Although I did not participate formally in Ludum Dare this time around, I did make a little Unity sketch based on its theme of ‘beneath the surface’. It’s a sort of 3D spatial poem about whiteness and maleness and the nature of guilt. You can play it here.
I made a game for Ludum Dare this time around! It’s called ‘Armageddon’, and it picks up right at the end of the classic arcade hit Missile Command. You can play it right here; if you participated in Ludum Dare and are therefore eligible to rate it, you’ll be able to do so here.
I did a game jam last weekend! You can look at the result right here.
This game is a parable about time and society. A person must journey all the way around the surface of the globe, following the footsteps of his doomed countrymen into hell and confronting the ancient thing that brought them there.
I developed this project alongside Dylan Bremner between the hours of 7:30pm on a Friday night and 4:00pm the following Sunday. We used Flash’s fancy newish Stage3D (via the somewhat-interesting StarlingPunk framework). The rings consist of rectangular textures bent over circle-shaped triangle fans using some clever UV mapping and programmable shaders. I am very happy with it. It was a productive and enlightening experience.
Special thanks to Phil and especially Emily for allowing us to stink up their suite for an entire weekend!
So you’ve just graduated from university, and you find in your hands a scrap of parchment with a bunch of letters on it that don’t make very much sense (say, for example, “Bachelor of Science from the Faculty of Communication, Art & Technology”). You want to work in the creative sector, yet your resume is looking rather thin and few seem interested in hiring a recent graduate of the science arts on her word alone. What can be done?
Well, I think you should consider building an ePortfolio. An ‘ePortfolio’, in addition to being a ridiculous word, is a thing on the internet through which people can learn about you and your work. The idea is that the student projects in which you invested so much time, but which cannot rightly be communicated or listed as ‘experience’ on a resume, may hereby be repurposed into a polished and readily-accessible form that (when designed properly) is both broader and deeper yet more approachable and indeed even more succinct than a resume could ever be.
My portfolio got me hired and yours can do likewise, which is cool. But beyond employment prospects, developing a portfolio provides a good opportunity to work uncompromised on a meaningful (yet also profitable!) personal project. Your porfolio can serve as a milestone; a monument. It can be a source of closure, of renewed opportunity, and even of personal transformation. For while it would certainly be more fun to go travelling for a year (perhaps “finding yourself” at a dive bar in Munich), people in our field should already be aware of the most effective route to self improvement: Good, hard, thoughtful, painful work. And a portfolio requires exactly that. This is a chance to synthesize everything you’ve done in school, for employers, and elsewhere in life; to produce your first proper masterwork. And unlike an unpaid internship or a placeholder job you don’t really want, if you put enough effort in I can guarantee you’ll be glad you did it.