I haven’t had the time to work on this site lately. I started a new design project with the City of San Francisco that has me down in a bunker under a lab at the East Water Treatment plant. We don’t get cell signal and nearly every fun website is blocked by a firewall. Can’t have people browsing Facebook when they’re trying to come up with new design plans for the city can we? The work is really fun and in just the last few weeks, the impact Ive already made is palpable. But I digress, that’s not what today’s post is really about.

Sneaking sometime in on the weekend, I’ve been slowly adding to this website in hopes of having it closer to completion by the time we officially launch. Today I was putting together the about page and kind of unilaterally decided to post a picture, blurlb and link to the people who have helped make this dream of Chris and I’s come together thus far. Its been a really REALLY long time coming. When you consider the time it took to write Deviant Rising, iterate on it, rewrite over and over and over again, find a publisher, get to the minimum number of per-orders, rewrite it again, get a handful of characters and spaceships designed, get the cover designed, hand the manuscript over to the publisher, rewrite the manuscript again, edits after edits after edits, plan and execute the launch party, have a small nervous breakdown post launch party that cost me a relationship with a woman I was content to marry, breaking down in my brand new mustang convertible that day I found Deviant Rising in a Barnes & Nobel in Corta Madera California…

A lot of this journey has been feeling around in the dark and not knowing how to drive traffic to the series or how to show the world how much work has been done on this thing…

And to think, while ALL this was going on, over the past 12 years, I was able to start and build a successful career in product design…

And all this is just my half of the equation. Chris has had is own path through this endeavor that has shaped him in very VERY profound ways.

As I sit here now, its just dawning on me how long a journey its been since the day I called Chris from a best buy parking lot in Union City California while I waited for a set of speakers to be installed in my truck that’s now long gone. It’ll be about 11 years this may. ( I found a receipt for those speakers recently) This project has touched many hearts and minds to make it thus far. From our most recent talent of Emily Smith, our audio book narrator, to Alexey Yakovlev our first concept artist I found on conceptships.blogspot.com over 9 years ago.

I’ve met so many amazing and profoundly talented people on this journey:

I can still remember the two pieces of art Alexey posted on the previously mentioned website that stuck out against all the other insanely talented people on there.

It took me the better part of a weekend to figure out how to get in touch with Alexey. Eventually I found an email address on DeviantArt.com and started a correspondence, finding out he lived in Russia. It was touch and go at the beginning since I didn’t speak any Russian and he understood enough English well enough to get the “broad strokes” of what I was looking for. Since then the language barrier has all but disappeared, another testament to his tenacity, I’ve spoken English my whole life and I’m still learing how to write in it. :P . Alexey, if you’re reading this now, remember all that trouble we had with the banks because our countries didn’t trust each other? I literally had to try two different banks and six different methods of payment before one actually went through. I was so worried he was going to think I was just jerking him around and wasn’t going to pay him, I was so worried I was going to lose him. It didn’t help that I was between jobs at the time and had to scrape the money together at the cost of eating for a couple of days. I got the first few sketches of the cover art from him one day while I pigged out at a Denny’s in San Jose CA near the Berryessa flea market.

His patience payed of and the amount of work he gave me in those early days was incredible. Most of the “feeling” that comes through in our art, especially our heroes, is the direct result of Alexey’s efforts.

Back in 2014 I was teaching User Interface and User Experience design at the Academy of Art in San Francisco when one day I happen to wonder through the design lab and literally out of the corner of my eye I caught the site of something that would shape the look of this series moving forward. A graduate candidate, Fan Zhang, was working on his senior thesis, a spaceship design that had an engine room unlike anything I had ever seen, I really wish I could find that piece on his artstation, it was incredible. I introduced myself and had a quick chat with him. He showed me around this alien spaceship he was building with the intent to drop it into Unreal Engine and make it somewhat playable. You have to understand that literally EVERYONE at the Academy of Art enrolls with dreams the size of the moon but few people are as capable of learning how to execute their dreams as Fan had already. It was then I learned one of the many pieces of art that had been used all over the Academy’s website, and the walls of all eight floors of 180 New Montgomery, was one of his pieces:

His shape language was so unique I knew I had to get him to design the look and feel of our stories antagonist. I had to have him design the look of the United Planets of Earth vessels, most notably, the U.P.E Enigma.

Fan, I’m sure you hate me for adding the red lens flares but those are popular now. :P

The amount of work Fan produced for Chris and I over the next year was incredible and helped change the way I thought about the significant difference in technology between our protagonists and antagonists. The UPE wasn’t just more advanced than the Strifer’s, their entire ethos was to strike fear in the hearts of men by the deadly look of their vessels: