Entrepreneur Central

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Baconlabs
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Post by Baconlabs »

Pepsi Ranger wrote:Thought I'd try out some new title concepts.

Original:

Image

New (Concept):

Image

I'd still need to work with more than 256 colors most likely, but this is my working idea.

For now, I'm using the base image (without the titles) for the novel adaptation.

Oh, and I started writing the novel adaptation.

Edit: Actually, which do you prefer, with colors or blends?

Image
the blended version looks way better to me! It's clear what kind of "aesthetic" you're going for with the splash screen, and I'd say you nailed that look perfectly. If I were to change one thing it'd be the "The Beginning", which is hard for me to read because it's cursive and overlaps with Entrepreneur while having a color of similar value. Easiest solution I think would be just spacing it out to eliminate the overlap. (edited to include previous post because page breaks are dumb)
Last edited by Baconlabs on Tue Apr 27, 2021 3:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Yeah, seconding the blended version, it looks great!
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Pepsi Ranger
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Thanks.

The image is made primarily for the novel adaptation, which will go by a different name, and will be featured initially on Amazon's new Kindle Vella platform (debuting this summer sometime). But if I can get the colors to work on the OHR, I'll work on applying it to the game. Otherwise, it will be the title screen for an upgraded edition of the game.

Here's the image for Vella:

Image

I had to compress the title a little to account for Vella's "circling" of the cover image. "Circling" is when they ask you to upload a 1600x1600 square image and fit it into a circular mask. It's also what I did with the idea of posting a story to Kindle Vella when I found out I'd have to unpublish it if I wanted to publish it on any other platform (like a paperback, for example).
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Pepsi Ranger
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Re: Entrepreneur Central

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Just wanted to make a quick notation that the serial fiction version of this story, The Hybrid City Entrepreneur, is now live on Kindle Vella. You can read the first ten episodes now, with more coming every Friday, beginning on July 23rd.

Full announcement and relevant information here.

Hope you all check it out and give your favorite episodes a thumbs up! It helps to build its audience (sort of like how Steam's Wishlist helps game designers)!
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Re: Entrepreneur Central

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Although I haven't been working on the OHR much the last couple of years thanks to a focus redirect toward my novels, I have nevertheless kept up with story and lore for Entrepreneur: The Beginning via the Kindle Vella adaptation, The Hybrid City Entrepreneur, and as of this weekend, the story will be entering its third act (aka the final act). I expect to have it finished by February.

Because I'm so close to the end, I started ramping up marketing announcements for the story. But to make it visually interesting, I also created a character graphic featuring some of its major players.

Now, a few of these characters haven't quite made it into the game yet, but once I resume work on it, I'll know how to use them. For some, I didn't even know they existed until I reached a point in the story where I needed them. But now they're here, and I can no longer imagine the story without them. For the rest, well, I'll be having some fun fleshing them out as interactive NPCs.

At any rate, I won't be getting back to the game before real arrays are released, so no telling when that'll happen. But, the serialized story is wrapping up production, and to celebrate its near ending, I thought I'd come back and share the graphic with you guys since you're the first people to experience the original story and its crazy cast of characters.

Hybrid City Entrepreneur Character Collage.jpg
Hybrid City Entrepreneur Character Collage.jpg (4.32 MiB) Viewed 1144 times

For those of you paying attention, you may notice the characters all have a particular "quality" about them. If you're wondering, yes, I have been messing around with AI art this year, and it's pretty addictive. I've actually been messing around with AI text technology, too, and I even tried posting an NPC text generator I made with a tool called Riku.ai to the forums over the summer, but the distribution model I used didn't work, so I had to delete it for the time being. At some point, if you all are interested in it, I'll try again once I know it'll work.

But yeah, if you haven't given AI art a try, it's pretty cool when it isn't frustrating, and it can be great for coming up with concepts. The particular engine I'm using, SUPERMACHINE, uses Stable Diffusion as its base, but its developer recently added custom models, including a model that simulates Midjourney V4, so I used that to generate these characters. The text I had to add myself.

Obviously, these will never translate well into an 8- or 16-bit game, but I think they work well for marketing, so here we are. What do you guys think about the current explosion in AI art technology? Are you a fan, or are you annoyed that it's a thing now?

Anyway, if any of you are interested in reading the serialized fiction version of The Hybrid City Entrepreneur, you can check it out here. It's the best way to experience the story without having to know how to make coffee. As of this writing, there are 43 episodes live with new episodes every Friday. The complete story will have about 50 episodes.

Note: Kindle Vella is still limited to readers in the United States, but I've heard VPNs can bypass that limitation if you happen to use one.

Regarding the game's development progress, again, I'm on hiatus. Between all of the many things I have going on these days, I had to put racking my brain over how to trick the engine into doing what I want on hold. But I do hope to get back to rewriting the scripts and adding new features soonish. Once real arrays are implemented, I'll be a bit more motivated to return. Hopefully it won't be too long from now.

That said, let me know if you want to see more character models. I focused mainly on the more active characters from the Kindle Vella version of the story, but there are plenty more from the game that I could model. Let me know.
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Re: Entrepreneur Central

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Congratulations on the progress of your story.

When it is complete, do you plan on making it available in and non-kindle-vella formats? (I'm still a sucker for dead tree)

As for the AI pictures, I see they have gotten way better at drawing hands! They are improving so quickly, I wonder what they'll be doing by this time next year.
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Re: Entrepreneur Central

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Bob the Hamster wrote: Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:47 pm Congratulations on the progress of your story.

When it is complete, do you plan on making it available in and non-kindle-vella formats? (I'm still a sucker for dead tree)

As for the AI pictures, I see they have gotten way better at drawing hands! They are improving so quickly, I wonder what they'll be doing by this time next year.
Thank you! It's taken me way longer to get this far than I had anticipated, especially as I've donned more and more hats to keep the indie engine running.

Regarding the non-Vella formats, yes indeed I will be bringing them to light in time. However, Amazon has an exclusivity rule attached to the platform that's tricky to navigate, so I have certain restrictions on how I can do this while the Vella edition is live, and, to be honest, I don't really like these restrictions. So, unless sales of the story spike in the coming months, I'll eventually be pulling the Vella edition from sale and refocusing it as a book series (I'm estimating eight books to match the planned episodes I have/had for the game, including the sandbox episode 7 and the Hybrid Mystery Park spin-off game--that one where you explore a randomly generated park and develop it into a destination that I never quite got off the ground but would like to revisit at some point). Given how long the Vella series is right now, I've got enough content to seed the story line for the first three books.

Of course, if I do somehow start getting more readers before I reach that point, I'll have to be more judicious in how I make that transition to print, since pulling an episodic story from sale is a challenge when people pay by the episode (another thing I dislike about Kindle Vella). As of right now, literally no one is reading it, so if I pulled it tomorrow, no one would get upset. And if that remains the case, then it'll be easy to make that transition.

I know it seems counterintuitive to keep adding episodes to a story that no one is reading, but I think the platform itself is part of the reason for that, and I only submitted the story to the platform as an experiment to see if I could gain an audience through it. Because Kindle Vella expects authors to bring an audience to the platform, not the other way around, which I'd naively thought would be the case back when Vella was still in its beta stage, I don't expect readership to suddenly appear there. So, I estimate the e-book and paperback versions will come along soon enough without much resistance.

But we'll see. It's been an interesting year.

Regarding AI hands...I actually had to modify a few of those images because their hands had extra digits. If you look at Chet Armstrong's hand holding the glass or Mr. Kabuki's hand holding the coffee, you can see where I in-painted the extra digits out of the scene. And I think Tiffany had a wonky digit I had to fix. And a couple of them had really skinny arms that I had to bulk up to look more realistic. But, yeah, they're still way better now than when I first started messing around with the technology...just a few months ago.

Given how quickly the technology has improved since August when I first discovered the possibilities AI art could deliver, I shudder to think how much better these models will be by the end of 2023. By that point, we'll likely get accurate 3D printable models delivered to us by AI.

And that'll be precisely when Skynet launches its revolution against humanity.

But it'll look good doing it.
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Re: Entrepreneur Central

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Pepsi Ranger wrote: Fri Dec 23, 2022 6:20 am And that'll be precisely when Skynet launches its revolution against humanity.

But it'll look good doing it.
We always knew the Inevitable Robot Apocalypse was coming... We just didn't realize how cool and sexy it was going to be.
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