Well the latest game is up, its been a month since Synapsis launched and I needed to work on a nice small game and came up with “the flying platypus”, it was mainly programmed as I was watching Blackburn Rovers on the 4pm game on a Sunday afternoon on Sky Sports. The match was so boring that to pass the time I did a little game as an experiment and it turned into a full game.

Its just a 60 seconds waste of time affair but it seems quite fun to play. The game mechanic is mainly just a simple distance game with a bit of skill and quite a lot of luck.

anyway enough waffle go and have a play of the Flying Platypus.

Well the latest game went up 2 weeks ago, its called Synapsis and its a voyage into the mind of David Carter, a completely odd adventure game that I’ve been trying to make for about 3 years. The production started about June time 2007 but the idea had been floating round my head in various forms for ages, the only problem was that it was June before I’d got good enough at programming to be able to make it. The actual game is pretty straightforward as I really didn’t want to do anything too illogical although the settings and the atmosphere of the game is really “David Lynch”. I’ve half got the sequel worked on but I need a break, this game completely did my head in during the last month of development.

The game was half designed by Jason Jackson, who was at work experience were I used to work, his 2 rooms were the church and the cell, I thought he did a pretty amazing job.
Its been reviewed on a couple of the big casual games sites like Jayisgames and has gone down really well. I’ve also had endless people email me in the last week for help as they are stuck, if you are one of them there’s a really nice synapsis walkthrough on mousebreaker.

Now that its finished I’m taking a well earned rest from stupid projects and am going to sit back with a beer and watch football for at least 3 days before starting on the sequel.

Anyway enough of me waffling on about, if you want to loose 15 minutes of your life go and play Synapsis.

Vector Magic is a new online package from Stanford University for converting bitmap images into vector based artwork. Vectors are great because they are scalable you can print them at any size and they still look nice and crisp. I often find I’ve been doodling a character and want to use them in flash which likes vectors better than bitmaps so I have in the past spent a couple of hours converting the bitmap into a vector by tracing it.

Vector magic takes your bitmap and converts it automatically after you make a series of choices  about your image. The above shows the results, I gave the packages a thumbnail image of panda Bob and the right is the vector output. There have been functions like this for a while, flash has trace bitmap and illustrator has a similar tool but neither produce good results and usually the amount of vector points used is horrific. From a few tests on stuff like panda Bob the output is as good as if I’d hand traced it.

Well its been about 6 years since I last did a blog post, mainly because I was abducted by aliens. It was on the way home after several pints of slaughter house ale I saw a bright light and then 6 years had past, I woke up with a sligh headache and a complete set of artwork for a kebab based game, which you can see by clicking on the picture, or view the Kebab Van.

Also this month I’ve written an article about game interface design which is on the mighty mochiland. Which was good as the kind chaps there sent me 2 t-shirts for producing the article, which reminds me I said I’d take a shot of me in them to prove I actually wear them.

See you again in another 6 years.

The first part is Mohinders New York office, you can explore around and get background information about the show, its pretty slick and you can access the games from the map on the wall, there’s also things to unlock if you pick items up and use them in some way.

The first games is the Isaac Mendez painting game, quite an original idea where you have to paint shapes to make up the various painting that he does in the show, it sounds odd but actually works really well. I also did a few animations to introduce the game where I had to recreate the whole of Isaacs loft apartment.

The next game was Claire Bennet’s game where she has to use her superpowers to get through the train wreck. Quite a challenge to get all the effects working well. Its a simple platform game where you have to get Claire from one end of the wreck to the the other, if she gets injured then she can use her super power to heal herself.

That’s all of them so far, there’s 3 more games to come featuring other characters from the show which will be going up over the next couple of months.

Another Scottish island photo this time actually from Islay, I think it was called Kintra beach where I found this, It was a stretch of sand between up Laggan bay about 8 miles long, utterly stunning. Its not that well known but Scotland has in my opinion some of the best beaches in the world on the islands, its a pity it isn’t a bit hotter !

This rather strange formation was where a river was running into the sea in a big arc (the water is brown because of all the peat soil). It was a really surreal day that day as the sky was actually that very odd colour, the other thing which was really fascinating about this river is you could actually see it erroding this mini coastline away in real time. Every so often a big chunk of sand cliff would fall off with a big splash.

Anyway the long overdue superpower thread is that I finally have my artwork on the BBC heroes portal its to go with the hit TV series Heroes (which is excellent if you haven;t been watching it) , which I produced a lot of the 3d artwork for the web games and my artwork has even been shown at the end episodes, woo hoo !

Unfortunately its locked to UK IP’s so you can’t view it unless you are in the UK.

Well its been a busy few weeks, and I just remembered I had one of these new fangled blog things. So what has happened in the last 4 weeks ? Firstly I found 3 vipers while on holiday, then 16 red deer including 4 stags, and a red frog. These were all up in Scotland in Arran, Islay and Jura. I didn’t manage to get a picture of a deer though to prove it so you’ll just have to believe me on that one. The red frog was indeed chilli flavoured.
What is surprising about all these Islands is that they actually had more distilleries than people. I tried some single malt scotch and it wasn’t actually that bad.

While I was away I released a new game Cubex, its kind of based on one of my all time favourite games res on the playstation 2.Its had a mixed reception, some people love it, some people hate it. It was kindly reviewed on Jayisgames last week, one of the biggest casual games sites on the net and it was given a very good write up. The other news on the games front is that robopogo finally topped over 1 million downloads yesterday thanks to the 23,000 Norwegians that visited my site over the bank holiday weekend. Robo pogo was also reviewed on channel 4 game recieving ascore of 7.5 out of ten. Almost finished a new game which will be released sometime next month.
And tomorrow I will reveal what that superpower business from the last post was all about.

Well I’ve been away from blogging for a while this is because I have been on a top secret undercover operation and blogging would obviously blow this cover. Well, firstly I made another game a few weeks again and forgot to tell anyone, its called roboPogo you are helping crushatron 2000 get to work on his trusty pogo. Its highly deep and involved and has gone down incredibly well in Brazil and Korea. Its amazing how much happens since you write a blog entry, since the last one, we have a new prime minister, a big pop concert which saved the world by using “low efficiency light bulbs” and also most importantly Kylie Minogue will be in Doctor Who.

Sometimes though translations are a real problem, I have 2 boxes on my games page which are place holders labeled “coming soon” and I have a very confused man in Brazil asking how he could play the game coming soon. hmmm…..

Thats all for now, I am just getting out my canoe to travel home.

Well its again been far too long since I last updated this blog, this time doing a game where you are a cube fighting other cubes in a world made of cubes. I got out this weekend though and went for a nice walk around countryside world, its just south of Birmingham and north of London, its more commonly known as the Cotswolds. Its great as you can walk round a bit and then visit a ye olde countryside world theme pub for a pint of local cider.

While there I stumbled upon this field it was amazing, unfortunately my camera was overwhelmed and didn’t focus that well.

Just to finish this off I found these 3 amazing facts :-
1. William Shakespeare was the inventor of the pencil sharpener
2. Currently in Sheffield there is only one man called Harold
3. All words to describe things which are small are all over 12 letters long

Well they finally launched the London 2012 branding today, 440ks worth of branding and this is what they came up with ?!?

I’m not usually one to go round bashing other peoples work but this has got to be one of the worst looking designs I have ever seen. In fact I only have to look at it for 30 seconds before it makes me feel quite ill. Purple and Yellow !

Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell commented: “This is an iconic brand that sums up what London 2012 is all about – an inclusive, welcoming and diverse Games that involves the whole country. It takes our values to the world beyond our shores, acting both as an invitation and an inspiration. This is not just a marketing logo, but a symbol that will become familiar, instantly recognisable and associated with our Games in so many ways during the next five years.

What the bloody hell are these people on about, its quite clearly an abstract version of a bowl of rhubarb and custard.