First Post of 2014 // "Lights" Cover

2013 is now over and I find myself halfway through my 2nd year as a Games Design student at UCLan. This seems like a good time to reflect on what I've learned and achieved so far and share some goals for 2014.

2013 was a very busy year both in and out of Uni: At Uni, I found myself learning how to use programs and software that I didn't even know existed two years ago and I think I've done well to get to where I am without any previous education in Games Design. Outside of Uni, much of my time was spent playing music, and I finished my first tracks in Reason 5 and Logic Pro X. My love of music really blew up this year.

2014 will hopefully be just as productive. I'm going to try and make even more music and keep up my Games Design work. I'm also going to try and do a lot more drawing because I've been slacking on it recently. Some of my more short term goals include making another Fallout 3 mod and another independent game scene. I also need to start looking into getting a job when my degree is finished and I've already been researching jobs writing music for games and other media, and game environment artist jobs.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My first creative project of 2014 was an instrumental cover of "Lights" by Ellie Goulding which took me a couple of weeks to complete and was finished and uploaded to my Soundcloud page yesterday. It was made in Logic and included acoustic and electric guitar and Midi keyboard and drum tracks.

Listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/denimkid/lights-ellie-goulding-cover

I've also recently started an Instagram page: http://instagram.com/theoclarke4l

That's all for now!

Abandoned Swimming Pool (End of Semester Brief)

The most time-consuming and involving University brief I've ever done (a.ka "the reason that it's been almost a month since I last made a post") is finally finished!

For the past few weeks there's been a few big end-of-semester projects on the go that have all been pretty intense in terms of workload, and they're now all pretty much finished. Definitely the most interesting and blog-worthy project has been the creation of a "modular" game scene, which basically means that we pre-make parts of the level's architecture, like walls and floors, so that they can be repeated to speed up the level building process. We then build a level and fill it with objects etc.

As you can see, I made a fair few 3D models for this brief.

 

Here's a few pictures of the finished scene.

It's taken countless hours of 3D modelling in Maya and texturing in Photoshop to get it finished. I've put a lot of time into this one and I'm happy with how its turned out. I'm definitely looking forward to getting home for Christmas and taking a break now. I plan on focusing on writing loads of music for a few weeks.

"Crazy Jungle Swing" - User Interface Project

So my current project for Uni is to design a working user interface project for a game using Powerpoint, to demonstrate a main menu, in-game user interface, pause menu etc. We had to come up with a vague idea of what sort of game our UI was for, so I came up with a simple sidescroller for a tablet, involving monkeys. I also decided to do some (kinda rough) artwork for this to make it a bit exciting than clicking around some menus.

The UI itself is pretty much finished but I'm working on a video playthrough of it that I'll post sometime soon, for now, here's some of the art work that I did for it. They're not too fancy but I think they're a fair standard for the length of the project :)

Gas Pump Model Finished

Today I finished the Gas Pump model that I began work on a couple of weeks ago for a University brief. It's probably one of the highest quality game objects that I've made so far. I've learned a lot of new skills that I'm looking forward to putting to use in my independant projects. As usual it was modelled using Maya, textured in Photoshop and presented in UDK. I also tried to go the extra mile with the presentational sheet this time, hopefully this will pay off when it's marked.

Here's the presentation picture that I produced

Then the boring bit: the texture map and wireframes

Dubstep Track: "Right Here"

This has been a very musical week for me, I've spent a lot of time producing and playing and learning new stuff.

The result (or one of them at least) is a new track that I uploaded to my Soundcloud the other day. It's my first proper attempt at a dubstep track and also the first time I've used a sample in a track.

Click here to listen!

3D Modelling a Gas Pump

This has been another busy week at Uni. Following the submission of my game character 3D model last week, we've started a new brief. This one is similar, but this time we're doing a low-poly game asset 3D model. This is much more suited to my abilities than the last brief because I spent a lot of time over the Summer making game assets and scenes and I think I take better to it than I do to character modelling.

Because I enjoy this area of games design, I'm already fairly ahead of schedule and I've got it modelled and UV mapped ready to texture at a later date. Of course, it's not finalised and I might revisit the model and tweak a few things, but here's a preview of it:

Underwater Environment Art Finished

Today I finished my Underwater environment concept art piece that I mentioned in my last post. It's a lot more detailed than the work-in-progress version and has taken me roughly 8-10 hours to finish. It's my first ever finished Photoshop concept art (which is shameful seeing as I'm in my 2nd year as a Games student) so I'm pretty happy with it and I think now that I've done one, the idea doesn't seem quite as intimidating. I'll definitely be doing more in the future.

Here's the previous version that I posted recently, for reference.

A lot of changes have been made in the final version, here's a quick list:

• Added plantlife and fish/animals (including sharks!)
• Added highlights in areas where the light is hitting the landscape
• Increased the intensity of the blue overlay to give more of an underwater effect
• Tilted the ship very slightly

Here's the final version: