Speculating About Fer.al and Cinder

Helloooo once again! I'm back. I also happen to be back from a trip I went on with my family. I don't travel much, and especially now with the pandemic it was pretty weird to be going different places, but it actually went well! I saw some cool cactuses, birds and lizards in the desert. Once I move the photos over to my laptop, I'll post a couple here in case you might wanna see c:

For this post, I wanted to talk about some WildWorks related things I've been thinking about. 

But first of all, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, happy Spring!! 

Flowers haven't really started blooming yet where I am and it's still kinda cold, but it'll be nice when plants do decide to start springing back.

Now, let's jump right into this...

After less than two years of being in the beta stage, Fer.al has shut down. 

It was something the player base was fearing, but not totally expecting. Shortly after WildWorks began promoting Cinder, the CEO said this in an interview: 

"Stacey wrote that Cinder will be 'drawing upon the scaffolding of Feral,' a Wildworks game where players control their own mythical animals. Feral won’t be adopting NFT and blockchain gaming, as 'the Feral community deserves to evolve on its own path, and crypto-gaming isn’t what its members signed up for.' Cinder may visually resemble Feral in some aspects, 'but the resemblance ends there.'"

– quote from this article

That article was published on January 14th of this year. On February 18th, WildWorks announced Fer.al's shut down. 

I personally wasn't as drawn to Fer.al as Animal Jam Classic, but with all the time and artistic effort put into that game, PLUS the community that grew from it, it really does feel like a waste.

This makes me think that there might be a few possibilities:

1. Fer.al was meant from the start to only be active until Cinder was done. 

2. The huge negative backlash to Cinder's release made WildWorks realize that it was gonna be a struggle to get anyone excited about it. So... they shut Fer.al down in the hopes that the players most sad about the shutdown would migrate to Cinder to experience the same aesthetic.

3. Too expensive to keep both games going at the same time?

I don't know, the idea that Fer.al was always just testing grounds for Cinder just feels weird to me.

WildWorks having pretty much just copy-pasted Fer.al's Shattered Bay into Cinder (see screenshots above), makes me feel like Cinder was mostly just stitched together out of assets originally meant for Fer.al. 

The Cinder homepage mentions that Cinder has been in production for about two years, but I wonder... 

This screenshot which I posted a couple of months ago was from a Jamaa Journal page in AJPW from April 2021. If this page echoes WildWorks' viewpoint at that time... then maybe the concept for Cinder is actually a lot more recent.

Maybe the 'two years in production' refers to Fer.al's production. That game did serve as the foundation Cinder was built off of.

Eh... not just built off of. That's literally the blood lake from Fer.al on the Cinder homepage. 

As I've been writing this post, I've been doing a lot of research and I stumbled upon something that might give some more clarity:

According to this article, WildWorks invested 6 million dollars in Fer.al over its two-year development, and they didn't think the game was making enough money for that investment. 

Now I'm thinking that Cinder came about for a simple reason: WildWorks just needed money, and they thought an NFT game would be the way to get it. 

I found this on the Cinder homepage:

('Coffers' means funds btw)

Pre-production of Cinder probably mostly refers to the production of Fer.al. So, the money players spend on NFTs in the game is needed to raise the money to keep Cinder in development. 

I don't know much about game development, so I don't know if that actually means anything... but it seems to me that, yeah, Cinder was thought up more recently than two years ago. 

...

This is tiring to write about...

I'm gonna go eat something now, and I hope you do too. 

This was a long post >.<

Byeeee

Art for Popcorn!

Hiya Jammers! I hope you're all doing well today. My laptop's losing charge, so this will just be a short post to upload the art of Popcornpizza25's AJ red panda that they won in the raffle!

I hope ya like it :>

If you're Popcorn, this art is just for you to use as you wish!

Whew... this drawing is such a huge first for me. I get so nervous about drawing animals, especially if they're sort of stylized, so I rarely end up with complete-feeling artworks of them. Animals are just so cool and I feel like I can't really capture that coolness in a drawing xD

But I tried, and I think I'm pretty happy with how this turned out! I aimed for a mix between how red pandas look on AJ and how they look in real life.

Also, aside from the initial sketch, this is also the first full drawing I've done on GIMP! I've honestly been having an easier time drawing with GIMP than I ever had with Photoshop. 

Something I learned about how to create line weight with digital art is to use an oval shaped brush instead of a circular one! I recommend you try it, if you want. 

This is also the first drawing that I made a special signature for :3

Well, that's all I got for now. I have some ideas for a couple posts, so I hope I'll be able to get to writing them after my school work is done. I have so many hours to do.... AAAAAA

See you in Jamaa!

Art Raffle Winner~

Hey Jammers! Happy March to you all. I hope we can make this a good month ^^

As promised, today I'll be announcing the winner of this past month's small art raffle. Big thanks to everyone who entered, and don't worry if you didn't find the time to enter– I'll be doing more of these in the not-so-distant future =)

Thought it might be fun to announce it through a little video! 

I assigned each person who entered a number from 1 to 4, and used a random number generator to find the winner.

So without further ado, the winner is...

(Click full-screen! Also, for some reason it's weirdly blurry until the halfway point, but it's not that way on the actual YouTube page :| )

Psst, don't keep scrolling! You can find the raffle winner at the end of the short vid above!

But if you can't play the video or don't feel like watching, then I'll let you know here that the winner is...

Popcornpizza25!

Congrats, Popcorn! I'll be drawing your AJ character like you requested, and I'll post it once I'm done :D

(It would be the same white and yellow red panda that's in your blog banner, right? Let me know when you can so I can be sure!)

Gonna try to go all out with this one, so I can't promise when it'll be done ^^; but I'm gonna shoot for March 16th at the latest! It'll be digital art btw c:

Well, that's all I got for now. I'm gonna go do some drawing homework, and after that I'll start planning the drawing ASAP!

See you in Jamaa~

Art Raffle Time + Mastertracks Title Music

Hey Jammers! It's that time– the day of my Jam-iversarry :D

10 years. Wow.

During the first couple years, I don't think I would have guessed that I'd be playing AJ for this long, but at the same time, I could never imagine quitting. 

I remember around 2014, or maybe 2013, I made a big emo post on here about going on hiatus from AJ indefinitely... only to come back like 2 days later xD

Whether I like it or not, the world of Jamaa holds a big piece of my heart, and so, so many memories that have shaped me into the person I am today. It can make me feel self-conscious to admit that, yeah, but I know a big bunch of you feel the same, so I know I'm not alone <3

That being said, I do deal with a lot of overwhelm, so I'll admit that sometimes the thought of writing posts here on top of all my other different projects can get, well... overwhelming. 

But I'm okay with that. While I have a ton of different interests that pull me in a ton of different directions, this one right here is an interest that's helped me through some truly difficult times. And it's really all thanks to you :')

Thank you for reading Animal Jam Stream, and thank you for being a part of this great little corner of the AJ community! 

–––

To celebrate this milestone, I was thinking something low-key but still nice. 

So how 'bout an art raffle?

If you'd like to enter, comment down below by Feb 28th...:

•    your username – either AJC, AJPW, or both if you want

       •    what you'd like in a drawing – could be your character, could be anything! I'm usually better at drawing humanoid characters, but I'm happy to draw nonhumans as well. (Appropriate for all ages, of course)

•    how you'd like to get your art if you win – I could post it on this blog for you, or give it to you as an AJC Masterpiece (I got no tokens on AJPW, sorry!)  

...and the winner will be picked randomly on March 1st!

I hope this is something y'all will be interested in :>

–––

Before I go, here's one last thingy:

I like the AJPW Mastertracks title music, so I saved it for anyone else who also likes it :>

That is all.

See you in Jamaa!

Layout Testing Part 2 – A Transparent Teacup

Hey Jammers! It's February again– month of the Lunar New Year, the Friendship Festival on AJ, and the month that will mark another year since I first set paw in the world of Jamaa. (AAA I know that wording sounds cheesy– but ya know what, I'm gonna leave it in there. Because it's happy)

Ideally, I'd host some kind of a contest or raffle for the 17th, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get around to that, mostly because I don't have many interesting items to give away. Hmm...

Would any of you be interested in a contest/raffle that didn't involve item prizes? I could draw something for whoever ends up being the winners– perhaps an OC, the winner's animal, or something like a custom Masterpiece? I'm sure I still got some MP tokens lying around here... 

Let me know in the comments what kind of thing you might be interested in this month! C:

–––

Redesigning my blog has been a fun and relaxing process for me, but I know the next part of this post where I talk about it might be a bit boring to you. Nonetheless, some content is better than no content, so here it is:

That slightly blurry green-ish block thing on my layout test blog is my new coding victory– I've figured out how to put an image behind each post's date header. That green thing is a test image!

I'm not sure where the idea came from, but I was thinking that each post should have a lil teacup on top of it.

And after searching Jamaa, I found the perfect teacup:

This one.

What's also good about it is that it's naturally pixelated, so it was much easier to erase its background.

One issue, though:

Ignoring the positioning (which I know how to fix) the teacup at its normal size looks just blurry enough on the test blog to annoy the perfectionist part of me.

Something I've learned is that it's good to create your drawings/graphics at a size at least 2x bigger than how you want to display them. That helps minimize the fuzziness. 

So I opened the original screenshot in GIMP, zoomed in 4x:

(Somehow, increasing the actual size of the image in GIMP made it blurry, but zooming in on it didn't..)

After going ahead and covering the overlapping machine part with a hard pixel brush, I used GIMP's convenient color-select tool to erase the rest of the background.

Then I filled the layer behind it with bright green. Because increasing the actual image size would make it blurry for some reason I don't know yet, I needed to screenshot the zoomed-in teacup and then erase the green.

Ta-da~

When I get around to it, I'll find a way to add this to my test layout in a way that looks cute. 

EDIT: Just realized it still has some white spaces around it, dang. Back to work, I guess...

Aaaaaand that's all the rambling for now! See you in Jamaa ^^