GET IN THE BACK OF THE VAN

...back of the van, get in the back of the van, get in the van. Back. Of. The. Van. 

(In the words of the Swede Mason remix...)

This spare-time project involves mud, multiplayer and minefields. 

More coming up later.

"Captain Gunner!" - Work in progress cheesy shooter game

After my final uni project finished, I started rummaging through my hard drives to see what creative projects I had started last year. Like most arty people, I have a tendency to get excited about and start new projects in my spare time only to exhaust my enthusiasm within a couple of months because there is no real ultimate positive outcome (as there is in a uni project, for example)!
Nevertheless, I often still like the ideas, even if I may never continue them again. To cut to the chase, I started making a 2D side-scrolling shooter game last September. Take a look:

I did this in YoYo Game Maker 8 Pro, which is an amazing piece of software for anyone who wants to have a go at making games even through they have no coding experience. Through doing stuff like this, you gain some proper understanding of how coding works, and many people have started out in this program before progressing to real scripting platforms like Java.

It's also a great program for making pixely/8-bit artwork. One of my classmates - Tom Clark - made his entire final uni project animated film in an 8-bit style, but he said that the only way he could enlarge his MS Paint drawings without them being horrifically blended out was to zoom in and capture a screenshot.
GM has a built-in graphics editor, which is basically like an advanced version of MS Paint. Fundamentally it works the same as MS Paint, but with tonnes of extra features, not least the animation feature. For my sprites, I drew them in Game Maker first, then exported them to Photoshop for some precise shading and weathering - which is surprisingly difficult with such a small number of pixels!

It was particularly challenging trying to make the train's wheels look like they are spinning fast - with only 5 pixels making up each wheel!

I enjoy using GM to test out ideas. It seems that I always spend much more time on the sprites (graphics) in the game, as that is what I am most interested in.

For the past month or so I've also been working on a new game. It's inspired by a 2D version of Minecraft; which itself is not particularly original, but all I am interested in is creating the blocky, destructible environment,  after which I will make it a game in its own right. Unfortunately I have spent all of that time working on the game's engine as oppose to graphics, so it still looks far too awful to show anyone...I am even using 'Billy the Garden Boy' from Lumen Soup as the character, because I haven't got round to drawing a new one! Maybe I'll post it here if it ever starts to look good...

Check out the YoYo Game Maker at http://www.yoyogames.com/

Background and Scenery Design

Here's some of the background and scenery designs I've been working on this year...

'20th Century Participation' - 1910


'20th Century Participation' - 1942

The Fall of the Wall - 1989
(The year I was born, actually...)

A screenshot from the first render of the 1989 Berlin Scene

Here are some of the wall sections, with graffin' painted digitally on top of an acrylic-painted texture of a concrete wall...

La-De-Da... Cos' it's a Lada? Get it? Yeah.

It's a cheesy, hippy-sort-of line, but apparently it was a popular one.

A lovely picture of some sort of peaceful bird (dove maybe?)
emerging from the barrel of a Soviet tank.
Bloody Commies.

The original textures, created in acrylic paint...

The original planned image was first produced as a sketch...

An incredible scene...

The Mongolians have swarmed the border!
(hmm, sounds a bit like a military code...)





A really, REALLY flowery and camp forest scene.
I would definately die of hayfever in there.

IN THE NEAR FUTURE...

In the near future, the escalation of transport congestion must be countered by a new traffic control system. Programmed to evolve by calculating more effective methods of control, it concludes that the extermination of mankind is the only way to resolve the problem.
With an army of 5 billion robotic cones, barriers and bollards, it coordinates a devastating blow to human civilisation which is only the start of the massacre of mankind...

Working together with my production team and a small army of extras, we created this film in just under four months.