Friday, December 17

Christmas Holidays!

Huzzah! I've done most of my work for the Ariel before Crimbo time! RATS 2 is pretty much complete (which is actually quite cool!), and I now await for amendments to flood in after some testing!
I have some style sheets to produce before my next meeting about the new project I'm working on (which is to do with domestic violence), but they'll only be simple...cause they're just initial ideas!

So I now have my Super Secret Crimbo Business to attend to! And I shall be posting photos of this project after xmas day, so as not to ruin the surprise! Woo! I'm quite intrigued/excited to see how it will look all together and whether that special someone will like it! I hope they will! Oooh!
I also have time to plan out my new mini portfolio, which is now going to be a CD-ROM rather than something print-based (as print isn't really my forte). I think I'm being too much of a stickler when it comes to how I present myself as a business, I'm finding it slightly difficult to think of a simple logo; as it seems quite constricting to define my business with one small piece of imagery...which is silly of me...I guess I think if I make something that looks too simple, it doesn't look finished, as I prefer my work to be quite busy. Which is odd because I really enjoy other peoples work that is very subtle and effective...I just can't seem to bring that into my own work!
Anyway! Enough yammering! Crimbo preparations underway!

Wednesday, November 24

Lunchie Munchie, mm?

I'm trying to be better at updating this thing (although I'm thinking of soon converting to WordPress, ssshhh, don't tell anyone. But I'll be sad about losing all the posts I've made...I know nobody reads them, but they were nice just for me to look over! I like looking back over the year and seeing what I was up to a few months ago and stuff...then I get to re-live the feeling of joy/terror/exhaustion!)

Work for the Ariel has exploded all over the place, but I'm somehow getting on top of it. Just having trouble adding videos to pages now. Cause if you go Full Screen, the whole FLV is like 'I don't care about any other info on the page, I'm the ***STAR*** and blocks everything out. And yes yes, invisible Actionscript gremlin I have tried using FullScreenTakeOver = false, but to no avail! So thats my job after lunch! Wa-hoo! I hate the little problems (that actually turn out to be pretty BIG problems if you're as dense as I am), cause you think 'righto, I'll just do this, this, and ...WHAT? WHY WON'T YOU WORK, YOU BLOODY B-, NOTHINGS EVER SIMPLE IS IT?!' And then ensues Claire's angry meltdown and she has to go sit in another room incase she throws her computer out of the window.
Anyway, lots to do, but there is sort of an end in sight, which is nice!

Tatty Bye!

(Fable 3 is sort of addictive, but I find if I play it for a big chunk of time, I can cease from playing it for a few days, which is quite good! I read the Edge review, and I do have to agree with it really...but the little side quests in the game keep you playing (as Edge said!), so its all okay!)

Monday, November 15

And its hit the fan!

Arrrrgggghhhhhhheeeelllllooooooo!!

Yes. Hello. I have come back briefly. A lot of work has come along in the past couple of months so I haven't been able to update as much, I'm afraid... (sorry to the imaginary people out there...)
So have been very busy, which is good and bad, as I haven't had much time to work on my business plan and I've got a meeting with my business advisor in little over a week. She gonna be mad. (Actually shes very nice, so I think I'll be okay!)

Lots of work for the Ariel Trust, feels like I'm chugging out games constantly, but its satisfying to see a greater selection of games in a short space of time (although it would be nice to spend longer on them to tweak and perfect, but thats a deadline for you!) So here are a couple of shots of what I've been working on!












Sorry about the bombardment there. But yeah, its been busy.
Theres all sorts in there about drugs, fire extinguishers, alcohol, and fractional distillation (which sounds rather dry, but it was an animation, so it was quite nice to just make a simple animation for a change rather than programming things and such! Although having said that, I have learnt a lot more about Actionscript 3 since last we met, and I am getting used to it a bit more, plus I generally have learnt abit more about stuff to use just in Flash! So its all good! I'm hoping over Crimbo to blitz a load of my instruction book just to teach me a few new things! And this has turned into the longest chunk of text in a set of brackets ever. I wonder if theres a World Record for that? Stopping now.)

And apart from that I'm trying to get my Christmas shopping polished off (as I have a big project I wanna work on for Christmas...I'm quite excited about it!)
And I need to get my Christmas cards printed off so I can cut them down and send them this year. (Note: I was talking about making and sending my own xmas cards this time LAST year...so I really want to do it this year!) I bought dinky envelopes for my cards about a month ago, and it was shocking about how much those envelopes arriving perked up my day! Plus I found some really cool websites were you can buy lots of different stationary/paper. It was rather awesome!
And lets not forget my business plan, which is telling me to create a mini portfolio, a website and re-do my proper big portfolio. Wow. No wonder I feel slightly stressed. Oh well!

I saw Scott Pilgrim a while back (can't remember if I mentioned this before!) and it was AWESOME. (I think I have mentioned this before...sorry!)
Um. I went to see Back to the Future at the cinema. I've had a little go at Fable 3 (and hope to have many more little gos of it!). I went to a talk about Arabic Maths and got lost after 10 minutes as I realised I have a short attention span when it comes to smart things. I went to the Liverpool Film Night at FACT and saw the animator Chris Shephard speak. It was uncomfortable. Saw the Biennial exhibition at the Tate but can't remember much of it so it mustn't of been that good. I went to see my friend Emily in Cambridge and got to see the super cool place where she works! Which was super! I made a cottage pie...then tried to make a variation by mixing a can of haggis in with mince...it tasted good...but once it went cold it smelt like dog food, which was not pleasant. I made my first ever English breakfast and it was GOOD! Aaaand, I've seen the films: Uncle Buck, Forbidden Planet, Logans Run, Reign over Me, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Nutty Professor 2, Addams Family Values, Planes Trains & Automobiles, Brother Bear, Julie & Julia, Bride Wars, Dragonball Evolution (on fast forward because it was so BAD), Coraline, The Others and thats that. Yes.
(I also replayed some old SNES and Mega Drive games the other week...Quackshot was still AWESOME. For shame to anyone who has never heard of it...which is probably a lot of people...so maybe not so much shame...but its totally worth playing!)



(Why do retro games have creepy music..theres just something about it...Not the music from the clip up above...thats great music...but take a look at the intro music and you'll see what I mean!)

Good luck and God Speed, party people!

Wednesday, September 29

Road Safety

Hello, hello, hello!

I've been a reasonably busy bee the last few weeks. Although I don't have much to show for it!
Firstly, I've gor work from the Ariel, so I've been creating new games and then tinkering with the games to make them better. Its quite cool to have the games shown to other people and then get feedback from them...because they're not involved in the development stage, its nice to get some new ideas thrown in later on (unless I can't code it...which hasn't happened so far which is good!) So here are a mere few of the things I've been working on.




The middle pic is an exercise called the Talking Fireman, and its simply an animated fireman talking through some tasks that the pupils can do, but I really like the animation style on it, as its going to be a wriggly/wobbly line, and I think it looks quite cool.
The Ariel has asked me to design the look of the main framework of the CD-ROM, which I feel sort of honoured/chuffed to do, cause it means I get to put my own little stamp on it, which is pretty damn groovy. I presented them with my one (and only) idea (I only drafted one just because I liked it so much, and anything else I thought of just look as nice in my head as the original idea!)





I liked the idea of the talking fireman so much that I wanted to make the whole CD-ROM in that sort of stylio, so thats what I did. I now need to work on developing the idea so it looks a lot better (as I whipped these up fairly quickly incase the idea didn't go down too well!) I'd say this style was influenced by alot of adverts I've seen for shows targeted at a teenage audience, so the likes of skins and hollyoaks...very much channel 4-based; cause I figured thats what the kids would be into! A sort of grungy/graffiti style. REBELLION should be the name of the style of something...or SOFTCORE REBELLION. I'm trying to make it sound like a font name or something. Okay. Stop waffling, Claire.

I've also been working on a NEW and BETTER mini portfolio...which I don't have screenshots for, but I will do soon! Don't you invisible people worry!
So, yes, keeping busy, but not TOO busy (as I neared a mental breakdown by forcing myself to be TOO busy, so now I'm pacing myself!) So, whoop!

(Have seen Scott Pilgrim TWICE now, because it is AWESOME. I wish I could have fights like that in real life. But that would be wrong. And I also played Heavy Rain over the weekend which was AWESOME. Norman Jayden is my hero. WE wuvs him, precious. But man oh man, I really want to play Lego Harry Potter, because....it looks AWESOME....or it sounds it at least, I've not actually seen any gameplay. And I'm done!)