BLOGGING IS REALLY BORING.

*cough*

I was up til about 3am this morning writing the first few strips of a web comic called Full Frontal Lobotomon, my upcoming contribution to the wonderfully eclectic www.the36print.co.uk. I really, really enjoy writing and I need to do more of it. But not blog posts. They always feel like I am just checklisting things what I have done lately. There are loads of things I would like to write about but I never feel fully informed enough to do so. Or entertaining enough. Or I just can’t stick with it. Hopefully doing Lobotomon on a weekly basis will help me improve and be inspired to do more.

Sooo the checklist. I have been:

- Freelancing for an iPhone game which I hope to share with you in the near future.

- Failing to find as much freelance work as I probably need when I move to Cardiff, hopefully in the next few weeks (I am very excited about this). Elance.com and similar sites were my initial source, but the undervaluation of creative tasks from both clients and contractors becomes overwhelming. Pangs of bitterness ensue. I’m convinced there’s some awesome resources out there – forums brimming with programmers who would love to pay me to bootify their games. But I’ve yet to find them.

- Still working on Mush LOL. Or should I say LOTOCOTI. Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. Or should I say, laughing because sometimes that is LITERALLY ALL YOU CAN DO.

- Not posting images on here much because everything these days goes on my Tumblr. Check that out instead. Aim to find time to do some more portfolio stuff soon, thinking of doing some mockups/marketing materials for game concepts.

Overall, I give things a 7/10. Neither here nor there. I think (hope) there is going to be a lot going on in the next few months, what with moving to Cardiff, finishing up projects (did I mention I live in eternal optimism that the release of Mush is only a week away?), as well as some other interesting opportunities cropping up.

Laters.

I finished that piece of artwork I was working on – check out my Tumblr, www.marblekittykat.tumblr.com, which gets updated more frequently. I also pretty obsessively build myself new portfolio websites, the latest of which is a mini folio purely for my illustration work – www.illustration.katekillick.com.

Although I am still working to build up my portfolio, I have found a more constructive way than self-set briefs – namely, freelance. I was surprised by the number of mobile game related projects looking for artists on elance and, having finally acquired an Apple device, feel pretty confident that I can meet their requirements. Got a couple of proposals in the pipeline which will hopefully be enough to sustain me whilst we finish Mush development / marketing.

In the mean time I am nervously anticipating the announcement of the student IGF shortlist this  Sunday!! We entered two titles, including mine & Henry Hoffman’s final year project, With the Dust. I can’t say I’m truly optimistic as there have been so many entries this year, but I am living in hope…

Finally, With the Dust *did* get nominated for a Ffresh award, which is “The Student Moving Image Festival of Wales.” I have no idea when the winners are announced (as seems to be typical of these events, they don’t even manage to email people to tell them they’ve been shortlisted….like, seriously?) but you can find out more at www.ffresh.com.

More importantly, I’ve decided to use Tumblr to dump doodles (I draw so much and yet put so little online…) and only blog here when I actually have something to WRITE. Thankfully due to the endless ways of cross posting social media, it will still appear nicely in the sidebar here >>
For the full show though, checkout www.marblekittykat.tumblr.com.

While I’m plugging myself, I’ll also mention that my folio is also looking rather tasty these days: Check It.

Anyhow I am now nicely unemployed and therefore trying to sort through the billion different goals that are buzzing around my brain:
- get a job as a 2D game artist
- go indie?
- develop my 3D skills?
- get a job in Flash/web?
- do a small solo serious game project on the side?
- get a local job? move to Cardiff and do it there?
- try freelance web? freelance illustration?
- apply for jobs abroad?
- finish With the Dust
- wait for Mush release

So far my process of making this decision is as follows:
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Whilst that sorts itself out, and I’m keeping my options open applying to all sorts of things, I have managed to narrow down my short term focus to practising my illustration (and possibly seeing what commercial/freelance opportunities that might provide).

SO what I am roundabout-ly coming to is this: I need Illustrator practice, my main problem being how distracted I get after 20 seconds with different styles, never quite committing to one style and changing things if it doesn’t look good immediately (I seem to have particular difficulty with line art and keeping my palette limited – thinking about reading up on colour theory). To avoid this, and to help me explore different styles to find what works for me, I am setting myself some briefs to do over the next couple of weeks:

- something with no lines
- something pet site style (single width lines)
- something serious
- something without the wacom
- something horror
- something scenic
- something abstract
- something urban
- something highly detailed
- something semi realistic

(some of these may be combined).

I am also trying to follow a few tutorials, more as a style guide than anything. This is one such example I started yesterday (got a long way to go):

(I wouldn’t have put eyes everywhere but it’s the theme of the tutorial…)

I had something else to say but I forgot it.

Hurrah!

A bit inconvenient, it means I’ve lost all posts prior to the point I started syncing my WordPress and Blogger (all in all, probably about a year of posts). It also means my gallery and categories are a bit messed up for the time being.

It’s not necessarily a terrible thing, however – I wasn’t exactly a regular poster and since I am finishing up at uni, perhaps it’s a bit of a new start.

Speaking of which, check out my final project, With the Dust, made by myself and Henry Hoffman in Blender:

More screenshots and info can be found at the website for the uni’s grad show: www.newportgames.co.uk – which I am busy organising and promoting. Come along! The opening is on Friday 17th June at 6pm (you can also follow us on twitter, www.twitter.com/newportgames and Facebook…) and is open during the day until 1st July.

The game isn’t quite finished, as we are still planning to polish it up a bit (a fair bit) for the show, but once it’s done we will probably put it up for free download so watch this space.

Mush is *still* in the pipeline – we are still going through some official processes BUT hopefully we will be able to make some extremely exciting announcements very soon (vague, I know). In less vague news, it won the BAFTA Cymru New Media award!

In summary, sorry about the mess and come to the grad show in Newport.

BAFTA / MUSH

Congratulations to all winners at the BAFTAs, including That Game Studio who gnabbed the ‘Ones to Watch’ Award. There were certain disappointments to the evening – and actually, I am not talking about the fact we didn’t win but the fact that Limbo didn’t get ANY awards and, as I keep saying, how few women there were on stage. But I have already done this rant to quite a few people so I will spare you this time.

Where is Mush? Well, as I think I wrote, we finished it before Christmas and since then spent a lot of time waiting for responses from Microsoft with regards to whether we would be going to marketplace submission or something else. It seems to all be finally making progress though so hopefully it will be hitting the WP7 marketplace in the coming few months.

THIRD YEAR PROJECT

For my third year project, I am working with Henry again (as Studio Yeah No Definitely – or something – for now) on a Blender game called Tethered (for now – it’s better than our last title, Patchwork Blue, but our lecturer seems to think it might have some S&M connotations – maybe it’s just him?). Having spent about a month just writing dissertaion – which I am happy to say is practically finished now – we can finally get back to it. Here is what I did at the start of this term towards the project:

I was going to do a write up of yesterday’s very interesting and encouraging lecture by Dan Pinchbeck. I may still do that. (In summary, I am so glad to realise that if you make games for the sake of experimentation, failure can be as useful as success).

I was going to write about my mild Minecraft addiction. Or perhaps how I’ve suddenly got into Left 4 Dead after my entire gaming life avoiding (or at least, sucking very badly at) FPS’s.

But with concept painting to do and dissertation only a mind-boggling 9 weeks away, I unfortunately don’t really have time.

Instead here is some stuff from Global Game Jam, most of which I took part in (well, alright, admittedly I went home early evening Saturday…)

After so long working on Mush (about 10 months since I worked on anything else…), it was quite a relief to be doing something different – and no, I don’t see any resemblance between the Mush art style and this art style. This is not a happy and angry level. Shhhh.

You can download Double Vision here: http://www.globalgamejam.org/2011/double-vision

You can find all the Global Game Jam games here: http://www.globalgamejam.org/games/2011

I really ought to stop writing about my failure to write and just write. ARGH!

Bye for now!

Windows Live Writer posts to both my wordpress and blogspot blog.

WordPress automatically posts to my twitter.

My Twitter updates are shown on both blogs, which also link to my linkedin and my folio site (which links to my wordpress, twitter and linkedin).

My Twitter links back to my wordpress blog.

Live is also connected to my Facebook and obviously my Live account which get status updates whenever I blog…therefore I don’t need to connect my Facebook and Twitter.

But the important thing is that Facebook doesn’t end up on Twitter or Blogs…which I think is correct ~^

Errr..

I think I’m getting the hang of this social networking malarkey.

Now..let’s see where this post ends up.

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