and 90′s, as you can see from the development we’ve put forth on Heart of the Forest.  So one of the things I was really excited to do was release some 8-bit button pins that you could clip to your bag, or a mirror cozy, something that was just quirky.  I actually had our whole A-list lineup of heroes.  Here’s just a couple of them:

 

Obviously they feel like Megaman.  But I think they turned out really well, especially Dirk.  What do you think?

The Tinker’s Tale Amazon Release

Hello everyone!  We’re happy to announce that The Tinker’s Tale is now out on Amazon.  If you have a computer, smart phone or tablet, you’ll be able to purchase the story for the low price of $2.99, and be able to read it all in one convenient place.

In other news, we’re also going to be making Son of the Storm free for the next five days, so if you’re just jumping into the Tellest universe, now is a great time!

We’re more than halfway through our novella release schedule.  For those of you that have been along with us all the way, we hope you’ll agree that we’ve been delivering a great experience for you.  And for those just joining us, we hope to entertain you for months and years to come!

Cheers,

Mike

Back from Otherworld

Hello all!  After an extended stay in Otherworld for the past couple of weeks, we’re back on solid ground in Tellest.  It has been a busy couple months, what with the advent of Inner Demons, the continuing adventures in the Tales of Tellest collection, and the search for more artists to round out the vision that we have here.

There are still plenty of things going on behind the scenes, and I don’t want anyone to be left out.

One of the things that we are going to start on in the next few weeks is the arrangement to have the audiobooks begin.  We’re starting to small, with the Tales of Tellest, first and foremost – they’re up to snuff, and smaller morsels for potential producers to get their hands dirty with.  We’re actually auditioning Mageborn presently, and hope to bring you news on that front in the next couple of days or so.

Hopefully, once we have the Tales of Tellest properties properly narrated, we’ll have The Bindings of Fate ready to produce as well – following those rewrites we’ve mentioned before.  If the audiobooks sell well enough, we’ll be able to slip right into the bigger, chunkier novels (and give our narrators a decent amount of work)!

We’re also still chugging along with Tellest’s first game property. Chris and I have been tackling new things each month, and on our priority list for July is an interface that will really pop when the game is ready for release.  These are just mockups, but I think they’re really putting us in the right direction.

 

You can see we also used some of the previous art we’ve had the privilege of receiving from Paul and Joman in the past.  While it looks great in this little project, those are just placeholder for now.  There’s a good chance we’ll have original art in its place in the final form, most likely from Chris.

Tellest is coming along faster every day, and we have a wonderful audience to thank for it.  I really do appreciate all the opportunities you’ve given me, and am happy to continue showing it!

 

Cheers,

Mike