Joe's Cat

    A quick post showing a few graphics to be used in a classmate's flash game. The brief was fairly simple, "Cute cat" and "Cut in half", I'm not sure why however in exchange for this I was promised some help with coding in my flash game, so I decided to go for it! Top left image is standard cat, top right is cat after after being shot, bottom left is sliced cat and bottom right is the layer to go on top of sliced cat if Joe wanted to do an animation of it's face sliding off. That wasn't asked for but I thought it might be quite cool in a way.

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Gradient Mesh Experiment: Banana

    A classmate was showing me gradient meshes in Illustrator yesterday, something that I'd never thought about using before but after having a quick play about with it putting shading on a circle I thought I should try and do something more testing. I googled 'gradient mesh' just to have a look at what other people have done with it and the first result I found was a guy called Yukio Miyamoto. This stuff he was pulling off using gradient meshes is amazing, work far better than what I expected to come up. I'll put a link to the website at the end of this post. Although it occured to me that if you can create images in Illustrator that are pretty much 99.9% accurate to real life then you might as well just take a picture... Regardless, they're still brilliant!
    Anyway I wanted to give it a go myself so I thought i'd just try and do something simple and copy from a google image. There was a bunch of bananas sitting next to me when I was thinking what to do so that's what I decided to use. Below is the result, I'm pretty pleased with it as a first attempt, I'll have another mess about with gradient meshes another time and hopefully do something more complicated...

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Link for the website:
http://www.khulsey.com/masters_yukio_miyamoto.html

3DS Max Morning Session - Chesspiece

    Another quick post showing what I managed to do this morning playing about with 3DS Max. It wasn't too complicated once I learned where all the tools were and figured what you can and cant do with them. There are a few principles that are transferable from Illustrator as well which helps, like using the line tool in 3DS Max is similar to using the pen tool Illustrator, with the bezier curves and vertices etc. After doing this I'm slightly more confident about making a chess board for my 3D Modelling assessment.

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fishmast

    I was doodling at my girlfriend's earlier and ended up drawing this thing, it's a bit odd as most doodles tend to be. Anyway I thought it might look nifty in illustrator, so I've imported it and have started to make what I'm hoping to be a poster. I'm doing this mainly because most of my drawings that I did when I was younger aren't on any walls anymore and have found their place in a dusty box in the loft now, so I thought it might be nice to have something more recent to cover some space. I thought I'd give it the name fishmast for now as it sort of looks like the top of a ship's mast... and there's a fish in it... Like my graphics tablet project I posted up a while ago (which unfortunately hasn't been developed since) I'm hoping to actually finish this and frame it at some point. I'm more optimisic about doing this as I'm spending a fair amount of time in Illustrator at the moment and I'm quite enjoying playing about with it.

    So here's the doodle and what I've got so far (if you click the illustrator version it becomes slightly crisper).

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Flash Game: Flashlight Start Screen

    Below is the start screen for the flash game I'm trying to make at the moment, Flashlight. The light switch in the top right can be clicked and animates in my flash version, however I haven't figured out how to upload SWF's onto Blogger yet. Hopefully I'll be able to get that up soon, as well as the whole game when it's done. The light switch serves as the start button for the game.

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Animal Frenzy: Europe Finished?

    This is just a quick post showing a possibly finished level background for Europe:

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Dead Bored 2

    I thought I'd just post a quick review on a game I anticipated for a while and have just recently finished; Dead Space 2.

    I feel ashamed saying this as such a massive fan of the first game, but I'm slightly disappointed. Typically I expect sequels to offer an experience which is an evolution of it's predecessor whilst sustaining the core elements of the game, in the case of Dead Space; it's fear factor and heart pumping gameplay. However... I feel that Dead Space 2 hasn't really offered much more to its players than what was already experienced in the prequel.

    Visceral have added a few new weapons/suits/items etc. but did they think that would be enough to satisfy it's players? All the way through the game I was waiting for something to happen which would give me the same churning feeling in my stomach which I felt frequently whilst playing the first game, however I was constantly met with experiences that I could have just as easily got in Dead Space 1.

    The whole necromorph bursting through a pipe in the wall routine started to get a bit old by the end of the first game, so why did it keep happening the WHOLE WAY THROUGH this game!? Could they not think of more exciting ways to create 'jumpy' moments? I know it's sort of a easy, bog standard way of getting a reaction out of players but that doesn't mean you can keep doing it Visceral!! You might be reading this thinking "I'd like to see you do better', and I probably couldn't. However I feel that being the successful company that they are, visceral could have pulled something more original out of the bag.

    Dead Space is somewhat of a horror game, we can agree on that. What works well in a lot of horror media? Not lot of light and lots and lots of creepy shadows! It's a bit of a clichéd idea however if Visceral were going to use old ideas then they might as well chuck some more in for a laugh. There were a couple of times whilst playing through where I would be walking through a hallway and the lights would go out and I'd start thinking "Ooh. What's happening here...?", but then the bloody lights would come back on again! Don't worry about me Visceral! You gave me a fekin flashlight for a reason! You give me something that will make me crap my pants and let me worry about the mess! A few fighting in the dark moments would have gone down a treat for me! A lot of the enemies were the same, there was even a section in which players had to run and stun their way away from a slow moving invincible necromorph, hmm this feels familiar... Dead Space 1 *cough*. Although they did change the way he looks so it's alright...

    In alot of older films it was common practice to create a build in tension then release a burst of shock, which is something that viewers begun to cotton onto in the last decade or so causing writers to come up with new ways of creating scares. A good example of what I mean is the old, someone looking in a half opened, mirrored cabinet, then closing it to reveal someone standing behind them trick. Over the last few years I've seen a few films use this, however changed. When the cabinet is closed nobody is there, making the audience feel a sense of relief, then moving onto the big scare. The point I'm trying to make is that, Dead Space 2 is still using the old mechanisms which people are used to, they needed to think up something new or at least expand on what they had before. Perhaps by creating the illusion of something that players may recognise from Dead Space 1 but then surprise them with something new, just like the mirror trick.

   Even though I felt that there was a lot of room for improvement, there were a few new features which did tickle my fancy. The introduction of a new ostrich-like, hunter enemy who skitter across rooms in packs, occasionally poking their disfigured head eerily around the corned to take a glance at your position before spontaneously charging out at you. This is exactly the kind of suspense I was looking for, something that I didn't learn about in Dead Space 1 and would drag me out of my comfort zone. There were one or two other bits that I liked as well but they wouldn't mean much unless you've played the game so I'll skip over those.

   Of course this is just personal preference, I was playing another game online recently and overheard a player explaining to his friend how he couldn't play it because it scared him too much, so it must work for some people.

    In conclusion, Visceral have produced numerous games which I've bought and enjoyed so I can't slate them too extensively, everyone makes mistakes. So I do take my hat off to you Visceral for the titles that gave me hours of enjoyment ...but if you look inside the hat there may be a small note reading "I'm disappointed in you...".

Xmas Break Characters Task - Fuggerbob and Dipdip

    Over the christmas break we were asked to think about two characters of our own making that could possibly be used in a scene/short story together. Fuggerbob and Dipdip are the chracters I've used to do this. They're friendly looking alien, monster... things, Fuggerbob being the big green one and Dipdip being the smaller yellow one. I'm thinking about using the John Steinbeck's - Of Mice and Men/ Pinky And The Brain sort of theme, where one is stronger but more stupid and the other is smarter but alot weaker.

    I thought about Fuggerbob having an obssesion with food, hence the big stomach, leaving Dipdip to save Fuggerbob from potential accidents in trying to get to and eat the food. That's just an example scenario but it gives a little idea on what they're about.

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