A game of my own

I've designed, 'programmed' and built all the art assets for an infinite runner called "SpeedRun Neo Toyko", as a demonstration of what to aim for by students studying on the BA Games Design course at Brunel University, where I lecture.

The game was built in Clickteam Fusion 2.5, runs at 1080p (with retro-style scanlines) and is intended for PC, smartphone or tablet use. At the moment, it only available runs on Windows.

The video above is in appalling-quality Bloggervision. To see a high-quality version, visit my site.

Personal project WIP

When I find the time (rare), I've been working on a 3D project of my own. The above is the completed low-poly mesh for a transforming bike design. It's been carefully 'engineered' with no 'cheating' e.g. parts that shrink or overlap each other when transformed. 

The scenario for the design involves a human pilot, who occupies roughly1/3 of the height of the robot internally - it's not a sentient, Optimus Prime-style robot. Again, the cockpit has been taken into account. In line with the 'real world' design, the transformation has also been kept as simple and robust as possible, avoiding the kind of complex, delicate transformations of typical high-end models. This is helped by it not having to turn into a perfect recreation of e.g. a Porsche 911. I'm more of a Macross fan than a Tranformers one, though both are cool.

The next step is to detail it up, possibly in Mudbox, texture it, and finally add a rig capable of handling the transformation. I then intend to render a short sequence that shows the moving vehicle transforming into robot form. So not much work there, then.

PDAP passed!

Passed my PDAP (Professional Development Action Program; a higher education teaching qualification) so am now a Fellow of the Higher Eduction Authority (HEA). This involved a research project, in which I investigated various aspects / approaches to teaching creativity. A fascinating area that I would like to explore further.

The project was summed up with a poster presentation to other academics going through the process. Mine's now up on the office wall:

Eurogamer 2014

This:

Goodwood Festival of Speed

I'm passionate about vehicle design, so Goodwood Festival of Speed was heaven. I took about a million pictures, but along with complete vehicles, I also like to collect mechanical details for use in future projects...

Jean Paul Gautier exhibition

Visited the Jean Paul Gautier retrospective at the Barbican recently. There was a great section where they projected moving faces onto dummies, to make them appear to be talking. The projectors were precisely aligned with the faces, which had 3D features like eye sockets and noses, which was eerie and very cool:

Comic Book Art course

On the Comic Book Art short course (which I teach in the holidays, at Chelsea College in London), we had a group of girls from an animation school in Moscow. They were all good artists and inventive in their ideas, and the course was a lot of fun. At they end they gave me a memento:

Retro gaming

As well as being into gaming, I also have a soft spot for retro electronics, so how about combining the two? My brother gave me this mint iMac G3 DV, which was in the loft of his new flat. The stock 10GB hard drive was noisy and slow, so replaced it with a near-silent 7K 120GB Samsung. The DVD laser lens needed a clean, but that's working fine now. I also maxed it with a gig of RAM.

It's running OS X 10.4.8 (Tiger) and OS 9. It's a bit painful surfing the web on it (with TenFourFox), but it runs 2D games in MAME OS X like a champ. Here's Capcom's RoboCop, which is usually the first game I load up on one of my annual MAME visits. Suits the CRT display well. 

My own office (to share)

I'm sharing an office with Doug, who as well as being a great chap is a video game theorist, researching themes in games and how games influence, and are influenced by, society.

Joining Brunel University

I'll soon be joining Brunel's Game Design BA / MA, as their lecturer in game asset production (graphics, basically). It's an exciting new challenge, and I look forward to seeing how I fit in to the course, which focusses on gameplay, as opposed to programming (or art, at least exclusively).

The campus has a nice vibe in the summer, too:

Global Investor Awards Logo

A recent awards logo I created for Euromoney, displayed on electronic signage. Looking pretty sweet.

The original logo:

Mobile App development

I'm teaching another new course, this time in mobile app development. We're using a system called MobileNation, which is a little buggy, but if you use some ingenuity it's possible to get a respectable business app out of it (no games, though, unfortunately!).

As a class demo, I built an app for the college, a few screens of which I've included below. Shown on iOS.

Illustrator CS6 Training Courses

I've started teaching Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign CS6 1-day training courses, at introductory and intermediate level. I knocked up these in Illustrator as part of the training materials I gave the students, and liked the way they turned out.

2D Flash Games

I'm currently teaching another games course, this time based around the free cross-platform software Stencyl. This allows you to manage scenes, animations, collision detection and so on, as well as develop scripts called Behaviours to control how enemies react and so on.

The screens below are from a 2D shooter that I built as part of an in-class demo. Tiles made in Photoshop.

Games Technologies course - 'pixel art'

As part of an introductory course into Games Technologies, I've been teaching the students Adobe Illustrator. As part of a fun exercise in the last lesson, we produced bitmap style avatars for ourselves, limited to a very low 'resolution'. Mine is below!

E-Commerce Teaching

Updates have been a bit slow this year, as I've been teaching a whole pile of (new) courses. As well as the digital graphics / games development courses I tend to talk about on this blog, I've also got another hat teaching web development / e-commerce / eBay courses for people with small businesses.

As well as getting me up to speed on the current considerations, platforms and so on, it's been useful to approach website development from the point of view of different 'customer personae'. It's straightforward to assess a design based on what you think of it, but perhaps more instructive to put yourself in the place of a 'character' visiting the site, and see how it fares.

Hopefully I'll find the time to post more regularly, though with a flat move and upcoming summer courses, we'll see!

Character Design using Paths

As part of a level 3 Multimedia course, I've been teaching the students how to use the paths feature in Photoshop to produce clean artwork. It's slightly clunky compared to using Illustrator, but we are using PS for the unit. After scanning in the sketch, adjusting it and tracing over to produce the line art, we then used Multiply, Overlay and Adjustment layers to add the shading.

The demo character below is a futuristic version of the Wolf from Red Riding Hood, this time as a robot. He is designed to walk on two legs or four, depending on the situation. The large head on his chest can open up to swallow you whole! Click to enlarge.

Concept Art Class - Environments

I've been teaching a concept art class based around Adobe Photoshop, and it's been going pretty well. Some of the students have PS at home and have brought in some great work. I've even converted a few to Wacom tablets, and now most of the class have at least a Bamboo (which are really good for £50).

I recently did a tutorial about coming up with an environment from your imagination, blocking it in in greyscale before adding some colour. The pic below is the result; a futuristic re-interpretation of the forest from Red Riding Hood.

BTEC Digital Graphics

I'm teaching two units (out of four) on an IT BTEC - Games Development, and Digital Graphics. The overal theme of the course is video games, so for a tutorial in Adobe Illustrator I got the students to design a clan logo for an online FPS.

The demo below is for a team called "Frag Out", based on the military expression.

Recent competitions

Been busy teaching a bunch of courses recently, but found time for a couple of competition entries on the IFX forum.

This was a quick speedpaint for a brief called 'The Race':

This one I had a bit more time for. The brief: 'Death':