Closure

Guess it’s about time for an update eh?

I wrapped up my sophomore year a few weeks back. Passed all my classes in one go, and the project turned out very well! I think we put together a pretty nice game if you look at where we started, with artists that knew very little about 3D, and programmers that had never programmed for games before. We were lucky to have a great team that worked well together, and even though we didn’t quite accomplish everything we wanted, I’d say we can be proud of what we turned in.

You can take a look at all the sophomore games here. I worked on Will O Wisp, assisting with game design, concept art, creating pretty much all the textures and putting together the audio and gameplay trailer.

So now I finally have some free time again to work on some personal projects (and to look for an internship). I’ve started working on Dinerdate again, finalizing the script and characters, and drawing the first few strips. It’s a little slow because I’m still experimenting with fonts and word balloons and coloring techniques, and I gotta get familiar with the characters again – in terms of being able to draw them consistently. But I’m getting there. If it doesn’t launch before my summer vacation is over I’ll never live it down. It’s been too long.

Dailies

I hit a bit of a funk in terms of art recently (as you might have been able to tell from the lack of posts ), so I’ve started doing some hourlies again to try and break through it. And so far it’s working out quite well.

Technically these aren’t hourlies anymore (a practice where you describe what happened each hour you were awake.), but more like what I like to call ‘dailies’ – a little summary of that day. Not every day is as interesting ofcourse, so I usually just pick days that were themselves noteworthy in some way. Here’s a couple that were lingering in my sketchbook:

And the corresponding Flickr album.

Turning the page

The other day I was on my way to a meeting with our programmers at the TU in Delft. My train was approaching Rotterdam station. It was early and I had overslept, so I was travelling on autopilot.

When my train came to a halt, I disembarked and descended the stairs into the hallway, looking for some sort of signage to indicate which train I had to get on next.

Upon reaching the bottom, I found myself in a long concrete hallway with a low ceiling.
Memories engulfed me like a warm bath. Suddenly, I was no longer here. I was no longer now. I was back then.
The only other time I had been at Rotterdam station.

Then, it had marked the start of something beautiful.
But back here, in the now, I found myself at the other end of that chapter.
So much had happened in between.

And I wished so much I could be there again.

I found the signage. Track 5. The 11:05 to Delft station.
It was 10:59.

No time to waste.

Bits n bobs

Thought I’d post something again. I haven’t really been sketching that much anymore lately. Too busy with other things I guess.

Here’s some old (and not-so-old) pages from the sketchbook.

The first one has a couple of rough mockups of what our game in the first semester was supposed to look like, along with some complicated calculations for the economic system in the game.

This one is from the kickoff of our current project, where we built a small (anti-)valentine’s game, “Detéste L’Amour”. You can check it out in the games section of my portfolio.

In other news, PoseurInk was at Wondercon this weekend, shopping around Side B among other things, and the word is that people are pretty stoked about it. So I’m looking forward to receiving my contributor copy and reading the first reviews.

Thas whassup.

A day in the life

The Hourly comics craze has caught up with me. So enjoy an exciting day in the life of a game designer!

Click this mofo down here to see the entire thing.