Brendon Schumacker

Illustration and Development


Welcome to BSCHU.net. This website is for promotion of my projects which generally includes illustration, writing, coding and more recently – putting all that together for game development.

I recently had to take down my previous site and start from scratch because of some type of security issues which I didn’t have time to deal with. So I just wiped the site clean and started from scratch. Meanwhile, I’m on the quest for the perfect CMS for my purposes, something which hopefully doesn’t come equipped with every security hole known to mankind (hello WordPress!).

But fear not, I have plenty of content on other platforms. Check the link below for art content, or keep scrolling down for content regarding my new game Keystone Library, or, look at the options in the header menu above.

DeviantArt Gallery

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Keystone Library was inspired by a love of keyboards, illustration, music and storytelling.

I actually started this game as a simple web project. I was experimenting with some new coding frameworks and simultaneously I was looking for something to do with all these illustrations I had made over the years. So I started making this typing game with illustrations as a background. And it was fun! It was cool! So I kept working on it and kept adding features as I went along.

I wanted to make it into a fully-fledged game that I could share online, but I already had some bad experience with bloated game engines, and Flash had gone out of style. Then I stumbled upon Godot, an open source game engine project, backed by Google. And from there it was history.

Now it’s been over two years and I’m still working on it.

The original philosophy of the game is to make an environment where everyone can login to the "Library" and choose a book with a theme they like - mythology, cyberpunk, fantasy, etc. And each book will have it’s own story to follow while you play casual keyboard interface games.

So far here, I think the idea is pretty simple. It’s a game with various stories and mini games for each story. So it’s a library of story-based mini-games.

Oh! But I couldn’t just leave it there, could I? No way. Let’s spice it up a bit more!

Since I’ve been studying illustration and storytelling for a great many years, I wanted each story to be really immersive and engaging. I’m hoping that each story will be like reading a book, watching a movie, really draw you into the world of the story. So I started collaborating with a music composer and she is composing all these awesome songs and environmental sound and sound effects to compliment the stories!

Now, we have Keystone Library. That is the dream. The dream has come to fruition!

In addition to this, there is also the keyboard element of the game which needs some attention. I wanted to do something different from the usual game, something unique.

As a developer, as a Linux enthusiast, and as a lover of matrix-style consoles and terminals, I thought I could try to bring my love of keyboards to the game. So I designed the entire game to be mouse-free, keyboard-only. This could possibly change in the future, but so far it this is how it remains, and it has been really fun to design the game like this. I like to see it as a type of "Matrix-style Dream Interface" where you can feel like a hacker typing commands into a terminal, but with tons of visual and audio effects to enhance the experience.

Using a keyboard as an interface for a game offers so much more than the usual game too. You can type commands to interact with the scene and characters, which opens up the door for all types of creativity. Imagine having an interactive chat with a character? Imagine an open-ended experience where you have to guess the right thing to say? Imagine the ability to control the environment with more than just a mouse motion and a button click?

This offers a creative environment with much more than just menu options. You can potentially type all types of commands and interact with the characters, the environment, and become more immersed in the story.

But much of this is still aspiration and food-for-thought. I am pushing the limits of this idea as far as I can, but not quite there yet. It will take a little more time to build the game beyond the appearance of "just a typing game". And that’s basically my main focus right now.

Other than that last hurdle. I’m extremely happy how things have come along and I am looking forward to sharing more of the game with you soon.

You can find an aspirational feature list of the game here in this blog, as well as an ongoing log on the daily/weekly updates to the game. Links below.

Keystone Feature List

Keystone Log