Plinky Plonk XMas!

I'm so so excited and happy to be able to FINALLY make this blog entry! :D We've been waiting a few weeks for Apple to approve the app and now that it's out we finally have the go ahead!

By we I mean Bev Bush (Games Design Course leader at UCLAN), Hannah Spikings (A fellow, extremely talented, student) and Jane Cull from FoCul who made the whole thing possible. They're amazing people so I'd suggest clicking their names and checking them out. In a non-creepy way. :D 

Plinky Plonk is an iPad App that helps teach children how to play the piano and allows you to earn coins to spend in the game's shop. We revamped the game from its previous version and added the Pond Scene, which you can build up by unlocking characters with the points that you earn.

I'd tell you more but I don't want to give everything away, so please do download it if you can - it's FREE! :D Here's a link to the game in the app store to make it even easier for you to get to it.

Here's a few screenshots of the game to show you a bit of what it's like:

And then to add to it a little more, here's some larger versions of a couple of the characters I made for this version:

There'll also be a non-Christmassy version of the app released at some point soon, so look out for a blog post about that when it happens! :D

If anyone wants to help spread the word that would be amazing, and thank you so much for reading and playing if you did! 

(~^-^)~

Very Late Blog

Before I start I just want to say that I'm sorry for how late this blog post is. I've had some personal stuff going on the last couple of weeks that has made me extremely tired and not do close to as much work as I should have done.

I'm hoping to get back on track soon but for now here's what I have to share.

The treehouse scene I've been making in Maya is mostly done, I just need to finish the texturing and put it into UDK (which I'm going to get done tomorrow). 

The texture maps are all over the place at the moment so I'm just going to show some pieces that are somewhat finished rather than the whole thing:

The top piece is for the top of the trees while the lower two parts are various bits of tree bark.

Then here's the full map for the tree trunk (with a few gaps):

I'm not sure how big it'll be in size but if you click it you may be able to see some of the details.

Here's some shots of the scene itself without a texture so you can see what it looks like on its own:

The whole thing is made up of 13 different pieces with 5 of them being reused.

Here's what it looks like with the unfinished textures:

I really really don't like the tree tops. I think that they're too round and the texture looks awful on them, so I'm hoping to fix that over Christmas Break. 

I also had to model my level in Google SketchUP, so here's a look at that (warning, it's terrible):

I have more to it that matches up with the sketch some more but this is the general idea.

Then to finish off on here's some pancake cat:

 

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading if you did and hopefully things will be back on track soon. 

(~^-^)~

Tasteless Treehouse

This week I had to do a presentation for my Contextual Studies module, so here's the title page for that. I'd share the others but this is the only one that actually includes any artwork that I made:

Looking at it now there's a lot of things that I could have done to present it better but I'll know that for next time.

Next, here's some concepts I did for our current project:

This one bothers me a bit because of how big the tree trunks are compared to the amount of leaves.  e_e I'm going to fix that when I make the models but the sketch still bothers me a little.

And here's the second one:

Note: I can't take credit for the larger purple writing or the shading on the bottom left tree, that was one of my tutors. The tiny writing is mine. ;>_> JUST SO YOU KNOW.

I also have another page but I'll have to show it in next week's entry because I was silly and didn't scan it and I don't want to take a bad photo of it while the other two look somewhat presentable. 

Then finally, here's some art I made to display the emotions that Downton Abbey has caused me this week. I made the (wonderful) mistake of deciding to finally watch it and it has already broken my heart several times. Just 2 seasons to go until I'm caught up... :( </3

Have an awesome week and thanks for reading! 

PS Anna and Bates are my favourites. I don't think anyone really wanted to know that but I just wanted to share.

(~^-^)~

Break Blog

This is the second week in a row that I've made a blog in the studio, just this time it's during my lunch break~

I finished the Spider Plant this week and put it into UDK. The original plan was to remove his face after I did some more of the painting but I decided in the end that I'd keep it because he looked kinda weird without it. D: 

Here's some shots I got in UDK:

Needless to say (I hope) the images are of the front/side/back of the model. I would have liked to try and make something for him to sit on other than the default scene but unfortunately I didn't get to do that. ): May have to be something I do in the future. :)

Other than finishing my Spider Plant the other thing I've been doing this week has been the UI of an existing game concept I had.

There's probably only about 2 people (me being one of them) who remember my 'Freshly Tweezed' concept, so for those of you who don't this will probably be kinda confusing until I can add something to this blog that shows more of it.

Anyway, I chose it for my project and so far I only have filler images to test my PowerPoint, so they aren't that great but I'll show a couple anyway:

As mentioned these are just filler images so they only took about 2 minutes to make, I do plan on making way better versions that'll be included next week. :D 

That's all I have for now, thanks for reading if you did and I hope you have an awesome week! 

(~^-^)~

Studio Blog

I'm currently writing this while sat in the Games Design studio at uni, how cool. :D I figured I'd write this now so that you guys don't have to wait all weekend! 

Most of the things I've made this week have been related to the previous entry just minus the bad photos of my sketches. 

First up is some more work of Cole and Hyde (the water guy that I decided to rename):

Something I just noticed now that I found kinda funny is the fact that they're both holding the same pose but have totally different emotions. :'D

I also made the front and back covers to my pitch document:

Not too sure about the front but I do quite like the back. :D 

Next up is some of the rock characters I made that help Cole along his journey:

They don't have names so you can make up your own for them if you want, I don't mind.

Then finally today I did Maya stuff. :D It's a WIP Spider plant - this is what I've got so far:

His eyes are kinda messed up and he looks a bit creepy at the moment but I'm hoping to get him to a stage I'm happy with.

That's all for this week, thanks for reading if you did and take care!

(~^-^)~

Fire and Water

I tried to think of a witty title for this entry but I've got nothing so have this overused boring one instead!

This week I've spent a lot of time drawing the same character over and over again, but I kinda like him so it's been fun.

His name is Cole and he's made of fire. :D Here's some of the many character variations I did for him:

Also I apologise for the crappy photos, I reaaaally need to get myself a scanner or learn to use the library ones. ;>_>

At first I had this idea of what I wanted him to look like (namely the one with a more obvious outline) but when my tutors told me that he looked almost exactly like a character another student did a couple of years ago I had to change him. :( I was kinda sad about it because I liked the design, though I liked the idea of a new design more than I did the possibility of a plagiarism case. :D

Cole's final design is actually one that I had pinned down for Sliver the water character, so that was kinda interesting. He's the bottom left in this image and right next to him is some chocolate because I'm terrible:

Then once I decided on what his general shape was going to be like I made these to mess around with it some more. I liked the general shape but the top of his head wasn't very flame-like so it bothered me:

Here's a couple of slightly more rendered images I did of him. The first one is just him in a flat style and the second is something I wanted to try out. :D 

Next up is the water enemy, Sliver. I'll probably change his name because to me it just looks like I keep spelling 'silver' wrong but it'll do until I think of another one.

Here's some early concepts for him:

I went with the first design in the middle row but altered it a tiny bit as seen here:

 

And sadly I don't have a digital version of him yet. :( I'll be sure to post it when I do though! 

That's all I have for this blog, thanks for reading if you did and I hope that you have an awesome week! :D 

PS. I'm aware that the bottom half of the blog isn't aligned, I've tried to fix it 5 times now but it won't work. Sorry!

(~^-^)~

Drawing Dump

As promised, here's the rest of the board game drawings that I did from last week. There's quite a few of them so I apologise if you have to scroll quite a lot!

Along with the front of the cards I created the back of them too. I made 3,4 & 5 number cards as well as cards for all of the Monkeys. Here they are:

They aren't anything special but I like to think that they make it easy enough to distinguish the cards from one another.

After the cards I also made the board for our game. It's quite plain but it was fun to make:

There's supposed to be one vine per player, you place your monkey tokens anywhere you like on the board and the first person to the top of their vine wins. Simple!

Then finally the last thing I made for our game were some tokens. I made one girl, one boy and a dog:

Aaaand that's that. Thanks for reading if you did and I hope you have an awesome week! :D 

(~^-^)~