New Denim Kid Logos!

This week I finally got round to creating some logos for my Soundcloud page! This is the first step in my plan to try and get the ball rolling for myself as a producer over the Summer. I made the logos in Photoshop. They are fairly simple; plain block capitals with various pictures that I took showing through.

I did banners and square logos in a load of different picture and colour combos.

Banners:

Square Logos:

I'm currently working on a few new tracks that I hope to upload soon!

"Withdrawal" Level Design Project - Uni Work

Our latest Uni project has been a group project to create a game level lasting 6-9 minutes for use with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. This has been a huge project that we've been working on for a couple of months and it's coming along nicely. It's involved more work than any other project and has called on all of our skills including 3D modelling, level design, digital painting, level building and scripting.

We've achieved a lot so far but there's still a lot to do. Here's some progress pictures.

This Week at Uni - Character Designs!

Super busy week this week, the submission of our character design module, which at first seemed miles off, suddenly snuck up, so everyone was freaking out and smashing out character designs, including myself.

I've posted some pictures of one of my character designs in previous posts, this one is now done:

 

We also had two other projects. One of them was to create two characters, a tank and a soldier, who belonged to a "visual family", meaning that they look like they could belong in the same "universe"/game. This one took a hell of a lot of time and late nights and is probably my favourite piece that I produced for this project. It was partially inspired by the Pacific and Band of Brothers series with a pinch of post-apocalypse included.

Finally, I have a picture that is currently unfinished but I'm going to return to it and try and boost my mark at a later date. This one is of a "cannon fodder" character - generally the most common type of enemy, that you see (and kill) a lot of in a game. I went for a more comedic approach to this one, playing on the cannon fodder idea. It's a zombie being tricked into stepping on a land mine. It's far from finished but I thought I'd post it anyway.

 

This Week's Work

This week at Uni was spent working on a new project. This involves two out of three of our study modules and we've got six weeks to do it, so it's pretty big. Basically we have to pair up and use Maya and UDK to create a level, from scratch, that provides 6-9 minutes of gameplay. Eventually this will result in the most complete "game" we've made thus for on the course. We're also being paired with music students for this project to create a soundtrack which is going to be pretty exciting.

With that said, I don't actually have much to show for it yet because we're still in the idea generation and concept stages. I spent all of Thursday using UDK and learning how to script events. Here's a screencap that I took of a script in which the player has to activate 3 switches to make a door open to give an idea of how complicated this is.....

I also did a bit more work on my vampire hunter concept art that I've been posting for the past couple of weeks. Here's how it's looking now....

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Finally, I also did a bit of music. I've entered a competition to remix a track by Hans Zimmer. The prize is a job as a composer in America, which I don't expect to win of course but it was a lot of fun to do and I learned a bit about composing while I was it. It was originally an orchestral track and I took a few separate instruments from it and added some guitar to make it sound as unique as possible.

You can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/denimkid/from-afar-bleeding-fingers

This Week at Uni - Vampire Hunter development and Tile Texture

Not an awful lot to post this week as I've just been powering on through the projects that I mentioned in last week's post.

Firstly here's the latest version of my Vampire Hunter concept art for my character design module. I've cleaned up the character and reigned in the lines a bit to make it a bit neater. I've also started to further develop smaller areas, like weapons, accessories etc and started to develop lighting effects. A few more hours work and it should be done!

I've also finished the second of my high quality textures, which was pretty rushed but I'm fairly happy with how it's turned out.

That's all for this week!

This Week at Uni - Vampire Hunter concept art and Metal Texture

It's been a busy week at Uni this week with a few big projects kicking off.

The first is a character design project; we have to design a main character for a game and create a piece of concept art that can be used as a desktop wallpaper. My idea is an "Arctic Vampire Hunter" and I've gotten started on the picture in Photoshop. I'm experimenting with lighting and poses with this one. It's nowhere near done yet but here it is so far.

We've also had a "next gen texture" brief which is basically about using normal maps to give a texture depth and specular maps to dictate how it reflects light. This has actually gone very well so far and I've finished one of the two that I need for the brief. Here's my final presentation sheet for the first texture!

More to come soon...

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.

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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!