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.

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………

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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…..

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

It has had many MANY ups and downs and although it is flying by at an alarming rate, at the same time there is still a lot more to come this year and I’m looking forward to a vast many changes that will be happening in my life, once I get over the current set of hurdles this race through life has presented me with.

So with that said, let the strange side of this blog commence, for as was once quoted in a movie…

Death is only the beginning

Nope, I’m not heading off to commit suicide or anything drastic like that, but many years ago the Smashing Pumpkins penned a song which was used on one of the Batman films (and later again in Watchmen) with two alternative titles, The End Is The Beginning Is The End, and The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning… with one lyrical version and one instrumental version.

Although I never really questioned the meaning of the titles, recent events in my life subjected me to a number of tarot readings in which the majority of the time included the Death card. Having looked at my past, present and potential future, I can see a connection and so thus this song has been bouncing around my head a lot over the past few months.

Meaining: Death. This is the end of an old cycle and the beginning of a new one. It does not mean the end of the old cycle, just perhaps a change of direction.

and so, the end of the old. . . .

So why not start with the end of the old?

First of all there was the rather surprising and abrupt, ‘no chance of talking about it, rescuing it or anything like that‘ end of the 20 year relationship I had with my ex partner and mother of my three children, but as well as that, after seven years of trading I have decided to start winding down my previous, but still current business Broadening Horizons. It’s been a tough decision, but there are many aspects of that business that could still benefit me in my future ventures and so, as per the aforementioned death card, the end of an old cycle and the beginning of a new one but it does not mean the end of the old cycle, just perhaps a change of direction….

which leads us to the beginning. . . .

With the end of my relationship, closing my old business and taking the decision to move out of the old offices and the old house I now have an opportunity to take on a completely new life.

With a number of projects already in development with the Horizon Studios team it is safe to say that once we are all fully sorted and running at 100% we have a lot of potential for our future.

One game that is due for release at the end of  May on the iPad will hopefully kick us off and introduce us to the mobile market, with future games to follow that are being developed and targeted towards the mobile market, the iPhone, iPad and Androids initially, however our developer is also looking towards crossing over onto Xbox 360 through his use of C# and XNA, so there is definitely a lot of potential.

To return to the end of old, start of new but not necessarily the end of the old, meaning of my tarot card (and obviously this post), through the many years of experience, the equipment and the contacts I’ve built up over time, I can not only put a lot of my previous knowledge to use in promoting the work of Horizon Studios, but I can also run some elements of the old business alongside the games development business and hopefully get the best of both worlds, but what’s better is that without the shackles of my previous life and a new house in which to live and work from, given where I could have been with the old business and the things that held me back and pushed me down through that one, I should have a far greater chance of success this time.

So here’s to the future and as is often said, life begins at 40.

Happy New Year, hope 2011 is an awesome start to the new decade for everyone.

So, New Martin huh?

Yup, this May I’ll be turning 40 and before then I want to completely change my life and lifestyle around.

My current business didn’t quite go the way I wanted to and with the recent shift in market trend, especially affecting some of my original core markets, so I’ve decided to seriously downsize my old business and start focussing on new horizons, including Horizon Studios.

Further to that, the break up of my long term relationship made me seriously look at my past life, mistakes I’d made and where my new life could take me.

So I decided that it was time to give myself a complete fresh start as well, with a new wardrobe, a bit of exercise, getting back to some form of normality in terms of eating, sleeping and all the other stuff that people do day and night, but above all to just try to look after myself over the coming months and turn the body that I live in into something I’m happier with, instead of the way I have been these past years and just existing for the sake of others.

I know it’s fairly normal for a new year to list the usual “quit smoking, quit drinking, join a gym, eat healthy” etc. but in all honesty I think a lot of people do it for different reasons and they never really list it as a real priority or something they can really keep up.

With that said, I didn’t join a gym, I haven’t signed up to weight watchers or alcoholics anonymous or anything like that (not that I drink that much anyway), but instead I’ve been looking at various things that can be done without going to extremes. I’m not going to be taking a run around the block every morning or walking around in a tracksuit, but I have been looking at my lifestyle, the whole sitting at a desk, rarely getting up other than to make a coffee or visit the toilet etc. and figuring out what my body has done with all these years of neglect.

So, what am I doing instead?

Well, I’ve found a number of great micro workouts that can be slotted in through the course of the day, as well as some fairly standard workouts that a lot of people don’t really consider that much, so over the next 6 weeks I’m going to give all of those a bash and see if they actually do make a difference and if they do then I’m going to be carrying those on and looking at what else I can slot in.

Larry Kinane, a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of the one hundred pushups site, and as it’s something that can be done anywhere at any time without having to go out and invest in any equipment, I thought it would be a worthwhile place to start.

Hopefully in about six to eight weeks time I’ll be able to turn around and say “I managed to keep this thing going and it’s worked (or hasn’t worked)” but I’m extremely hopeful that by the time I hit the big Four-O that I’ll be in better shape than I have previously.

Watch this space……

Anyway, here he is, the completed (albeit unrigged as such) Minotaur character. This was an interesting project because it’s the first time I’ve taken a model out of 3ds max into mudbox and then back in again. There was a LOT of trial and error with that workflow as I’ve created high poly models in 3ds max and then created a normal map of the high poly model onto a lower poly model, but this was the first time I’d actually tried it from Mudbox and to be honest, it really wasn’t working out as well as I’d hoped. My problem being that I was trying to render the normal map from Mudbox, rather than export/import the model back into 3ds max and use the process I was familiar with. Once I realised that I could do that it was somewhat plain sailing after that. A few areas didn’t quite work out the way they should so I ended up having to do a bit clean up work in PhotoShop to resolve issues with the normal and diffuse maps but all in all I’m quite happy with the end results and look forward to working on more, higher detailed models in the future.

I was also pleased with how the specular map turned out, as I was mostly after a dull finish to the main character but a slightly glossier finish to the eyes, nails, horns and hooves, but all in all he worked out well.

For some time now I’ve wanted to get back into box modelling and one of the things I haven’t pasted up on my recent list of portfolio work has been a character.

Train2Game have recently had a thread running for Greek Mythological Creatures but while many of the posts that were made centred around starting and finishing a model in either Z-Brush or Mudbox, to me that was totally wrong.

Considering that the artist and animator course is mainly aimed at working on game ready models, not one piece of “work in progress” that I saw on there were usable as a game character, so I decided to post up my WIP, my starting block as it were….

Yup. This is him, this is my Minotaur as he began life.

In all honesty he came together quite nicely, but there are a lot of relatively nasty polygons in there that I need to go around and clean up, especially around the facial features, but a quick edit of that, taking out some offending loops and straightening up some vertices should see that come back to something cleaner that I’m happy with in terms of topology and ready to be unwrapped, textured, rigged, skinned and animated.

It’s an interesting one as I’ve done many walk cycles in the past, as well as general characters running around, but I can’t say I’ve done something  of such magnitude as it were.

The character itself is based on a high polygon art piece created by Glen Southern, although he went from start to finish in extremely high sub divided detail for a static image rather than a game character, so my aim was to draw inspiration from his character, but turn it into something that could be animated, and as such, as I mentioned, I’ve never animated something of such magnitude in terms of the physical size and characteristics of the model.

The first thing that struck me even before I’ve finished modelling this character is that for all he’s only currently 2096 polygons (of which I’m aiming for roughly 3000 for the finished character, before seeing how low I can get him back down once I’ve done a high poly normal map) he is of physically huge proportions. He has a large bulky, somewhat overweight body mass and having previously rigged characters with slight hair movement or a bouncing chest on a female character, due to the size of his belly that would be a perfect section of body to add extra animation to, so as a girl’s chest would bounce up and down as she walked or ran, so would this character’s belly, so all in all I’m quite looking forward to getting this character finished off and animated.

I’ll post an update on this one once I get back to working on it.

So out came the grunge brushes and on went the paint. The aim was the look of waste industrial paint barrels, which probably would have been that little better if I’d put labels on them. I might do that at a later date.

I had considered creating a high poly mesh to create the rings on the barrel, but I decided to play with normal maps in Photoshop and although not perfect, I at least managed to bump a couple of ridges out of a flat surface.

I definitely think this is one to be continued, modified, worked on and improved upon, but all in all it was a fun little exercise.