Shapes and Lines

My my buddy, coworker, and fellow “instigator” Andy Maloney has moved on. Which is to say Andy left the garage, Garage Games that is, and headed off on his next big adventure. Switzerland, Sweden, or one one of those places with the tall blond beauties, chocolate, clocks, and what not. …Farfegnugen?

Best of luck Andy. I expect you to have some great stories to tell next time our paths cross.

Here’s a shot of Andy enduring a vile ..I mean tasty concoction that Kate (of Eugene’s own “The Vintage”restaurant) whipped up for him on his birthday this year.
…Yummm …hallelujah! where’s the Tylenol?

And also a few of Fallen Empire: Legions shots. This is the game I have been working on for the better part of the last year.

Legions just entered “Open Beta” over on InstantAction.com, so now anyone can play. Go give it a spin.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

…is like me doing web dev. I can bang away at it, but it ain’t gonna be pretty.

It’s a case study in the misapplication of human resources. Don’t ask Captain hook to give you a back rub, and don’t ask me to do web dev.

Speaking of which, I want to thank my brother Shingo for his generous assistance. He kicks butt at web dev. Check it out HERE if you are looking for top notch work. He is a very busy man, so don’t bother him unless you have a serious inquiry

So web dev is not my game, just the same, it’s starting to feel like progress. Before long now I will have the infrastructure built and be able to unveil to next phase.

Obligatory pic.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

The site still seems to be running slow, so this is just a quick post to draw attention to a new link I have added, check out Zero Punctuation and his review of Crysis.

Yahtzee has been doing these awesome reviews for a while. If you are not familiar with them, have a look. …I hope he never reviews one of my games. But if he did, I imagine it would be sort of like getting fatal brain freeze while eating the best ice cream ever.

Be sure to check out the rest over on the escapistmagazine dot com

I did have his review of Crysis here, but that video is no longer on You Tube, so I have post the direct link to that review on here ..enjoy.

Life is terribly short, or as Buffett put it “…maybe sixty good years
It’s still not that long a stay.” 

But no matter how many times you hear it, you can’t begin to glimpse the harsh reality of it until you lose someone very close to you, or face it yourself.

And then of course, it’s too late.

Experience lends perspective, and the two combined become wisdom. That’s what books and tutorials offer us. As do mentors, big brothers and sisters, sempai, directors, teachers, friends and colleagues.

This guy, Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, is sharing his experience with us.

The video has been around a good while, but If you have not already seen it, or perhaps even if you have, it’s worth the time to watch.

I read a blog not too long ago by Bruce F. Webster that was pretty insightful. Strictly speaking, he was referring to the I.T. business, but notes that I.T. is not the only industry this effect can be witnessed in. I could not help but note that the corollary with the game industry is strikingly accurate.

Well worth the short read.
http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/

And because an artist blog is not complete without some art… here are a couple of old shots from an AvP RTS game a I worked on several years back.

These things are super low poly by today’s standards, and did not have the benefit of normal maps. Brian Collins and I did the models for that game. I will see if I can locate shots of the Alien models and post them some time.  …Ah’ the good old days…

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

So I installed PicLens as an image viewing tool for my galleries. When it works, it’s really cool and makes for a great sort of Matrix style infinite gun wall (the scene from the first movie) approach to image browsing.  

However, I have encountered two problems with it so far. First, that unless the user (that’s you) enables Piclens for their browser by installing the plug-in, it displays the images in a slide show, which has the unpleasant side effect of maximizing the images to the full window size. This means that images which were downsized specifically to be web efficient, are now displayed too large and look like crap.

The second problem I have encountered is that the provider I switched to seems to be having some serious bandwidth issues, which means PicLens in all its glory is loading images WAY too slowly.

…Back to the drawing board.

February 2nd of 2006 …that was the last time I updated my shapes and line dot com site. Boy how time does fly when you’re busy.

This is the first reincarnation of my site as a more accessible blog oriented web presence that should enable me to update regularly. I will figure out the layout before long.

One downside to all of this effort is that by taking down my old web site I have broken the links to pretty much every image I posted in blogs on numerous sites. as the saying goes, “Every solution breeds new problems” …I’ll have to tackle that another time.

Here are the last quotes I post on the old site back in 06, which seem oddly appropriate.

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

-W. Edwards Deming

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

By the way PicLens is a pretty cool image/media tool, which I will be using for my gallery. If you are interested in checking it out got here http://piclens.com/lite/

Here are a couple of video of what I have been working on for the past several months.

Fallen Empire: Legions …Go Team Justice!