more than a day it seems

like gnome said :)

well, yeah, Despite what you may expect I have been very busy working on the game, as well as my other ongoing projects. So into them, in fact, that i neglected this blog a little too much. Sorry, and thank you for bearing with me

so without any further ado, here's what I'm up to right now

The Crest
This is the new itteration of the crest I have been working on for a friend. Cosmetic changes include simplified fleur de lis, correction of a typo, altered ribbon detail and size and alignment changes to the dragon and hand images at the top. I seem to be nearing the client's mental image, so hopefully I will have signed off on this one by the end of the week


Election Publicity
I posted the poster design I had done for this a couple of weeks ago, well I'm just starting work now on the official promotion website. Nothing to post yet, but it's quite a simple design so hopefully I'll have stuff to show within the next week.

Road Safety
My girlfriend (who has worked on another area of the same project) is presenting my film to the client tommorow.. fingers crossed no major changes are required.

Diorama Game
Yes, well.. this is the big one.. the dev diary for today is going to be quite epic I think.. here goes...

Dev Diary: Day 20 - 26/02/2006
Immersion in the project leads to a lack of good book keeping

Needless to say, I haven't given any info on the project now for a week. The goal in this diary entry is to cover the last week's development from my perspective, and hopefully do so to the depth I have managed previously.

Tuesday
A day of meetings. Primary job was to make sure that everyone had completed their jobs from the last week's task list, and to hand out the next lot. Me and Jules had done everything, excluding jules' documentation of the set pieces he was working on, thats been continued into the next week. Adam had done everything needed, and then some, his work on this is incredible, check out his screen grabs over at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/adam.griffiths5/g&g/. Dave is still working on the bike model, but has made good progress given his lack of experience with the 3D software. A key fear for me and Jules is Ed, who is our coder, and we haven't seen since day 1 on the game. He has been ill, and Jules took on the job on tuesday of trying to chase him up and see if he was ok. My roles as per the group's task list are...

Texture Bike, General texture work, photoshop cutscene, informally involved in set peice and level design. Edit Jules' asset list for alleyway

Well the bike and texture work was all dependant on hearing from Dave on completion of the bike, and the set piece and design work will take place through conversation, so my major job for the week was to develop this cutscene.

Jules made me a CD, which featured some crudely photoshopped images grabbed from the web put into a slideshow to set the scene. He asked me to use my 'bithellization' skills to take his idea forward, so treating his slideshow as a storyboard I decided to generate a fly-over of a newspaper to set the scene. I decided to use layered images to create a sense of 3D depth. I used flash, as I'm much more familiar with it's interface than that of after effects. I know this isn't the ideal tool, but I was up against the clock. I worked on this for the whole of wednesday, and photographed some friends

Thursday
Thursday morning was spent in a lecture theatre. Sadly I got there 5 minutes late and missed the announcement of a lecture by an art lead over at codemasters the following day :( luckilly adam recorded it :). After the lecture I dragged Jules over to my flat to look at the current build of the opening, all placeholder imagery at that point. He liked it, so I carried on with the same film. Key issues were raised against the soundtrack I was using, so I simply removed it, me and Jules are going to sit down together and cherry pick the music needed later.

Saturday
Finished the cutscene (with placeholder timing for now), but didn't have time to show it to anyone as I had to go to my part-time job.


Sunday
Showed it to everyone via the server Jules set up for Mirror. What, you'd like to see it?.. ahh go on then http://www.reflectionsinthemirror.co.uk/dio/cutscene.wmv

Adam and Jules like it, and I got some positive feedback via the animation newport forum, so hopefully that's pretty complete. I also did the edit on Jules that I had to do this week as per my task list.

Right, that's me done for now