Resurrection!

By the power vested in me I restore this fine blog to it's former glory!

Right, things happened since my last post in May 2011. Very quickly, here's what I've been up to.

Later on in 2011 I gathered some friends to talk about making a video game. We were very good at generating ideas but naive with our project scope and personal abilities. Ultimately we didn't make anything like a game, but it was valuable to think about doing it, and then to think about why it didn't work out in hindsight.

We were thinking about a game with ziplines or something?

Late 2011 to early 2012 I made another map for Team Fortress 2 by the name of pl_doppleganger. I'm pretty happy with the result.

pl_doppleganger

At Uni I'm a member of the Computer Society. This group of nerds have a very wide and wealthy variety of skills and they're all lovely people, too. I was Gaming Officer for a while, which isn't really relevant to this blog but it means I can show you my gorgeous manifesto.

Vote for me!

So at Uni I've made a bunch of friends (hooray) and they're all great at different stuff. The thing I'm good at is making maps in the Source engine, so I gave some talks with handouts on how to make your own maps! People came along and learned stuff from me which was pretty amazing. 

Busy times followed - I did a placement at an engineering company (terribly fun), I was helping out with the Computer Society, I was playing Dota (so that's where all my time went...)

Dota - a game best enjoyed with friends

In March 2013 at a LAN party my friends Ben, Tanbouz and I decided to make a shot at recreating the Team Fortress 2 comics as a videos using Source Filmmaker. This project isn't moving right now but you can have a gander at what we did on our blog. 

And I can't remember the precise trigger but early 2013 I started to make games with the Unity engine. I can count about 6 different Unity based experiments and projects that I'm to blame for since then. 

Project Summit - my first collaborative game project

Project Summit (June - September 2013) is probably the coolest project I've worked on so far because it was with friends. We're passionate about playing games and game development and we're very keen make and release our own games. Our first project together was Summit - a physics based rock climbing game that may never see the light of day. Despite that, Summit isn't a failure for me - we learned a great deal about Unity, ourselves as a team and we stuck to a deadline. 

And finally, last weekend was Ludum Dare 28 (a competition to make a game in under 48 hours). I participated and I've kept working on my game following the competition (48 hours wasn't enough, but the crunch will give you a fantastic start!). The game is called RedLines and it's a work in progress, hopefully to be completed in January '14!

RedLines - a solo project

OK you're all caught up.