Wednesday 24 June 2009

Top Secret Project!

Okay, it's not really all that top secret and amazing, but I figured it would be more interesting if I titled it this way.

Remember the Dogbot character I made?
And the post where I mentioned David Freeman's book on Emotioneering?

I'm gonna be trying out a few of his techniques and design a game around the dogbot, and for some reason I'm also imagining a little green blobby alien that takes over the dogbot...

No idea how far I'll take it, but if anything more interesting happens with it, I'll post it up.

As for the Summer assignment, I've spent more time thinking than doing at the mo. I got about this far before I joined the family in the BBQ area in our garden.


Something like bamboo with windows in... and the other one was.. something like... willow branches? Yeaah. I think I'm gonna have to start taking a few pics of stuff in my garden for inspiration and do some proper sketches.

Saturday 20 June 2009

Plot to Take Over the World: Stage 1 - COMPLETE

Officially passed 1st year CGD with a respectable load of B grades [B11, B12, B13 & B13, in that order]


Now I have a Summer Assignment: Natural and Man-Made Form, Micro and Macro.

I am supposed to produce a series of drawings for the design of a virtual environment, inspired by forms in nature, paying "particular attention to differences in scale, from small to large, micro to macro..."

Sounds good, I'm pretty excited for next year already.

Also, I spoke to my friend Dan [a.k.a. the BigBlueLion] and showed him the little flash clip I made. He loved it.

Changing the topic once again, tonight I removed all labels from my posts. My previous system was... barely a system, to be honest, so I'm going to be re-labling [how does one spell that word?] all my previous posts and all posts that follow in a much more useful way. Also added Twitter to my sidebar... although I rarely use it at the moment...

Friday 12 June 2009

Why Guitar Hero is a Beautiful thing.

It introduces kids to classic songs they may otherwise have never heard of.

How many kids go on youtube and purposely seek out this stuff? Not many. Proof that games can introduce kids to more than just a billion different types of gun - it can also introduce them to old music styles in a fun way. Take that, critics of the idea that games can't teach anything!!

Wednesday 10 June 2009

Big Blue Lion & co.


The other day [yesterday?] just for fun, I began making a series of flash clips, using voice clips my friend Daniel sent me via MSN during a random conversation [or three]. It's almost like a follow up to the AIR project I had been involved in recently.

[AIR - Animator In Residence. Basically the animator, Ian Gouldstone, would make a 5 second video clip for us to make a response to. We would have 24 hours to make our 5sec or less response. He would then respond to that, as if we were writing animated letters to eachother, creating a dialogue between two characters that were created by us as the story went on. Click HERE for the result...]

The project went on for a few weeks, and I found it a good way to practice different animating techniques or try new ones I haven't done before, such as the digital rotoscoping maya method Eric and Rhys introduced me to.



This is a video of one of my entries. Bit frustrating as I haven't figured out why I can't export Quicktime movies from Flash, so it wasn't in the format requested. I also ran out of time to do what I originally intended, which was to have a picture of a joker on the side of the red cuboid - like a pack of cards - which would have an animated facial expression.

Also... in the previous clip done by our character, we called Ian's character a leprechaun... I wanted to make a leprechaun style "Jack" pop out, but also didn't have time to get it done. I made the box and handle in maya, animated it in maya, and then put printscreens of each frame into photoshop and traced over the action there. Rotoscoping is a cool technique, but rather time consuming. Especially at 25 fps -_-

But yes. I'm going to show Dan the first one before I put them up anywhere, to see what he thinks. I imagine he'll end up laughing. I know I am, and I haven't even gotten to the good part yet.

Saturday 6 June 2009

Watch out for HEADCRAB ZOMBIES...

I'd apologise for finding this funny but... no. Hahaha :D



This is, without a doubt, the greatest film adaptation of a piece of literature ever.

-- whichwayfilms

Assassins Creed 2 & My Maya grade...

Kieran told me we got a B13, yay! I've just emailed Corrado so I think he will be emailing me some more indepth feedback later.

Onto the next thing:
Just caught this trailer on YouTube...



Verry naiice.
Very cinematic.
Very sorry for the poor dude near the start.


Now for some commentated gameplay..



Leonardo Da Vinci gadgets... It's like James Bond set in the Renaissance.

Monday 1 June 2009

Super Monster Candy Attack!



Went to the 3rd Year's Grad Show the other day, it was pretty good [it's still on, til the 5th June 09 - click here for more info]. Pretty interesting to see what kinds of things we'll be expected to do when we get to Year 3, and the atmosphere was really lively compared to some of the other Grad shows going on.



I wonder why.



CGD, knows how to party hehe :) But I guess the theme was Super Monster Candy Attack, so it wouldn't have been right without some candy!



A lot of the playable pieces were very glitchy, but still cool, and I'd like to see them when they're all done up proper. I heard some are heading to Game City this year, which I am totally attending as last year was Suhhhweeet :) As was breaking the world record for the most number of zombies recorded in one place...



1227 of us :) Anyhoo, back to the Grad Show. Here is a photo of the best thing there.



Am I talking about the mutant chicken thing in the background, or the fan? Blatently gotta be the fan. Just check out that structure, the choice of textures, the fact that it works when you press the "on" button...

I'm joking, however, it was absolutely boiling hot in that room with all those people and computers. It's because CGD is so damn amazing, hehehe.

Also because somebody decided to put the table of sweets in front of the window.. and then somebody decided to have the blinds pulled down so the wind wouldn't blow the sweets away.

Oh! On another note, I've finished playing Fable II. Well sorta, I got to the finale of the game, but I haven't yet experienced the consequences of my wish before leaving the Spire. Am I the only one who got creeped out by the way Theresa spoke at the end about the Spire? But yeah. I was well miffed when Lucian shot my dog. Even if it was just pixels, and the only name I had given it was "Dog", or "Doggy"...