New Headlines, Same Old Story

I recently stumbled upon a headline worthy of an Ed Byrne comment.

4th March 2009, Tim Eves dies suddenly. 28th of March 2009, this article appears.

Going to the article may lead you to the question, "...how is that headline worthy of an Ed Byrne comment?" The answer is, it's not. This was just the earliest story [that I could find] that quite likely led to a stream of other stories a couple of days later, including the one that first came to my attention when I logged into my MSN to check out my emails.

Note under "Today's Picks" the second headline: "Man, 25, dies playing Wii Fit"

Pretty shocking, even more shocking when I eventually found seven more articles that had been posted yesterday [30 March 2009] about him and two more that were posted today - and those are just the ones I could be bothered to look at before writing this. I have no doubt that more will spring up today and tomorrow. I think it's lame how many people will read these headlines, simply because somebody read the first article and thought it ironic that somebody happened to die while doing something that is supposed to help us live longer and healthier lives. The Ed Byrne joke I have been referring to of course has been the one where comments on Alanis Morissette's song, "Ironic".

The family were told he could have been killed by Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.
Also known as Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome, it is a disorder of the electrical system of the heart

- Mail Online

To that annoying person causing another waterfall of diss to the games industry [and by association, me and all my course mates], inadvertently or otherwise: Tim Eves' death was not ironic [that is, if he did die from SADS and this site is anything to go by].

If he had been in need of some exercise to the point where his life expectancy was affected, and then he purchased a Wii Fit in an attempt to extend his life expectancy, but then died while using the Wii Fit because the lack of exercise up until the decision to purchase a Wii Fit had caused him keel over... That would have been ironic.

Hell, it would have been ironic even if he had died carrying it home due to not being accustomed to any kind of exertion at all.

As it is, he was thought to be perfectly fit and healthy before he died. He helped to lead the First Belton Scout Group. He played in a band called Turnstone, which became Distant Sun [I presume as the drummer, as he was buried with his drumsticks in his hands], he enjoyed cycling, and fishing. My condolences go out to the people who knew him.

His death was simply unfortunate, and I should like to give you - the annoying story twisting sensationalist [and all those who saw your story and repeated it with similar headlines] - a good kick up the bum, not only for continuing the games-are-evil train of thought in such a pathetic manner, but also for causing thousands to register Tim Eves in their minds as "that 25 year old dude who died playing that Wii Fit thing...".

Let's get this show on the road.

Here is what I should have posted a week or two ago... We've have since handed in the work and had the crit where people look at our work and we discuss what works and what doesn't.

Ours was recieved pretty well, in that the comments made were generally expected ones. Someone said more explanation of what was going on would have been nice, and we did initially intend to have a third shot of the deaths, to better explain what had happened, but had to take them out because we felt the standard was not good enough at that point. Dave said that was good decision making. Woo.

There were a few things he didn't like, such as the lamp lady turning on during rollover instead of on a click. I have to say, I was a bit annoyed that I missed out on a day of work near the end because I got ill and ended up in bed literally all day, but I reckon if anything is really annoying me about it I can have a secondary pop at it for my own personal satisfaction. There will be more criting tomorrow, as we didn't get through everybody today before the Maya tech.

The Maya tech was good, I learned how to make a ball bounce. It was very exciting stuff, I can tell you. I have the video Playbash or whatever it's called on a stick somewhere, so I'll put it up soon.

---

Less than a week to go before our deadline, and we just need to:

- Get all the assets done..

- Import it all into Flash

- Make it all interactive

- Add sounds

- Make sure it all works

- Make sure it does what the brief said

- Make any neccessary adjustments

...I think we can get it done...

Temporary picture of the pool, a combination of our efforts

Temp picture of the pool at night.

...Pictures of some unfortunate person's hand...

Based on a small lamp, this will be a life sized lamp in the scene, which will cause a death due to some kind of power surge.

This poor girl above will eventually have a shard of glass in her eye... Also some more definition that will be taken from the source photo will be added. Oh, and some blood, lots of lovely trickly blood

Let's do the Time Warp again

I found a rather nice clock.

It was in a stock on dA, found here.

Also, I have a lot of updating to do, as a fair few weeks have passed. I had an idea to make it so that when you click the clock, it zooms into the clock, fastforwards through time, and then settles at and zooms out to show the pool at night, where the viewer can click on something to accidently sabotage it [well, accidently at first, no doubt some people will begin purposefully trying to find things to click once they realise that doing so would result in a little animation for them].

Then I had a second idea - what if the view before you is just a decrepid, deserted pool, out of business, and clicking on the clock sends you back in time so you can see what happened to make it that way? Then I suggested this to Dae, who then came up with the surveillance camera idea. The viewer is looking at surveillance footage of the pool. Clicking on things in the "video" would show the viewer somebody's death. Mousing over the cursed statue would cause some interference on the video [see the very quick knock-up video below - BEWARE, the white noise might be a bit loud on there]. There would also be some interference whenever something gets sabotaged and while the statue's eye is glowing.

Here's Seth. Except he won't really be doing anything in the final piece, I just did it as a warm up for drawing and colouring him for real, to get an idea for colours. Also I wondered whether I could scare Dae into thinking this was the peak of my drawing abilities. Hehehe.

Below is the proper Seth linework, aswell as some colour testing done in chalk pastels.


More colour testing... Most pictures I found of Seth shows him with blue hair, but most of the text I found about him mentioned how he is often depicted with red hair. A meeting with Dae decided that we'd give him a black face and red hair, to link him more to death and evil-doing.

Brought into photoshop and blocked in with colour, not actually finished at this stage [note the arm bands], and I will be making it look a bit more 3D later.
Oh.. I've also just noticed he has no tail, and most of my sources say he's supposed to have a forked one.

We've also been playing around with perspective a bit [or in my case a whole lot].

This next picture is one Dae sent me over MSN that he had done so I could have a look. I'm liking the POV, although some of the perspective is pretty out of whack [such as the diving board and the clock].

Here I've taken his drawing into photoshop and tried to figure out perspective, basing it on the lines of the pool, because I liked them...

Just yesterday we were given the handbooks telling us the brief and the aim of the project, which was a bit lame as Dave pointed out considering we're two thirds of the way through already, but better later than never.

"..create a set piece of interactive flash animation. The concept and development of the project should follow the premise that the work is a postcard from some remote place. That place might be a surreal world, something ordinary, posted from within a dream; it is up to you to develop in pairs a conceptual design to be created in Macromedia Flash.

...

Brief:
Grouped into pairs, produce in Macromedia Flash a set-piece, single-screen illustration. This illustration should feature a degree of interaction in the form of 'clickable' or 'scripted' elements, and should focus on the communication of an emotional sense of place and environment."

Hmm... Well, the emotional sense of the place is probably going to be quite a hostile one. Possibly quite unstable as Seth is the Egyptian God of Chaos, and tinged with hints of the anger and frustration of the manager [aka Angry Tech Support Customer].
When I read the brief, I realised that we were trying to do too much, sort of turning it into an interactive mini movie when really what we want to do is create a painting, one that moves when you poke it. I mentioned this to Dae, and suggested we just flash some grisly images of death rather than fully animating them.

On a seperate note... look, a walking robo doggy, and a rope! [Guess what happens next..]

It was finally co-operative enough to upload my animation for me :) I got a B13 for it overall [which is like, a B+] and a B12 for the character design of the first red dog [equivalent of a normal B].

Thats all for now. I really should update this more frequently, it would makes things much simpler when uploading as I wont have a billion images to have to rearrange because Blogger likes to put images at the top of the page instead of after everything.

Flash Project: Interactive Horror Themed Postcard

The next project we're working on is a Flash project, with the theme Horror, if you couldn't tell from the title of this post. We're working in pairs, and Dave gave us all two "monsters" at random to include in the world that we decide to show, and we have 6 weeks to do it [well, 5 now I think].

I'm working with Daemon, and the "monsters" we were given were Angry Tech Support Customer and Rusty Sculpture. Yeah... I then proceeded to take a picture of Scott and Kieran labelled as appropriate, hahaha.

That's Scott's new iPhone in his hand, but moving on - Dae and I came up with a few ideas, which included:

1: An alien ship malfunctioned, crashed into a palace that is owned by a clown, that happens to contain rusty sculptures. The alien is the angry tech support customer.

2: Rusty armour that is possessed by a ghost, who wants a refund on the rusty armour, because it is rusty...

3: Tech office worker to be murdered by angry customer. The sculpture would be on his desk. Or the Tech guy turns into a murdering monster.

4: Swimming pool with a haunted statue, moved in to decorate the pool. Statue kills people indirectly via "technical difficulties", causing the owner to get angrier and angrier as his pool loses customers... literally.

We ended up picking number 4 to develop, probably because of all the ways we could think of to get people killed in a swimming pool. Nice bit of variety..

Thought we'd give it a bit of an Egyptian theme, figured it would be nice what with all the cursed stories you can hear about sometimes. Seth is the Egyptian God of Chaos, and murdered his brother by drowning him in a coffin in the Nile, so he seemed like a good candidate for the evil Rusty Sculpture. The statues eyes will flash red in the night, which is where the tech sabotage happens...

To make the pool seem a bit posher we've given it one of those slopes that come right up out of the water. It's a bit like the one at the Blue Lagoon where dad works [well, that's what it reminds me of]. Dae thought it would look sleeker with square or box shaped ducts above the pool instead of the round ones.

And yes, a section will be falling on top of someone at some point. We're also thinking of killing a clown in a cruelly comical fashion on the diving boards, skinning someone alive in the slide, cooking some people in the hot tub, sucking someone with a fan at the bottom of the pool, and perhaps having a shark or crocodile swim into the pool too. Fun times.


I sent the pool pic to Dae so he could explain what he meant about the darker walls, gonna do it properly in a bit. He's working on the Angry Manager, I might put a few pics up of him another time if I can. Now I'm really hungry, so watch this space, and do give input if you feel like it'll help.

I am the white rabbit.

"I'm late! I'm late!"
Yes, I know it's been like a month since the last post, but hey I'm here now.

I'm not going to tell you how I couldn't work out for ages why my laptop's bluetooth wasn't working, only to find that I must have flipped the switch on the side turning the wireless off, and didn't realise for weeks because my internet connection in my room at uni doesn't require wireless because it has a wire.... because then you'd know how observant I can be.

So now, what can I show you...

Well, there is part of the dogbot's walk. It was done flipbook animation style for a walk cycle excercise. But.. you'll have to wait for that because apparently the only place I saved that video was on the media drive at uni.

There's also a little group project I was involved in where we had to come up with and propose an idea for a game to get traffic to the uni's website [other groups had other briefs]. We came up with a little game called Gastronomy, where the student collects cans of beans floating in the air to.. ahem.. propel himself to the stars.

Apparently we did really well in the presentation, having kept it simple. Also we were told that somehow we managed to make the idea sound... half decent [considering it's basically a guy who farts his way to space].

We've also started life drawing classes, which I'll admit I was worried about, not because of my skills but because I thought I might laugh the first time. I was lucky as the only naked people I've had to draw have been female, so I've not really had to draw anything scary. It was a little harder during the second class as we didn't have a proper model to pose for us, instead we had to pose and draw eachother [not in the nude, I should add].

One of the trickier poses of the first model we had to draw

The life drawing teacher, Elfyn Lewis, is pretty cool and each session he sets us a homework. First was a self portrait in pencil, second was one using biro only, third to do over the holidays is another biro of ourselves, and one of a friend or family member in pencil [I've yet to start the third, but I'd better get on it soon now as we need to spend a good few hours on each].

Before and after on my first portrait. The mirror check made it blatently obvious that I'd drawn the eye on the left and the mouth too high in the first shot, allowing me to adjust it before doing more shading.


Before and during the second portrait. I found drawing initially with dots rather than faint lines better as the marks made in the wrong place were less noticeable.

Final second portrait, I was sat at my desk in my room

The last lecture I had was a cool little Game Maker tutorial which was pretty fun. Barry Atkins [who's unfortunately not gonna be lecturing us for the next year cos of another job - laaame! His lectures aren't boring enough for me to feel indifferent haha] taught us how to make a little spaceship that moves side to side, with aliens to shoot at that move randomly [it's funny, when I've watched family members play what I made, and sometimes when I play myself, it feels like they're moving intelligently although I know they're not]. Since coming home I've edited it slightly so that the first screen displays the controls, with "Do not push" buttons moving around randomly. It shouldn't take long for players to figure out what to click on to start the game...

That'll do for now methinks. At the moment I'm just waiting for a friend to send me a guest-pass to start playing World of Warcraft, he told me to check my emails but it's not there yet... I've played it a little, and I like the fact that to respawn you have to run your spirit back to your body. It's a nice touch, even if it does get a tad annoying when you've had to do it 5 times in a row. Moral of the story? Don't let the character die in the first place! As for the rest, I've noticed I'm not like the other gamers and it's unlikely I'll be spending time levelling on purpose, but will just be exploring what these Blizzard people have created.

There were some videos I wanted to upload here, but for some reason it's taking waaaay too long. I'm giving up on them for now. So... yeah. 'Til next time!

Woooo, the robot dog!

Well, here she is:

In the making: This is actually a photo I took of the screen because I didn't have a USB on me at the time:

And here's my desk [that said, most of the production of my dog was done over in KA3 with the guys]:

And... here she is looking confused. The story is, she built a robot dog. Next thing she knows, she IS the robot dog, regretting the fact that instead of front paws with claws, she gave the dog kangaroo boots...

In the beginning...

Well, I am now a good two months into the course, which I am enjoying enough to say, "I'm glad the CGD interview came first." However, this also means I'm a bit behind on blogging about work and stuff. So...
Today and tomorrow [or technically still today] I will be updating this blog with images etc. of my work so far. I'm hoping this will persuade me to get out of bed before noon, in which case I'd better get to bed asap, so that I can't use the excuse "I haven't slept enough" to keep me in bed.

But first:
A robot dog....

[Some time later...]

Uhh... Will be uploaded later, when I figure out why it's not working. Until then, nos da!