Personal Statement.

Well, it is now almost ten to 11pm, and I've been quickly typing out a personal statement for tomorrows lecture.

I've given up on trying to pursue a career in something in particular. Here's what I typed out. Italicised text is just the stuff I wrote to get into writing mode.

---

Personal Statement.

I have experience in:
- modelling and UV mapping in Maya,
- texturing with Photoshop,
- some javascript programming in Unity3D,
- organisation and planning within spreadsheets, including Excel, Google Docs and Google Sites
- animation in Flash and Maya.

You know, writing a personal statement is really fucking hard when you have so many varied and sometimes conflicting interests, especially when you don’t know who you’re trying to impress.

Maybe I should start with why I chose to study Computer Games Design at University.

Well.

I do not have a passion for games. I have a passion for creating, making, observing, learning, exploring new areas and concepts, and an insatiable desire for acquiring more knowledge and skills that allow me to do even more for myself.

When I chose to study Computer Game Design, I was looking for a course that would allow me to further develop multiple skills, including my visual art skills [drawing, painting, photography, photo-manipulation, sculpture, architecture, animation and film making], story writing [be this for games, music, film or plain prose], audio creation [including song writing and ambient music and audio clip selection for conveying feelings and sensations within a situation or area - although usually for use in film/visual work], research skills [including historical, psychological and scientific understanding, and learning how things and systems physically work and the concepts behind why they work in this way, and what these things could mean for future developments in various areas], programming skills [to allow me to create and control interactive virtual environments and systems myself] and teamwork skills.

When I was younger I was never able to seriously answer the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” As a young adult, I still feel unable to pigeonhole myself into a single specific career choice.

---

Haha. What do you think... would you give me a job?

A more important question to me would be; would you give me a job I would enjoy?

HubHouse: Make a house a Home.

I've added a few tables and chairs into the house now. It also got some interior walls and new different wallpaper colours over Easter. And a bit of grime. The bathroom now has a bath, but no sink or loo... very hygienic...

There is a magic teleportation device in one of the rooms aswell. It looks like a very strange and out of place cube.

...Okay, there isn't actually going to be a strange mysterious teleporting cube in the game. The cube is just the place holder for the code until we can get some magic paintings modelled and textured in there.

HubHouse: Changing Rooms

Got some fancy new wallpaper for the walls, coving and skirting boards, and a nice bit of board for the door...

Click on the images to get a better look at the wallpaper and grime.

HubHouse: Hole in the wall.

Bit more progress today, I've knocked through the wall, and UV mapped the house and given it a quick texture. Also been fiddling with lights, still looks a bit on the dingy side and what little light there is in the stairwell seems to be coming from out of nowhere...

HubHouse: Infinite Stairway

Here's the stairway the player begins in.

Access to the actual home part of the house: coming soon!

New house hub-area...

Here's what I've been working on today:

When I'm done, the player can try and try to get out, but they will always end up in the same place...

FireBENCH!

This is a little something I made last night, for fun:

... I call it "FireBENCH!"

When you click, you fire benches that are on fire at the targets on the wall.*

... The targets are flammable.

Each time you click, the word, "Fire!" can just about be heard over the background music of a version of Firestarter that had Eric Cartman dubbed in as singing along to it.


* The targets' faces originally looked like a slightly modified version of the "troll face" that I've seen around the Internet, except with pink skin, brown hair added and an orange hoodie. I believe the picture was drawn by Frodey [or Frody?] in the year below me, but I hadn't asked to use it so I've got some more standard targets in for these screenshots. Also, I started feeling a bit creeped out by the fact that I had made this game when all those faces were looking at me, so I thought I'd better change it anyway...

Someone's vandalised the second room!

It has been a while since either of us have posted on this blog - apologies! Dissertations are out of the way now though, so we'll be able to focus our efforts on the project more :)

In the past month, "somebody" has vandalised room two.

They even put one on the outside of the room!

Meanwhile, I've been sat here at my laptop figuring out some javascript. I did manage to make the OrthoCamera [the 2D side view camera] move to the correct position depending on which room the player was in, but for some reason it kept forcing the view to change to it each time the new camera was created.

That wasn't supposed to happen, so after a chat with Mike Reddy [a Games & Artificial Intelligence lecturer] and Cody [? I think Rich said he went to UWN and graduated a few years ago?], I'm attempting to code this new script that tells the OrthoCamera to translate to the new position instead of destroying and re-instantiating it there...

I got quite stuck on Tuesday when I started doing this, but after watching a few Unity 3D Student videos, I think it's on its way again.

Roath will be happy days for me, I think!

Okay, I suppose I deserve a slap on the wrist. Not only have I not been doing anything on the book designs front in the past few weeks, I have also not been doing much in the way of Uni work either, and my 365 page a day project has been neglected for... I'd say around a month. I am a bad, bad girl.

But wait! I have not been doing nothing!

I've been heading out to Cardiff a lot lately, first to find and view and choose a house to live with some friends. There are eight of us, six of which will still be in Uni next year, but we have split up into two groups of four for the purposes of house-finding. I'm going to be living with Claire, Dave and Todd, who I can affectionately refer to as The French Actress, The Dark Dove and The Wizard Rockstar... Really need to come up with some good names for the other four guys. I'm also not sure what nickname I would have, although I've been told by the DarkDove that if I were a Pokemon I might be a Persian, and that the French word for cat is pronounced the same way as the first half of my name. Perhaps I'm The Petit Chat?

Almost us: This image drawn by The Wizard Rockstar includes members who won't be part of the Cardiff crew, and is missing out a couple of people...

We've all managed to find houses and flats in Roath, literally a couple of blocks away from each other, which is fantastic. We won't have a garden in the flat my half will live in, so I was looking up allotments in Cardiff and found some cool things going on.

Then I found out all about the Roath Market, and the Craft Market too, as well as an apparently abundant craft culture in Roath [see here too]. Needless to say, I am now even more excited about the first post-Uni year of my life than I was before!! And unfortunately more distracted from my current Uni coursework....

Come now Petit Chat, don't get too ahead of yourself!

Yellow Snake

Today I made a little artwork to splat onto the walls of room two. Wasn't sure what to do though, so I'm drawing a little inspiration from my 4 Pillars [if you don't know what that means, don't worry. It's one of those Chinese Horoscope things].

Here's my year pillar, the Yellow Snake:

I literally just painted the body with the touch pad on my laptop, and sneaked a peek at this tutorial for some help with making it look like old graffiti.

Here's a quick look within Unity:

Empty Room; Requires Vandalism

This is a quick check I'm doing to see how the texture I've put on puzzle room two looks, before I start vandalising it with paint and more wear and tear like Tim has done for the first room.

I'm going to paint some walls

Project

Well, the animating plan didn't work out too well. I found it really hard trying to work with a rig I didn't understand. I might have done better if I had used the same tutorial Tim had worked from to rig a character, so that I'd know from the start what all the lines on the rig meant [perhaps I should rig up Mr Shiny when he is made?].

So this week I've got to texture up the second room of the first level. Here's what I've been given to work with:

Tim has shared a bunch of textures with me using Dropbox [Dropbox is a file sharing/syncing software and website that's pretty cool. If only I had more computers with files I want to keep track of so I could play with syncing stuff with myself...]

UPDATE: Have put the base texture on the walls, floor and ceiling, now it just a little tender, loving care vandalism decoration.

I've also made a little task chart for us to look at and use. I'm not sure how up to date it is at the moment and we haven't thoroughly discussed Milestones at all, but it's up there and is shared in our Dropbox folder for us to edit as we go.

Dissertation

I think I've gone into denial. The sun is out, I can smell freshly cut grass, I've got plans for living arrangements next year in Cardiff with some friends, and I've got texturing to do today. Let's just say I will be happy when I have seen the end of the dissertation period.

I'll be like Dr Frankenstein

Looks like I've got me some animating to do! Tim's gotten sick of looking at Tagger, so we're having a bit of a switcharoo. He's going to take over the environment for now, and I'm going to animate the rest of Tagger's animations. Except I haven't done any 3D character animation since the tweaking of old Igor back in year 1...

Tutorials to the rescue! Here seems to be a nice little one from OliverBarraza on YouTube about importing character animations from Maya into Unity. Not hugely in depth but I think I get the gist of that side of things.



What I seriously need now though is some tuts for tips on handling a rigged up character for animating. Part 2 following the above video has some tips, not sure I quite understand some of them yet though. I think I will just have to have a play and see what I can do.



He has some more tutorials in his Advanced Unity Tutorial series, so I'm going to check those out now and see what I can learn.

Idle animation in engine

[by Tim]

Paper Production Grades, and Minecraft

Got my grades back for the Paper Production module today.

Post Mortem/Diary:
Creativity = B12
Research = B13
Development = B13
Overall = B13

Design Portfolio:
Creativity = B12
Research = B12
Development = B11
Overall = B12

Presentation:
Creativity = C10
Research = C10
Development = B11
Overall = C10

Overall grade = B12

Nice.


Minecraft

I played Minecraft for the first time last night, and I think I probably shouldn't buy it. It seems like the kind of game I would waste a lot of time and attention on. That said, I might end up buying it anyway, because I had a play on the free version on their site and got annoyed that I couldn't craft things from the stuff I found, only place blocks and destroy blocks...

Did I say might? I kind of... just did...

Unfit for Public Consumption

Oh man. Some things just aren't. I remembered a dream the other day well, but I didn't want to write it up in detail. It involved getting a naughty letter from someone I know. Today's dream however is a different sort of unfit for public consumption.

The first bit was fine, it involves me being a cop and then being arrested even though I didn't do anything, and at my trial they gave me a prescription and sent me to a triangle shaped Square [a bit like in Tenby] / street, where I was to go see someone and get me some pills. Before that there was something to do with a train, and after that something to do with being on the force again with three other guys [I think I was a guy when I was a cop. Why do I do that, dream that I'm male? I've only noticed it since writing these dreams up], and being in a car reversing while one of them explained that we were to climb onto the top of the roofs as back up to each other, one on each building to the left of us and me on the last one. Why is this unfit for public consumption? It's not. Just wait.

The Dream

Continuing with the story, there is something to do with a flashback of this girl, when some mob boss had a load of dudes involved in some crimed lined up unconscious on the floor waiting for a helicopter. Out of some act of goodwill or something, he gives the blonde girl, who may have been a cop [played by someone who looked now and then like that blonde lady in 30Rock], her friend, played by Eva Mendes. Eva Mendes in this dream was one of the unconcious people. If this scene were in a movie, it would be really odd to see. Blonde girl was sat in some kind of pale painted metal area, like on the top of a building, bridge or submarine, holding Mendes fireman style, shouting some sort of thanks to the helicopter.

This is when things start sort of changing and getting weirder. I remember things looking slightly futuristic, like Star Trek, but things were also a little Medieval. I heard a ruckus and went through some double doors. These people were convinced that they should worship this bubbling cauldron / hot tub of water. The blonde girl was there, looking all fanatic, and around five other people, one of which seemed to have developed warts on his hands that for some reason I knew hadn't been there before. The cauldron was actually talking in an evil ominous voice and lighting up inside with pink light, saying, "Don't worship me! Don't worship me!!" Why they thought it was a good idea to worship it when it was telling them not to I do not know.

Everything up until this point kinda made a little bit of sense. In the past month I have seen a few cop films, and I saw The Other Guys that had Eva Mendes in, and have been watching the Yogscast Minecraft videos, a few of which included a Star Trek custom map. Although none of my dream today had any pixally cubes in.

This is where it gets nasty. I left the room a little while to listen to what the Mayor or whoever he was had to say about it, as did the "worshippers". Then the blonde ran back in to do more worshipping, but instead of the bubbling cauldron hot tub there was a sinister table with robotic arms and instruments, like a modern day Medieval torture device. First it grabbed her and stretched her out, dislocating her joints, then I think it folded her up sort of and chopped her hands off, then it... took... her lips. And she was totally awake for all of this. Also, when did her clothes disappear? This is horrendous, I thought. How is she still awake?

And just like that, my brain decided I had seen enough, and turned off the dream.

The Reality

I was back in my room, eyes still closed wondering why the dream just turned off like that, as if something in my mind had said it was past my bedtime and that I shouldn't be watching this horrible stuff. But as horrendous as it was, I think I could have taken what else the horrible machine was going to do. I've seen worse in films, plus, it wasn't that gory. There was no blood and after I woke up I realised that if that ever happened to someone, there would definitely be some blood. Also when it took her lips, it just looked like she had thinner lips, not no lips, so apart from the fact that she screamed, it didn't look that bad. Well, the fact that it took her hands was nasty, but the lip thing was fine.

It is times like these I wonder about my sanity. Then I remember all the crazy things people have put into some of the films I've seen and heard of. I saw worse in Cabin Fever. Urrgh... Cabin Fever is horrible.

Torchlight Rainbows

The Dream

Last night or this morning, I dreamt that someone had shown me a nifty way to use a screen with a camera connected filming a piece of card with colours painted on it in the colours of the spectrum used to reflect light from a torch straight at the camera would cause a beautiful rainbow light to appear on the screen, as if the coloured card and camera combo would work like some kind of prism refracting white light from the torch. Then I practised getting it to work. I think I showed it to my sister Yvette too.

I think earlier on in the dream there was something dangerous going on involving someone killing people or people just being killed by something, but I don't know the details or what that was all about.

The Reality

Your guess is as good as mine.

Previously

I didn't post this before because it was really short and I wasn't sure of the point, but I may as well. This was probably over 4 nights ago.

The Dream

I praised a girl named Zoe Vaughn for her math skills.
Then I accidently nearly made Dave Ware cry.

The Reality

As above, your guess is as good as mine.

Let's get it started! *

I have really been lagging behind on this Business.. business. I've researched adequate packaging for shipping, checked out what other people are selling, had a few ideas, made some things... But I feel I haven't really gotten stuck in yet.

I haven't actually made any products for listing, and ArtFire's 45 Day Guide suggests having at least 100 products to list. So last night, I began to make a small 100 page notebook to fill with product ideas and material requirements and probable costs. I definitely don't have 100 ideas in mind yet, but it's okay. I have a few to get started with.

It just needs some holes and some stitching together. I could have stitched it simply last night, but I want to try something experimental with a macrame spine...



* Have you seen the movie Hot Tub Time Machine? I loved it. Check this out - although I reckon it's better in the context of the actual movie! :)

dA Portfolio

Wow. I totally forgot I had this.

DeviantArt gave us all some kind of portfolio space ages ago. I like it, but I haven't updated mine in over a year. Hmm. Nor have I signed in on dA for a few months.

The Game

New York, Newwww Yorrrrk...

This felt like a really long one.

The Dream

I'm going into a really old house with my three sisters. We're playing hide and seek with my mum, except I think she's tracking us down as if we are wanted assassins of some sort. In other words, stakes were high, and things were dangerous.

The house is huge, a massive maze that seemed to consist of a ramshackle of old dusty beds and platforms that go upwards and outwards almost forever. I peer down through a gap to the bottom level where mum is, and I see her walking about on the old stone floor, the sun shining warmly on it through some kind of opening in a wall I can't see. Up where I am it is dark, but still plenty light enough to see.

The house reminds me of the layout of PlayZone, that indoor adventure place that I went to in Swansea with Tall Dan for his birthday, and the layout of my bedroom when I was 8. We had one room between four girls and to fit us in we had to squeeze two bunk beds against the sides of the room. There was maybe about a foot of space between the beds.

We have a little collection of books between us on my team of sister assassins. I think I realised that I was supposed to smuggle at least one of them out from the house. One of them looked old and magical, and also contained game maps. I didn't understand how to relate them to where we were though; they were very abstract.

This is the point where things begin to merge with a different theme. We are no longer in a huge old house of infinite bunk beds, but outdoors. All we did was move upwards some more, and now there is a well kept hedge to hide behind as well as beds. But then suddenly, Genevieve yells, "There's police in the fields!!"

We all duck, but I think it's too late. Damn it, why did Gen have to shout so loud? Two detectives approach and find us. One was a woman, but not my mum. The other one reminded me of that annoying friend in... hmmm. What's that film with the narrating cowboy and the bowling and the man they call, "The Dude"?

The man interrogates us, and some things start to look pixelated. For some reason, I have a sword now. So does he. Apparently, and according to old and magical rule books that both the police and we had, each of my sisters and I were supposed to have been following roles. They wanted to know what roles we were playing, and if we told them, they wouldn't kill us.

I also seem to remember some kind of little pig-like animal getting a bad fate in this dream, but I'm not sure when or where that happens. I feel like it wasn't at this point but some time earlier...

I didn't understand how simply telling them what our roles were during this game would avoid death by stabbing by the bad cop, so I didn't say anything right away. Then, after some kind of jumping about as if trying to picture possible manoeuvres out of the situation, things felt tense as if I figured there was no way out, so I yelled, "I'm the map reader!" I don't think I was the map reader, but my sisters didn't protest.

I'm not sure exactly what happened next. All I know is I was continuing along a totally 2D pixelated scene, slaying pixelated panthers and other beasts that would probably try to eat me as I went on my own merry way.

Oh, come on post editor, you're made of pixels and you don't know that "pixelated" is a word?

Eventually I come upon some kind of facility. Things change; the place is still kind of pixelated, but more 3D now. It seems to be a square storage area, full of those huge storage containers and truck things and also guns on tripods. Also, I'm in a helicopter. I make my way anti-clockwise around the edge of the facility, hopping over the storage containers as if they were hurdles in a race, being chased by trucks and shot at by guns. I look up to the top left, and see a circler HUD, flashing between orange and red and swarming with enemies. It doesn't look good.

Eventually I fly into a big box that looks like an area has been surrounded with wire fencing around it and above: I'm trapped, and swarms of little truck things roll in after me. Not only am I trapped, but the area appears to be a crushing unit. The trucks begin to get crushed, as does a man who seems to be the owner of the facility. Win! With his legs half crushed, he lets me go.

Seriously, WTF?

I am rewarded with the sword I used in the pixelated jungle. Also, the view is now 3rd person, and I seem to be a simple drawing of a man in a suit and handlebar moustache in black and white. I hug three ladies [we all look old fashioned and dapper], and comment on their umbrellas/parasols. Then I head to a nearby shop, which holds an interesting array of merchandise. I find too little men dolls made of light blue felt and yellow stitching, and I ask if I can have them, with the intention of being them so I could be 3D too.

The shop keeper has a better idea; a framed portrait of the man I'm supposed to be. He gives me the portrait and an umbrella in exchange for the magic umbrella sword I won, because I have no money to pay him with. I happily put the portrait on my face, carefully hanging the top edge of the frame on the top of my forehead, and walk on with a buddy, swinging my nice new white-with-an-elegant-orange-flowery-patterned umbrella. Then I witness a conversation, possibly between Dave and Thebag about how the film was. I think by the film they were referring to the dream. I disagreed with Thebag's telling of the film.

The Reality

... I have some game level design to be doing today. And now I have that New York New York song stuck in my head for some reason.