Well it’s been a long time since I’ve been on here to write anything, but all of those who know me personally know that I’ve been through a lot of life changing events this past year, with many things still needing to be finished off and I guess put to bed once and for all, but at last I’m starting to see a brighter future.

So while my gorgeous fiancée battles through the single player campaign on COD MW3 and my son sits tapping away on my mac mini doing his homework, I thought I’d once again put fingers to iPad and write a blog post.

Mainly because I’m quite happily buzzing from the fact that after months of hard work, today was a milestone for horizon studios as I finally took Mike’s build of our current iOS game Purgatory and created a working iOS test build.

It’s also been a long time coming but it was a serious achievement to be able to finally deploy and test a game we’ve collaborated on, not only on my 3GS, my 4S and my iPad 2, but also to drop a copy of the app into dropbox so that Kevin, Mike and Justin could also test it on their devices.

Finally we’re at a stage where we can build games for mobile devices and soon will be able to upload them to the app store.

It feels strange to have worked with the team for so long with an aim to building for iOS devices, but using engines that were pretty much PC only, so it will be really cool to start taking some of our older projects, our PC demos of forthcoming iPhone games and start to redevelop them in the knowledge that we’ve finally got a working system for building iOS apps.

It’s also weird to compare where I was emotionally and mentally this time last year to where I am now, and if it wasn’t for my wonderful fiancée then I know I wouldn’t be where I am now. As I said at the start of this post I still have a lot to sort out from my old life up north, but her belief in me and my ability, as well as her support for me and her brother Kevin with Horizon Studios, has pushed me to start building new assets for our game and I’m pleased to say that every day that I’m messing around creating things, I’m starting to improve in modelling, texturing and animating.

Seeing how my assets appear on the iPhone and iPad highlights different areas I can tweak and improve on so I’m looking forward to constantly pushing myself to improve what I’m coming up with so that when our first proper in house project is released, it will look highly polished.

I also find it quite amusing that having handed over one of our previous projects to “industry professionals”, on launch day there were so many obvious design and coding flaws that should have been spotted and rectified before release, things that I as a “noob” as it were spotted and yet went unnoticed by the professionals to a degree that made us wince with disappointment.

Hopefully these will be mistakes we won’t be making with our releases, not just in the way the games themselves look and perform, but also in their pricing and marketing (just hope that with the latter said, we’ll be able to make some money with them).

I think the next thing I’ll have to start doing will be developer diaries and a support website for our forthcoming titles, followed by a trailer and more work on the front end and interface.

All exciting times ahead.

or losing my religion?

So, fresh off the back of a day trip to Brighton in order to attend this year’s Develop Conference’s Expo I came away with a renewed drive to see my life take a more positive direction while at the same time trying to figure how to fit 101 different things that I’d like to achieve into such a short space of time.

The trip was partially to see what the expo was about, to do some professional networking, but most of all to finally meet the rest of the guys from Horizon Studios face to face. It was a brilliant day, despite having come away with so many different things buzzing around in my head and needing to come up with some form of road map to structure it all in order to see it work,  but I have to admit that once again having that  completely new focus on where I originally wanted to be in my future along with remembering what I originally wanted to achieve and more importantly, realising what I could achieve and how I can go about getting there, I honestly can’t wait to get started.

I think one of the most amusing things from the whole trip was a book I bought from the expo. Having travelled all the way from the North East to one of the furthest points in the country, I ended up buying an art book by a company  who operate from a building  just down the road from me!

Whether it was fate, divine intervention or whatever, in buying their book, leafing through the pages, reading about how the company came about, reading about the various staff there, some of whom I’ve already met previously and others who I would probably fall to the floor yelling “I’m not worthy!”, it set my mind off again trying to fathom out where my journey has taken me so far, the ups and most importantly the many many downs I’ve had over the years, but in reading the introduction to the book especially it reminded me of how I started my business several years ago, what inspired me to start that business then, what did and didn’t work, why certain things didn’t work and so it started to restore my original drive and passion, while at the same time giving me a slightly clearer perspective on things in terms of past, present and future.

As a side note, it was even more intriguing to later discover that some articles I’d previously slightly glossed over in both 2D Artist and ImagineFX not only featured work by some of their artists, but also had an extensive interview with the whole team.

My biggest problem in all this was once again, where to begin.

Thankfully, Jason Pickthall from DR Studios gave me a few pointers to try to handle the different aspects from the art side of things and while trying to avoid reaching for the graphics tablet or my box of pencils, I jumped straight into 3DS Max and was quite happy with what I came up with after a couple of hours, while at the same time conversing with some of the guys from Horizon and various other usual multi-tasking things that I’m well known for doing.

Of course one thing I’m trying to get my head around in a fashion are the “tools of the trade”. This decade is definitely one for getting into almost any industry with the plethora of tools at your disposal and looking at what is available to those still in school or those just leaving makes me wish I was their age.

For me, I like drawing, I like digital painting, I like 3D modelling and I like coding, but all require specific tools and experience and a fair amount of discipline and while I am relatively well versed in each area, trying to fathom where to dedicate my time to an individual area is still a bit tricky.

A bad workman always blames his tools

At the same time, as I mentioned with the “tools of the trade”, I have found a massive flaw in the old saying “A bad workman always blames his tools”. Over the last four decades I noticed that if you start off with the right tools then you can accomplish things much easier. Having worked for a number of companies in the past that vaguely had the tools to do a job meant you spent more time having to work around the limitations of what you had to work with, rather than just getting the job done. A tool that vaguely does the job is not just detrimental to getting the job done properly, but it can often put people off trying to advance further in that field and even though the graphics tablet I have is okay and vaguely does the job, I often wonder if a wacom would be better so quite often I turn to pencil and paper instead.

It’s one of those things that you can’t really tell until you try it in a real working environment/situation, but it’s whether to spend the money or not. It would be great if there was somewhere or way you could try them out and see if you if they are more productive than a cheaper alternative, I’ll have to work on that one.

to be continued………

Having now been involved in games development since late 2009 I was starting to get a bit disheartened that anything and everything I was working on seemed destined to wind up either on PC or on the web. Although I have nothing against PC development, the vast majority of projects I was working on were best suited to a particular medium and one that I’ve wanted to be involved in since I first got my hands on one.

As you can tell from the picture to the right, I am of course talking about the iPhone, or more specifically, iOS, the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

After bouncing around with various different engines, languages and looking into things as much as I could, I finally started to see some light at the end of the tunnel and now that I’ve unravelled the mystery that is getting an app onto the App Store, I can now see why it wasn’t something anyone could give a relatively straightforward answer to.

Yes, the process is slightly complicated when you’re first starting out, and Yes, just because you’ve created something doesn’t mean that it’s going to be accepted by Apple and published on their store, but what I am more than happy about now is the fact that I’ve got to the stage now where I’ve created an app (a very short test piece that hasn’t been made public or published to the app store) and have managed to upload it to my iPhone for testing.

It’s one thing to see a game you’ve developed being loaded in on someone’s computer, it’s something else to be able to pull your phone out of your pocket and demonstrate a project that you’ve made yourself.

Of course, now that I’ve started to get my head around Xcode, provisioning profiles and all that jargon, now I’m just seriously itching to get a project developed, demo’d, tested, bug fixed and live on the app store.

Watch this space…..

Following on from my previous and somewhat sinister sounding post, things are starting to move forward in a somewhat zig zagging fashion, but I guess for me the main thing is that they are in a bizarre way moving forward.

New Abode

So first of all, I’ve finally moved in to my new house. It’s slowly getting there although the powers that be like to drag things out as much as they can.

The first of these being when I applied to have Sky+ and broadband installed. I placed the order on the 27th May and while it could have been a very straightforward and painless process, in their wisdom they’ve chosen to drag the installation of all this out so sadly my broadband won’t be installed until the 21st June (yes, 6 days to come out and install the Sky+HD box, a further 7 days to get BT to switch on the phone line and then a further 11 days for them to activate the broadband thereafter, don’t ask why it takes so long,  I haven’t a clue). I just hope my router turns up between now and then.

The furniture that I ordered on the 5th June was initially pencilled in for delivery on the 15th, but then I was informed that it was going to take another 7 days, so my furniture will be landing on the 22nd, and finally after that, my return to my arts course should take place on the 23rd with my son potentially moving in that weekend.

However, once all that is up and running then I should hopefully be able to plod on somewhat better than I have been these past 6 months and finally start to get my life back on track.

New Plans

So with a new start in a new location, what do I have planned for the rest of the year?

New Horizons
Among many things I need to do, one of the first things will be to start pushing forward with Horizon Studios and get my team on the right track again.

I had many big plans for the start of the year which were unfortunately somewhat thwarted on New Year’s Eve with the end of a 20 year relationship and after a long time trying to restore some normality and sanity into my life, that is finally starting to come to fruition and I’m pleased to say the development of a number of projects that we had been looking to work on can finally begin.

Old Business
The original business I started 7 years ago still has some promising areas that, after 20 years experience in various fields I can’t really turn my back on and as such I will be looking at everything I’ve built up over the years and look at what can still be recovered in the current climate and restore those areas back to being profitable.

New Portfolio
For all I quite enjoy writing these somewhat relatively personal blogs, in the future I need to start to separate my personal and professional affairs to an extent, and so I will be tweaking this website a little to present a somewhat more professional outlook and tuck the personal side away in the background. Although in part I guess a lot of my musings have been based on those I read in Luke Halliwell’s blog after the demise of RealTime Worlds, but having looked at other portfolios of game artists I have been inspired to be somewhat more creative in my art and less vocal in my posts.

New Connections
Given the new location to work from and the somewhat altered freedom my new life with my son will give me, I’m looking to start pushing forward and restoring some old connections and making new ones, getting my own name and that of Horizon Studios out as far and wide as I can in the hope of drumming up a lot of potential business and other associates to work with/for.

edit: in closing, I’ll stick some pretty graphics on this at some point in time soon, but at the moment I’m busy trying to recover one of my external 1TB drives (typically the one that has the last 4 year’s work on!!!!) and things aren’t looking good. I just hope that my accounts aren’t sitting on the damned thing otherwise I’m screwed