.The Lack of Theory: Brown, A Mans Best Friend.

I've never dwelled to deeply into digital art, now that I am exploring the medium I've started to relize how little I know about it.

As a medium paper is very easy to learn to manipulate and exploit to achieve desired effects, where as working with a tablet takes your senses out of the picture and leaves you having to plan ahead alot more of your art. With physical mediums like paper I've never had a large range of colour to work with so coming into such an unlimited amount of colour in photoshop is all a bit jarring and left me with a huge desire to learn a LOT more about colour theory.

These are some of the works I've done since being given a tablet, the recurring brown theme is evidence of my lack of confidence with colour. Thanks to Matt Dyet for the Tablet.

.Going Indie Baby.

This Post is sort of a response to a Diomades Blog post about porting bit to the IPhone that has gotten me thinking a lot about what has to come next:

It's a really exciting idea, we never finished our original version of "Bit" and I'd like to see such a solid and unique concept have our names attached to it, not to mention that the visual style of bit would perfectly transition to the IPhone, Our end beta-Esq product showed real potential and this would be a chance to actually have a finished product of "The first game I ever made from scratch".

but the more I think about the Legal side of making a game that had so many students attached to its conceptualization the more I get a headache, Now I want to have nothing to do with the Law side of things... NOTHING, my brain just does not go down that lane in a productive way. So I'm thinking maybe it would be wise to enlist the help of a student from another University or College (or a real "Man of Law/Lawyer" but the cheaper the better) to draft up some contracts and run us through what we need to do in terms of making everything legit... then there's the issue of purchasing copies of Adobe software which in the long term would be beneficially but when your a student with no money looking at only making a few bucks out of an IPhone game the sense seems to fade fast, which of course is going to leave me looking for free alternatives that allow commercial use.

But forgetting the subject that haunts my dreams, It's the concept I'm looking forward to expanding on. When you're as passionate about a concept as I am about bit the new idea's seem to flow like a river and it's in this thought that I have a never ending confidence in the concept itself, it seems limitless at this point. Remaking all the art is going to bliss as well... as a self proclaimed artist there is nothing like making some old art look better... cause your harshest critic in the end is always going to be yourself.
I've made an image to show how the art will look compared to how it did in it's first project stage, It's the 16-bit character. It might not seem like much but I believe it has a very defining quality.

UPDATE 20/10/09: Finished upgrading the walk cycle of the "Red Round" character and thought I would mock up how it might look on the IPhone.

~ Scott ~

Alpha to Beta

The GO3 Electronic & Entertainment Expo 2009 will be held in the next couple of weeks from the 2 - 4 of October at the Perth Convention Exhibition Centre, As far as entering the gaming competition for the this year's upcoming event things are looking a little grim, We've been having collision issues and as it stands the XNA language is very 2D platform oriented and becoming difficult to convert to work in 3D, but with that all said we're not giving up hope and will be endeavoring to complete our Alpha in time. We will have a BETA running at the G03 for all 3 days at the "Space Agents in Space" booth that will be manned by at least one member of the SAIS team, so if you're at the Expo head on down and have a firsthand look at our game. After the Expo will be heading into our Q&A (Quality and Assurance) phase of development where we will be polishing and ironing out all the kinks and bugs, hopefully over this time we will be opening up for external beta testing so if you're interested in getting involved in the development process and being a beta tester keep an eye out.

So the Official Space Agents in Space Website is up and its getting updated every week with new content and news stories, so check it out http://www.spaceagentsinspace.com/.

Drug Addicted Robot

What is “Drug Addicted Robots”, basically we are a college based games development team from Western Australia Localized at East Central Tafe currently working on our own independent property called “Space Agents in Space”. Studying for our Diploma in Games Development we consist of 7 Programmers and 8 Technical Artist each with specific roles, we work in an industry workplace simulated environment under an agile ideology in an effort to become industry ready. As a team we have been assigned 9 weeks in which to conceive, design and develop “Space Agents in Space” for a Steam and Xbox Live release later in the year, This Coming October we will be showcasing a playable beta at the GO3 gaming Convention at the Western Australian Convention Centre.
Each Artist and Programmer has a Role and Team and currently we have:

Matt Dyet: Lead Artist, Designer, Web Artist, UV artist, Texture Artist, UI Designer.
Scott Higginbotham: Lead Artist, Designer, Sprite Artist, Concept Artist, Web Artist, Web Author.
Ben Moreschi: 3D Lead, Concept Artist, Level Designer, Texture Artist.
Kieran McDonald: 3D Artist, Level Designer, Texture Artist.
Ben Russell: Concept Artist, Web Author.Adam Megow: Concept Artist, Sprite Artist, 3D Artist. Mark Angus: Sound Development, Level Design, 3D Artist.
James Smyth: Sound Development, Level Design, 3D Artist.
Curtis Unger: Web Design and Programming, Lead Advertising.
James Gibson: HUD, Collision and Distortion Programmer, Lead Sound, Saboteur.
Tahaa Sharara: Programmer.
Llew Walton: Programmer.
Mathew Louson: Programmer.
Peter Nelson: Program Lead, Programmer, Cell Shading and Sound Programmer.
Andrew Pech: Graphics Engine Developer, Programmer.