2025 Catch-Up

 I mentioned in my introductory post that I've been writing and drawing online for a while...

"Hi! I'm Dino McEyeball, you may remember me from..."

 

It's all been real small-scale stuff, pet projects, things I do just for fun. I've never contributed anything truly significant, serious, or widely remembered. You're not gonna find video essays about me on Youtube or read about me on TVtropes, I'm not in the internet hall of fame with people like PewDiePie and TayZonday and never will be, yadda yadda yadda. My work's just a small drop in a very big pond and I'm quite well aware of that. I just wanna put that out there cuz I am about to blab about myself for the entire rest of this post and don't want you to think I'm a total self-obsessed loon.

Really the main reason I'm making this post is on the off chance that someone (maybe one of my old friends from back in the day) might stumble across this blog and whisper to themselves "oh hey, I remember that! I wonder what the guy's up to now?".

For the sake of brevity I'll be calling all these miscellaneous things I've done "projects". Some of them were just a bunch of drawings, others were written stories, there were a few forums and websites, and some were a combination of all of the above. They're all silly little things I did purely for the heck of it, but they also don't fit neatly into one single category and I need something to say, so what the hell, project sounds about as appropriate as anything else, I think.

It's possible (however unlikely) that somebody somewhere might remember bumping into little Chris Junior back on an old Jurassic Park fansite or Cryptozoology forum the in late 1990s, but the first project I ever put out there was Dino Hunter's Den.

DHD was a text-based Role-Playing Game that went through a looot of iterations. The first one was a ProBoards forum in 2004, but over the years I made and remade it several times, usually with an accompanying website that acted as an "instruction manual" to the forum game. Virtually all of this stuff is too old to still be around today, but shockingly enough the very first version is still accessible 20 years later! I made so many versions of this game and for so long that there will inevitably have to be an all-DHD post sometime later on; the websites may be gone, but I still have all the old drawings!

And yes, if you know your Ukrainian bargain bin PC games then you can probably guess what the main inspiration behind this was- but there's more to the story than just that!

A lot of people had a phase in high-school, like goth or scene kid or horse girl... for me it was all about dragons. I collected McFarlanes figures and those ceramic statues you find in mall shops, read a ton of fantasy novels, got way too into the whole "dragonology" thing before that took off... probably because the early 2000s were a pretty dragon-heavy time to begin with, with timely influences like Reign of Fire, Spyro, the Eragon and Deltora Quest novels, the first Monster Hunter, and the TV mocumentary Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real.

Naturally I wanted to take a shot at creating my own world in that kind of genre, so Lair of the Beast was the result. It's kind of a funny one to look back on because, while I think of it as one of my most forgotten and fruitless endeavors now, back then I was all in on making this my thing. I used what I learned on DHD to make an even bigger and more intricate website that was all about real world dragon mythology, the creatures and continents in my original setting, and the speculative biology that explained how they all worked. I had an episodic tale about a band of adventurers in said world that I uploaded to as regularly as I could (The Book of Hibradel) and even tried to get a novel off the ground.

As you probably guessed it turned out to be just a smidge too ambitious for a teenager. A lot of it also aged like milk, but hey, for what it's worth the site actually survived for a few years and had an enthusiastic little* following while it lasted.

*We're talking "random website in the early 2000s" kind of "little", though, like 10-20 people tops!

Also, side-note: Lair of the Beast also had a Sci-Fi themed predecessor / sister project called D.E.O.R. (Department for Extraterrestrial Organism Research). Inspired by Men In Black, Hellboy, and Expedition / Alien Planet, it was going to be the same thing but on a galactic scale, with a high-tech secret organization scouring exoplanets for alien life. There was also a second, even shorter-lived version (that I honestly forget the name of) that was going to focus on just one planet, but go through it's whole evolutionary history, with geologic eras and family trees.

All my creations could be considered obscure (if they're even worth being considered at all), but those two were really obscure. Like really, really obscure. My friend group was not feeling the astrobiology thing and I never found an audience for it online. I think the two iterations of this combined might have lasted a month, if that- it was pretty disheartening being so excited about something that literally nobody else cared about, so I just moved on.

Godzilla: Code Red was a fan-fic that I updated concurrently on two different sites, one made specifically to feature it and another called Monstrous Fiction which was like an open writing workshop for authors who liked creature features. It started out as a response to Godzilla: Final Wars and Toho's "retirement" of the Big G at the end of 2024; I didn't get to see the film until a year later when it came out on DVD, had some strong feelings about it, spent a year planning and drawing, and then in 2007 started to upload. Almost nobody read it, but over time the artwork for it ended up being my most consistently viewed and favorited uploads on DeviantArt.

Which sucks because I'm not proud of Code Red. Middle and high-school weren't good times for me in general, but the last half of high-school was especially rough and for a while (the while that I wrote CR during) I turned into someone I don't ever want to be again. I was a very angry kid. I became bitter, spiteful, and mean-spirited. Started fights that didn't need to happen, took my frustrations out on people who didn't deserve it. Art- yes, even the art of children and teenagers- is a direct reflection of the artist who creates it, so when I made Code Red all that angst and negativity came right through.

Most of the things I drew and wrote before 2009 are really hard to find these days, even if you're digging. Code Red is the one thing that I'm glad vanished. Maybe later I'll talk more about why that is and all the various different ways I've tried to reconcile it, but this is one story I have no intention of ever reposting (parts of it are technically still out there but... don't bother) and if you think you're EVER watching the animated trailer for it then wooooo boy have I got bad news for you.

 

It's hard for me to believe but the next thing I really put out there was actually Savage Destiny, my own foray into the kaiju genre and a project I'm still toying with to this day! SD is a lot less "organized" than some of these other things- there's not a story you can go read from beginning to end or a complete set of drawings to look at, I changed its art style and direction more than a couple times, it's really changed throughout the years because so have I. This is the project that never dies, the one that's always at least in the back of my mind, the one I want to get absolutely perfect when I finally do tackle it for real. Like DHD there will almost certainly be a post or two in the future about Savage Destiny. If you're one of the few people out there who knows Caitlyn & Theraga, I promise you: you haven't seen the last of them.

Nychus, on the other hand, might be in retirement for good. Monsters In Training (or for a while just Monster College) was another all-original endeavor, this time a cartoon, originally intended to be a webcomic and then later a comic-comic. Which it kind of became? Sort of. Technically. Not really.

I put 2014 as the ending date for this one because that's when it reached its culmination, as a printed comic I exhibited for my college senior show, but technically I've been drawing some of the characters and thinking about a reboot until fairly recently. I made a preposterous number of sketches and notebook doodles for this, but the amount of actual, finished content is minuscule: pretty much just that one 28 page comic (which hasn't aged very well).

Why I'm not moving forward with M.I.T is a long story... I miiight open up about it, but probably not?

 

 

The same year I started doodling Nychus I decided to make a tribute to my favorite turtle, Gamera! Kind of intended as the anti Code Red, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe / Gamera: Destroyer of Mankind was a tale of two parallel timelines. The edgy dark timeline was explicitly framed as being the worse of the two scenarios, a cautionary tale about what happens when people act with fear instead of empathy, and the drawings that accompanied both were deliberately bright and cartoonish with thick pen lines and "mostly finished" colors that were meant to invoke drawings in a childhood notebook. The accompanying stories are really more of a collection of summaries and kaiju battles (there's no dialogue and almost no characters), not exactly my best work, but you can read them all on DeviantArt.

The end result is, admittedly, pretty amateurish, and there's a lot more I wish I'd done with it, but GOTU/DOM was an absolute blast to work on and I'm very happy to report that it was well received*.

*By the 10-20 people on this planet of billions who saw it. Yeah, see, I'm self aware!

 

I took one more swing at the Godzilla franchise before the big guy came back to the States officially. Well, okay- technically I took a second swing, there was Godzilla: The Second Age in 2008, but I wrote so little of that I never even uploaded it anywhere. We won't even talk about Godzilla Rising. No, this one was just called Godzilla, or G1 for short.

Like my earlier Gamera story, this was basically just a really long, detailed plot synopsis... or a synopsis and a half, if you count the G0 Godzilla vs King Kong prequel. Neither were fully fleshed "real" stories- there were characters at least, but nothing was told in real time so it was very short. Still, for such a nothingburger project this got a shockingly positive reception (from the few people who-- do I really need to keep saying this?), so much so that I genuinely still feel bad about not continuing it.

The original King Kong vs Godzilla actually originated with a script from Willis O'Brien (then King Kong vs. Frankenstein- long story), so I wanted to explore an alternate reality where Toho really had produced a joint US-Japanese Godzilla film sometime in the 1960s, using stop motion animation instead of suits. The end result was a tragic love story and retelling of Godzilla's origin that can be read here.

 

In 2015 I wrote a short story I'm retroactively calling The Disorder; it was my entry into a DeviantArt contest by RenDragonClaw, where entrants were challenged to take monster traits from a randomizer and craft them into a cohesive kaiju character that somehow represented them. I bent the rules a little bit and wrote about a monster that wasn't exactly me, per say, but rather a part of me- the chronic anxiety and depression I'd just been diagnosed with.

 

I wouldn't usually consider a single drawing to be a "project", but the 100 Halloween Hybrids took foreveeeeer to get done and were pretty ""popular"". It was a two birds with one stone type situation where I combined my nostalgia for Monster Rancher's combination mechanic with a Creature of the Week creative exercise. You can look at the drawing here, but you'll need to go to Tumblr to read the descriptions.

 

If you've never played the PS2 game War of the Monsters then you're really missing out. It was a game I very desperately wanted to get a sequel, one I spent years eagerly awaiting. When it never happened I decided to "make my own". I went all in on War of the Monsters 2, with a batch of original monsters more than twice the size of the real game's roster, skins for all of them and the old monsters, character endings, boss descriptions, and a rundown of new modes, gameplay mechanics, maps, and a new branching campaign.

I'm gonna remind you again for hopefully the last time that I'm an absolute nobody with a ""fanbase"" the size of which pales in comparison to even the paltriest of YouTuber channels, BUT, by my dramatically low standards, this got quite a lot of buzz. I was pleasantly surprised by how many people saw this and liked either it or WOTM enough to reach out!

Technically I started uploading WOTM2 stuff in 2011, but I listed it here as a 2016 project because that's when I made most of the really novel content like the new monsters and campaign description.

I've thought about giving this speculative wish-list sequel treatment to SNK's King of the Monsters franchise too but it's never quite worked out.

 

Near the end of 2018 I uploaded Terra Monstrum, a 120 page fan-fic about B-list Toho kaiju like Anguirus, King Caesar and Manda having to save the world after Godzilla dies. The story came with a timeline of events, size comparisons of all the monsters, and a whopping tall image with character art done in the style of the 1990s Trendmasters toy packaging.

The whole thing can be read over on Wattpad, but DeviantArt's still the best place to look at the art.

Even by my standards I don't think very many people read TM (it was pretty long), but the ones who did seemed to all have strong opinions about it. I was kind of shocked by how """many""" people got emotional reading it. There's a fair bit I'd have done differently now (it's more of a proper story than most of the things above but still reads mostly like a collection of fights) but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't kind of proud of Terra Monstrum. It's weird and flawed and amateur, but something about that project hit right. I feel good about that, especially since I'll ostensibly always be the Code Red guy too.

TM was initially planned to be the first part of a trilogy but proved to be too time consuming; the earliest un-named drafts of it were around well before there were rumors of Legendary doing a new American Godzilla film, but by the time I was one chapter in on TM2 King of the Monsters was already out in theaters. The desperate, content-sparse giant monster dry spell of the 2010s was over and now Godzilla was everywhere again; part of me felt like there wasn't even any need anymore.

Monster Hunter is my all-time favorite video game series. This is not a secret.

I've always been doing fanart of this franchise, taking deep dives into its lore, and occasionally sketching my own ideas for new monsters, so one day I just decided: what the heck- why not fully commit to the bit?

The Monster Hunter Verge wiki is a whole dang wikipedia type thing (Fandom/Wikia is controversial at best I know, but the extent of my coding knowledge can be summarized by a wet fart so I'm using what I can) with hand-made location maps, written monster ecologies, and designs for original creations meant to fit into Capcom's world. It's designed to feel like something that could, hypothetically, be a real MH title- maybe a touch overzealous still, but deliberately more reserved than the usual "I want every monster in the series back" and "I want 20 new weapons AT LEAST" type affairs you see so often.

As of the time of me writing this it is very much an incomplete project, but it's not dying or abandoned, just kind of a "background thing". The scope of it is so large that realistically it just can't be completed in one go. I'll probably be messing with it off and on for years, tweaking things and taking breaks, coming back intermittently to work on it whenever I don't have anything else going on.

 

Rewinding a little ways to 2015*, one summer I started jotting down ideas for a video game concept that combined elements of RTS and fighting games. I never named it and only semi-seriously messed around with it off and on for years. At one point it was about scaled up animals like cheetahs and orangutans competing for land. Later on it became about dinosaurs, then dinosaurs and mythic beasts, giant bugs, medieval siege machines, and so on. By the time I finally submitted some finished drawings to DeviantArt in 2020 I'd already lost count of how many times I'd rewritten this concept.

*I'd also planned and drawn a lot of similar concepts in the years before and after, like Legend of the Orb and a thing with dinosaurs & aliens, but none of them were very good IMO. The point is I've had a dinosaur fighting game on my mind for-basically-ever.

The result ended up being the "Ages" series, starting with Age of Fire. The idea was that I would do four installments (or "expansions", if you will), each with a different theme. The first one, Fire, was a caveman & dinosaur type fantasy inspired by the likes of One Million Years B.C. and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. The conceit was that each time a new Age would be added those same cavemen & dinosaurs would get to interact with a new genre of fantasy with its own monstrous pantheon, like cryptids or modern monster movie tropes.

The project was "very" ""well received"" (no I won't stop with the quotation marks bugger off) but also proved to be one of the most ambitious things I've ever tackled. It went through a long and tumultuous development involving last minute changes in art direction, two full-blown false starts, corrupted data, accidentally saved over and deleted files, a dead laptop, multiple replacement laptops, and a slew of commissions from other artists. I'm not exaggerating when I say I spent the better part of two years just trying to get through this and was legitimately actually surprised when I did.

And it was just part one of four. Uh-oh...

The second installment, Age of Aether, had a much smoother development overall but proved to be no less stressful or slow going. Again, the result was mostly worth it- the people who liked it loved it and I'm happy how most of the art turned out- but the journey to get there just kind of sucked. I was utterly spent after Age of Fire and even after a break still didn't feel up to doing all of that a second time (let alone a third or fourth) so I "outsourced" most of the artwork. It cost a pretty penny and switched the whole thing from a strictly personal project into more of a collaborative event. Not exactly what I had in mind (and not a decision everyone approved of), but I don't regret it! The best part of the whole thing was working with friends and seeing how differently they all interpreted the same prompts; the commissioned artists whipped up some really wild designs I never would have thought of and I'm not ashamed to say most if not all of them just flat-out objectively outdid me! That part was great.

The problem was it wasn't something I could afford to keep doing repeatedly. It also got me asking myself a lot of questions like "is my heart even in this if I have to keep paying other people to complete it for me?".

I looked at the mountain of character skins and commissions ahead of me and finally said "no".

As of right now I'm plotting a sort of spiritual successor to Ages... but more on that later.

Happy New Year, everyone- let's see what 2025 brings!