Back in the World of the Wide Web.

Internet man was round yesterday to give us internet access at our house.

Now that I'm not a student [I am a student, I'm still studying, but I don't think studying independantly of any organisations like Universities or schools of my own accord using the Internet and any other sources available to me counts as being a Student in the Gov's eyes, for Some Reason[?] ], I possibly won't be having my free licence to use Maya anymore. So, today I'm downloading Blender again to re-learn it so I can make stuff.

OH! And I forgot to mention, I seem to have gotten me a 2:1 for the past three years of work.

"Miss Charlotte Gyseman B.A.(Hons)"

Nicely done.

How NOT to stand out with your advertising.

Quickly went onto IndieDB today to accept an invite to join the group Flying Bones [the team name for our final major project], and lo and behold, what did I see?

I'm guessing those adverts on the edges are supposed to be in the background - but they're not and have ended up covering a fair portion of the screen's edges. I can't read any of the numbers on the side. I'm not amused. Especially since Ctrl scrolling doesn't do anything to help it.

I don't even know what they're advertising precisely, but already I've probably developed a subconscious link between it and the feeling of rage it's giving me. F.

Quick Prototype Development

Today I registered at IndieDB.

Then I read through this article by the people from the Experimental Gameplay Project on how to prototype games in 7 days.

... A very short post today.

Hand in done, presentation on Tuesday!

Turned out pretty alright considering neither of us are supposed to be programmers. We changed a lot of the textures in the house to something a little more old-looking and realistic over the past couple of weeks. I've also managed to squeeze in a couple of extra levels for a bit more gameplay time. Here are a couple of in-game screen shots showing Tim's texturing and light mapping skills.

3D Mode

2D Mode

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...

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.

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...

Where have you gone again my sweet?

Woah. I can't believe I actually missed out an entire month from writing on here. And I've had two hand-ins to write about.

Dissertation Draft

I handed in almost the required amount of words in time on Moodle [the online submission thing]. Except, I might have posted it on the wrong submission link and I didn't hand in a hard copy, so the other day when Rich emailed me asking for it, that may have been the first time any of the lecturers saw it. Woops.

Also, I've been staying away from it since the draft hand in on Jan 13th. On the plus side, I finally borrowed Raph Koster's Theory of Fun from the library. It was an interesting read and some of it might come in handy. I definitely should be focussing more time on the dissertation than I have been though. I guessed biggest problem is a lack of dedication. I should probably set myself some extra deadlines to meet to make sure I have something half decent to hand in.

Portfolio - Paper Production

Handed in a concept doc [or "Design Portfolio", I should say], dev. diary and 1500 word "post mortem" of the process. The hand-in itself was pretty easy going in the end. I wrote up my post-mortem on Sunday, the day before the hand-in deadline. Then because the deadline was at noon-ish the next day, I figured I'd hand it in via Moodle early, that Sunday night, so I could have a sleep in if I felt like it. I don't think I did sleep in, but I did keep on my pajamas.

In other news...

The 365 page-a-day Project

I wrote about this on my "business" blog [I'm not sure I can really call it that until I sell something]. Check out the post here [I also talk about sheep poo paper. And tiny houses].

It's been going okay, I've noticed after 3 weeks of doing it that I've started to attempt colour coding my days.. Standard sorts of emotional colours, adding random extras of yellow for happy, blue for sad and red for angry. The pages have also started to be less about drawing something artsy and more about recording what I was doing or focussing on that day.

Shown here are 28JAN, in which I accompanied Sam and Tom of the Irving and Booth varieties on their day off to Barry Island, and then drank wine, helped invent a new game, and went to a fairly empty Uni rave, and the 29JAN, which was when I spent part of the day catching up on five days worth of pages. Apparently I'm not very good at doing a page a day sometimes, especially when I spend a few days over at Camp Sausage.*

*Camp Sausage n. the house at which numerous friends of mine - of the male variety - live

And oh my! I totally forgot. According to page 25JAN, that was the day I died.

...Not for real. Dave of the Ware variety phoned me up and asked me if I could help him and Dan of the O'Hara variety with a teaser tape. I had to run around Caerleon for a bit and look scared and then relieved on camera and then - oh no! Turns out there was still a murderer nearby. I had to lie on the muddy pathway and pretend I'd been killed while they dripped fake blood on a real knife and tried not to drop either upon me. It was all quite fun actually. Still need to wipe the mud off that coat though.

And Claire's acting was really interesting to see. I say interesting; I should probably say awesome. It was really unnerving - in a good way - and as a result, half of my acting wasn't even acting. She really was behaving the whole time like the kind of person who was on the edge enough to kill me, and until she said "I'm back" and laughed her friendly laugh, I was slightly scared that she might actually kill me [I'd seen her around before but had only met her properly that night].

It was brilliant, and totally freaky. It was as if she'd put herself under hypnosis - she wasn't acting the character. In those few hours, she was living it. Dave told me later that when they filmed some other scenes at her house while she was back in character that it was even more intense and freaky, as she'd actually be talking back to and staring at them while being this on-the-edge and unstable, agitated character.

I know that story is not much to do with CGD but.. self induced hypnotic trances? The whole thing just fascinates me.

Teaser Coming Soon

Tim here, Well we are halfway through and are about to start actually making FP3.

A lot has happen but even more is going to happen. now we are in the process of creating a 30 second teaser trailer for FP3. This will hopefully get people talking and who know might even get extra support. for now I'll leave you with some nice 3D concepts.

Dissertation: It's Christmas Eve...

... And I'm attempting to work on my Dissertation.

What I seem to be having the most trouble with - just like last time - is choosing what to focus on and write about. I don't have anything in particular to do with games that is deeply and academically interesting me in a positive way at the moment. Instead, the thoughts that are weighing most heavily in my mind are:

1. Oh, this dissertation malarky is hard.
2. What am I going to do for a living next year after Uni?
3. [And everything else I wouldn't be thinking if I were a robot, including "I'm hungry and my feet are cold"]

The result is that I'm spending even more time rejecting the games design scene, probably due to a lack of confidence in myself to succeed, and am instead focusing on things that are less difficult for me... like binding books. When I stand back from how I feel, I can see that some things aren't that hard to do - I can do them, and the only reason I haven't done them is not because I can't but because I've talked my mind out of wanting to do them. It's a bit of actual cognitive dissonance in action.

This blog is a prime example. I used to write lots of stuff. Sure, they weren't particularly academic posts, but they were words and they were posted often. The last post on this blog mentioning any work to do with my course was over a month ago. I've just been writing things down on paper now and then, but most of the time I've just been stewing inside my own head, changing my mind about what to write about - totally at the mercy of whatever I feel is being most pressing - until I gave up a short while ago and spent some days not touching any coursework at all. With a few weeks to go until I have to hand in the first draft, the awareness of the deadline being right after the Christmas holidays has prodded grumpy little me sharply in the back of my skull.

My desire to escape from all things computer gamey revived in me the ideas of pursuing handicrafting. Unfortunately, it's not something I can picture myself writing about academically. I tried, but it got out of hand like watered down PVA glue and ended up being all over the place.

I just want to make stuff.

From what happened with the last essay I wrote, I can see where this is going to end up. I'm going to take the essay I wrote about writing essays and work from that and how I'm feeling about writing the dissertation and end up writing about the difficulties students can face when writing dissertations. As you can see in the picture above, I've already started. Who knows when I'll finish.

And then after I graduate, I will start to feel less pressure from the whole game thing, and I'll start to return again. I will play with all the free software I learned about, and I will make little games, and write up ideas for bigger games, and think about stories for narrative games and come up with mechanics for seriously simple but fun games. This won't happen all at once; it will happen slowly over time, mingled in with numerous other things I like to do and tend to return to, like playing things on guitar and reading about history and magic and learning about science and love and art and me.

This is what I'm hoping. Life was much better when I wasn't worrying about how long I would be able to keep going. I mean dude, I'm not even 21 yet!