Tuesday 26 November 2013

WOW IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE I POSTED LAST...

Hi,

I've just realised its been an absolute age since I posted up any project work! Man the months have flown by so fast!

I think the lack of posts has been down to me not making much in the last few months and shifting over to playing on my Supergun and my consoles rather than doing modifications etc. Actually playing on the consoles and games I have rather than just working on them. It's been good fun and I'm slowly ticking my way through my games on my shelves.

Me and my girlfriend (now fiancee) have also been away on holiday to New Orleans for just over a week last month which was amazing! It was a real adventure to go all that way and we had an awesome time. The weather was great, we saw lots of jazz and other types of music played out in the open, did a little dancing but not as much as we were hoping and expecting. That was very weird, we expected big dancing clubs etc being the heartland of jazz and jazz being the main music Lindy hop is danced too but everywhere was very small and really really crowded. So we didn't get much Lindy done.

The main thing that happened on the holiday was I proposed to my girlfriend on the nightly jazz cruise up the Mississippi river on the steam paddle boat Natchez. It was a perfect night for it, nice and warm, we'd been sitting listening to some amazing jazz being played by the Dukes of Dixieland. And when we went for a walk around the boat we stopped to watch the paddle propel us up the river with New Orleans lit up and reflecting in the water and I clumsily dropped the question. It was better than I hoped!

Since coming home from holiday I've been doing lots of little projects for other people art and design wise which has been a really nice change. I've been asked to draw a tattoo based on elements that make up her brothers personality who sadly passed a month ago. Its been a nice challenge and a little worrying to do as its a very personal thing. Instead of cartoony doodling style it's been all very still life style which is something I've not done since school so it was good fun to revisit that style of drawing. And I was pleased to see that I could still do that kind of artwork.

The main project I've been working on in my spare time between designing etc is working in collaboration with one of my best mates and one of his industry friends on a shootem up game. And its been super exciting and very different to how I've normally worked as in the past I've done all the art, figured out clumsily the coding or logic using something like Construct 2 etc etc and have only ever gotten so far. With this we have really been making strides in different areas of the games ideas and with 3 of us working on it its branching out along the different developmental lines really nicely.

I can't post anything about what we've been doing yet but at some point we will have a tumblr / website for the game development and I'll cross post over to here to keep my blog updated. It's all very exciting and again its getting me drawing and developing new skills and styles.

So basically, that's whats been happening. Game playing, holidaying, planning, designing, drawing and exciting developments.

Catch you later

Porl''