City of Game

(Original photo by TigersHungry, new characters revealed by Photoshop)

Last week I made my first visit to Gamecity, up in Nottingham, a festival of games, talking, and education, and good it was too. I had been invited to talk on a panel with Robin Hunicke (of the always-inspiring ThatGameCompany, creators of Flower & Flow) and Dr Barbara Lippe (visual goddess behind the fascinating, and completely unique Massively-Multiplayer Online game Papermint). Where we talked about some of our influences, (I talked about SchoolDaze a favourite game of mine from the Sinclair Spectrum) ways of working, highs and lows, and took questions from the audience.

Having met up with my old pal Jon Burgerman for lunch I was able to drag him onto the next panel with me as well, which led to lots of rude jokes on stage and a impromptu session of game-designer Chinese Whispers. A particularly strange experience, as we were doing this with Masaya Matsuura (creator of Parappa the Rapper and Vib Ribbon) Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy) and Adam "Atomic" (creator of my current gaming obsession Canabalt ).

Other highlights included too much curry, playing the games in the indiecade including the epic projector games, meeting up with some great folk, and being introduced to 1-up Megazine by its creator, truly one of the most beautiful videogame magazines I've seen.

And this:

Odosketch

While my mac is having its motherboard replaced, after burning out just after the warranty ran out (Thanks Apple) and I'm having no luck installing Cs3 onto a temporary machine due to its crazy DRM which won't let me run the software I paid a fortune for (Thanks Adobe) I've been looking around at what online creative tools there are to see if anything can help my predicament. Aviary looks like a real technological marvel and I'll probably try that for a while.

But, the big news is Odosketch. I love it. In many ways there isn't much to it, but that's the point, it's the way it forces restrictions on you. There's no eraser, limited colours, and you can't change the size of the drawing tools. Just like real life. It's exactly like when you're sitting on the train and you have to doodle in the margin of a discarded newspaper with an old biro because that's all you have. And of course that's also when you can do your best doodling.

Here's a couple I did earlier:





Full size versions here and here

Playful 09

Playful is a great event full of people talking about interesting technology used with playful applications. It's right up my street. So it was nice to be asked to do the branding duties for this years event. Here's some of what I've been doing for them (using the lovely stuff that Poke did for last years event as a jumping off point).



You can see more on the official Playful web home here. Maybe you'd even like to score a brace of tickets while you're there too.

I'll also be speaking at this years event, so would be grand if a few folk turn up to see. I'll probably natter about some LittleBigPlanet related stuff, like about avatars and customisation and remix culture. Or maybe I'll just draw a cock on a flip-chart. We shall see soon enough.

Fngz Of Fury

Yikes. So busy. Can't complain though - but it has been a month since I updated on here so I'm going to try and start hacking through the backlog. So first up is this the Fngrz of Fury web game I made for Orange with my pals at Poke London and Player3.

The game stars the two guys from the Orange cinema ads (Which are actually really good. The Steven Segal one is my favourite) fighting past a number of characters with the power of texting. So the faster you can type the better you do. A bit like Typing of The Dead from back in the day, except with no shooting, and no zombies. But featuring deadly udders squirting corrosive bad juice.

This was a fun one, as I could really concentrate on the character design and animation (just as well as I had only a few short days to do it). Here's some of the characters, combined together into what we technically call a jpg:



And you can play it now here. I still really struggle to beat the giant hamster. See if you can...

Letting The Beatles Be

I got asked recently to take part in a fun project - redesign or reinterpret the cover of any album from the top 100 albums of all time (as chosen by Pitchfork) for the folk at Becks Beer.

So I leapt on "Let it Be" by The Beatles (well, actually I leapt on Purple Rain, but Kate Moross had already picked that one, so I swapped pvc and superbikes for coudroy and facial hair). I've written up in more detail on Becks' Flickr page my thoughts behind choosing this cover, mainly for the challenge of creating a likeness of the band while also sticking with my bold style, so you can read more about it in detail there.

But here's the image:





And here's some work-in-progress, as you can see from the Ringo sketch I was originally thinking of using a more realistic style, closer to brilliant artwork they used themselves on Revolver (by Klaus Voormann) before switching back to a bolder simpler style so I could concentrate on getting likenesses with as little extraneous detail as possible.





And in Beatles related news, there's a new trailer out for the forthcoming Beatles Rock-Band game, which, although I have not interest in actually playing, looks amazing in the Sgt Pepper segment at about 1:00 in. I want to see more games that use colour, lighting and post-effects like that more. Down with polycounts! Up with art direction!

Guybrush Threepwood

One of my favourite games from childhood, Monkey Island, is getting a re-release next week, all smartened up for the HD generation. Personally i'm not a fan of the new HD visuals, probably because I grew up with the old version, I'm a big fan of pixelly retro-ness and the youngsters shouldn't listen to old salty dogs like me.

But in the meantime I couldn't resist a sketch of the games sometime-hero Guybrush Threepwood as he exists in my world of doodles and piratey memories:

Grip Wrench gets an outing in Brighton.

My MTV animated series Grip Wrench is going to be screening at the Loop Festival in Brighton this Sunday from 1:00pm (in the Pavilion theatre), thanks to the lovely folk at onedotzero. I'll be there. Hopefully you'll be there. Although please remember, you won't be able to un-see what you see.

In the meantime here's a photo of Mr Wrench's last trip to the seaside, a happy day of sun, speedboats and exploding flamingo corpses. Hopefully he'll be able to outdo himself this time with a KissMeQuick hat, a donkey and a three gallons of melted ice-cream.

Fresh Smack

Feeling like jumping around to some electro bouncy noise, while staring at visuals from another world and fending off a man with a marker pen that's drawing a donkey skull on your arm? Well, you're in luck - all these things and more can become reality next friday in south London.

Noises will come from the decks of Merf, Brother, Superstar PJ and Forward-Thinking Tam and live performance by Super Soul Soldiers, and I'll be there to do my usual drawings on anyone brave enough to have a go.

Hope to see you there, you brave fools. Here's the poster:

DuckMonster Destroys PixelToyko OMG!

I've been a bit slow to post this one (although its now very relevant, as if you purchase The Sun newspaper (U.K.) tomorrow you'll find out more) but I was involved in a crazy project recently called RubberDuckZilla for Coca-Colas tasty fruit cocktail "Oasis".




If you visit the site linked below (and have a webcam) you can play various games that I did the 16-bit retro visuals for, after being asked to do them very nicely by PokeLondon. And by harnessing the power of GEEKMAGIC (tm) your webcam puts you inside the game and turns you into a giant duck shooting lazers out of your eyes (a bit like this Project Natel that my old pals at Lionhead are making for Xbox360, but with more wonkiness and lazerin' and explodin' and for a whole load less less money and with less digichildren).

Anyway, you can play the games here:
www.rubberduckzilla.com

And you can watch the tv spot in this handily embedded video:



And, as I said at the top, if you buy The Sun newspaper tomorrow (11th June) and wave it around in front of your webcam you'll be able to unlock some extra special features. Blimey!

Psst! Sugar & Spice in HD

Now that I've stumped up some cash for a Plus account on the brilliant Vimeo, I can start posting some HD movies. Here's my segment from this years PSST! Pass it On animation/motion-graphics collaboration:



It's not actually HD in that embedded version, but you can see it in full WrapAroundPixelRama (tm) on my Vimeo page here.

It was a fun little film to make, I took the final frame of Bran Dougherty-Johnsons piece and continued the themes he started. But with more focus on Victoriana, sexual awakenings and, of course, snails.

As always I had a hundred ideas that I couldn't put into practice due to lack of time, but it turned out okay, and enjoyed animating something a little bit closer to my sketchbook style. Something I want to do more of.

And I was massively pleased with the musical score by David Kamp, who managed to make it feel like something far more professional!

Doodlebook Dump One

As I was saying in the last post, I've been scanning in my sketchbook for this months Computer Arts magazine feature. And I'll put them (and a few more) up here on The Internets for all to see. So here's the first batch of impenitable doodling, these examples are more about story development, I'll post some others soon thant show character development.




These all feature work for my Grip Wrench series for MTV. As you can probably see, most of my thought process happens on paper, and really consists mainly of doodling ideas until I get enough of a collection to edit down into something fit for human consumption...

Here's some close-ups:

Sketching in Computer Arts

There's a new issue of Computer Arts out, and once again, I've breached security and sneaked into the magazine, this time in a leading feature on designers and their sketchbooks. There's some great stuff in there, and it's always interesting to see how other artists think on paper, and formulate ideas before launching into the final piece. My bit has some character designs from the Disney pilot show I made a while back, and some development stuff for my Grip Wrench show.

I'll put some of the scans I took of my sketchbooks on here in the next week or two (including a load not seen in the article). In the meantime here's me, browsing the magazine just now:

Stand Up

I'm off to FMX in Stuttgart next week, with Kareem & Francis from MediaMolecule, to talk about how we made the wonky world of LittleBigPlanet. It looks like there's some interesting programmes on, I might have to sneak in and geek out on the various talks on the production design of Hellboy2 and Watchmen.

Talking of Watchmen, here's a portrait of The Commedian, it's not really finished but I'll have to leave it as it is for now..

WibbleDone

The cream has curdled, the rackets are splintered, the nets are packed away, and Cliff Richard has been returned to his sound-proof cage. And now we are left with the artwork that Cookie & I frantically generated in our Layer Tennis match last friday, and the fine prose commentary of Anne who managed to write it up at a zillions words per minute.

Each volley lasted 15 minutes, here they are all stacked up. Cookie won the toss and went first, creating the beautiful image of Albion which set a fantastically high standard. A standard that I fumbled with in my first volley, panicking about time-management rather than getting on with making something nice. At least my return had a sea monster in it, and an obscure reference to LittleBigPlanet with him saying YARG! (the name of cheese that was chosen as a codename for our latest game update, which is produced in Cornwall, where I'm from).

Anyway, here's the collected volleys. Scroll down for more waffle.



I think I managed to improve with subsequent volleys, finding my stride and just getting more comfortable with working in this way. I guess the x-ray of the cod-piece is probably my favourite round of my images, I'm not really sure that's what a gentleman would keep in his cod-peice, but if I could carry around some ninja stars, a pint and a cod with me at all times I probably would.

It was great fun to participate, and a real honour to play, exhausting too. A combination of exhaustion and a couple-too-many post-match Margaritas led to me falling asleep on the Tube on the way home and me getting picked up by the police. Beat that Mr McEnroe.

Photoshop Tennis

The Pims has been poured, the lawns have been trimmed, the strawberries are on ice. It's must be almost time for my Photoshop / Layer Tennis match with Cookie. You can follow the progress of the match here, commentary will be provided by Anne from I Like, and many thanks to Coudal and Adobe for running the whole thing.

For those that don't know the procedure, the 2 of us will be taking it in turns to create artwork in a series of volleys, building on what has just gone before. And with only 15 minutes for each turn its going to be a mad flurry of paper, crayons and Wacom pens. Here's an image I warmed-up with, it was done in 7 minutes so maybe there's still hope for me.

Self Portrait

Just doodled a portrait of myself (it was needed for an animation festival that I'm supposed to be talking at).

The old one I did in LittleBigPlanet that's used as a sticker, and crops up everywhere was a bit out of date on the haircut (or lack of) so I've done an updated version. HAIR POWER.

200 Edges

Edge has always been my favourite games magazine - I really like their unapologetic mission to examine and celebrate the best of videogame culture with writing that is leagues above most of the PR-driven "Churnalism" that's also out there. And its always been a beautiful thing to look at. I still remember buying Issue 1 and holding it with wonder as i starred at these amazing pages from the future (although, as it was all about how the 3DO was going to conquer the world, it doesn't always get everything right).

Anyway, so in order to make me feel old and grown-up they've gone and made a couple hundred issues since then. And to celebrate this milestone they've got 200 different covers this month, and if you're a subscriber you get one designed by me and my little Sackboy helper.



There's a bit of an ugly watermarked CVG logo slapped on there so hopefully I can provide one without that soon.

It's the third cover I've worked on for Edge, but probably the one I had the most fun making. And didn't hurt my eyes as much when making it as the one for issue 120 for Jeff Minters Unity project!

Sofa Surfers

Some very brave friends decided to supply alcohol and pens to all of us that came to their housewarming party to decorate their sofa. Here's some photos of its development/deterioration. I like the photo of me, Nicky and Cookie each beavering away on different cushions - wish I'd worn a single coloured t-shirt too, my plaid ruins the composition!







I really need a haircut, Nicky nearly used-up a whole Sharpie pen trying to draw my portrait...

Psst! London Screening

Psst! Pass It On has got a London screening, far handier than that one in LA the other day, so I'll be going along, hope some of you other cockney-sparrows come too. Here's the details:

(Psst! is a collection of 17 collaborative films made by some very clever people. I made a bit too, about a young womans sexual awakening with a snail. Saucy.)

Chirpy News

I forgot to mention, Grip Wrench, the star of my MTV Qoob animated series has got himself a twitter account, you can follow him here.



So now you can read all about the minutiae of a failed 80s action move star in all it's riveting detail.

Also, LittleBigPlanet just won 8 shiny objects at the DICE awards (from the Academy of Art & Sciences, i.e the Oscar dudes) which were:

Outstanding Character Performance
Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction (yay!)
Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction
‬Outstanding Innovation in Gaming
Console Game of the Year
Overall Game of the Year.
Family Game of the Year
Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering



I'll have to put together a bit of list soon of all the other things LBP has won, although might wait till after the Baftas - just in case ;)