Vision Riders Entertainment Blog

Wow, has it really been a year since I posted anything here?

Work on Junction is slowly proceeding and I hope to have a site up for it soon with information and screenshots; maybe even an early trailer. If all goes well the full game will be out by the end of the year. As for Swordmaster Odyssey... I honestly don't know what to do with it. There really doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in the comic, and I haven't even had the desire to work on it in a long, long time.

One day I'll be big.
Way bigger than I am now.
I'll be taller than my big sister, so she'll have to be nice to me even when other people are watching.
Maybe I'll be taller even than my dad, and he'll have to look up just to see me!
I'll be stronger and braver, and all my friends will think I'm cool.

But for now, for today
All I want to do is fly.


This is based on an old sketch I drew some time ago. Families and the dynamics of their unique relationships have long been a fascinating subject to me. Brothers and sisters; parents and children; the way they interact. I don't know why. Maybe it's the blood bond they share that is not so easily broken? Even though at times, of course, sometimes they wish they were. On that note, I'm the oldest of my siblings, so I can only wonder what it's like to have an older brother or sister...

Regardless, the theme of this piece is not siblings but fathers and sons. In hindsight, I guess it's kind of appropriate, what with Father's Day coming up and all. Dads that take the time to actually play and talk with their sons are always cool in my book.

Painted in Photoshop. Time taken: ~3-4 hours. Brief prose intro is nothing special; just something that kept coming to me while I worked. (And it amused me thinking about how the boy's big sister is implied to be really sweet to him whenever no one else is around to see it.)

I wish I enjoyed reading more than I do. I really do. But even when I read fiction that I enjoy, it's difficult for me. This is not because I have trouble reading--I can read English very well, thank you very much--the problem in fact stems from the fact I cannot turn my brain off. While most people praise reading because it requires the imagination, this is why I loathe it so. I want to enjoy the prose and the narrative, the author's wordplay and the feeling that it invokes. But instead I'm too busy staging scenes in my head. I'm too busy imagining the story as a movie, an animated series, a comic book; at times, even a video game. I substitute dialog on the fly, change environments and pacing, add entire scenes and characters that are nowhere to be found in the story, often to the point where I can't remember which parts were the book and which parts only were in my head. At my worst, I'll physically set the book aside to finish playing through a made-up scene in my head before continuing.

I hate this. It keeps me from enjoying the book, and it's only gotten worse with age. I'm to the point now to where I do this when watching movies. Is this something everyone else does and actually enjoys, and I just don't realize it?

Regardless, over the years the best remedy I've found is to find enjoyment writing stories instead of reading them. It's why I have so many half-finished manuscripts littering my hard drive. Unfortunately, I'm my only audience--no one else seems over the years has given them more than a glance, but what else is new--but even more dreadful in my mind is thus: a writer who does not read is nary a writer at all. If I don't read, can I really improve my craft? I seriously doubt it.

Not to mention I think it's only aggravating my condition...

Updated the company website for the first time in a bajillion years. Of note is that I killed off all links to the old news page (which was never really used anyway) and the site map (which was a pain to keep current). From now on the blog will function as the main news page, since that just works better anyway.

All references to "Vision Riders Entertainment, Inc." that I could find have been removed, except in the terms of use and privacy policy pages which I'll update some other time maybe. Right now the future of the company is a little uncertain, you see. And by "little" I mean "Ha, ha, wasn't this business a waste of my time."

I stumbled across an article by Derek Yu of Aquaria and Spelunky fame, in which he shared a surprisingly insightful grain of enlightenment:

We’ve all had that feeling about at least one game, comic book, movie, etc., that comes out: “Gee, I could do better than this! This is overrated.” But it’s important to take a step back and realize that, hey, they put in the time to finish a project and I haven’t. That’s at least one thing they might be better than me at, and it’s probably why they have the recognition I don’t! If you treat finishing like a skill, rather than simply a step in the process, you can acknowledge not only that it’s something you can get better at, but also what habits and thought processes get in your way.

(Emphasis added.)

I must admit, looking at it from this perspective does kind of change the way I look at other people's projects!

Here's some more screenshots from the latest build of Junction!


Junction is an adventure game. The key to making progress is to investigate your surroundings, find out what you have to work with, then determine how to use the things at your disposal in order to move closer to completing the goals set for you.


The game has a rich story, steeped in an atmosphere of suspense.


You'll need to interact with the other characters in the narrative in order to move forward. As you explore more of the game's world, new conversation topics will appear.

In the interest of making it look like I'm actually doing something productive and useful to society, I am posting a screenshot from our upcoming adventure/puzzle game which is taking forever totally almost finished.



I'm hoping to have it out by the end of May. Maybe even May of this year.