Gamer Camp (the briefer than I would've liked version)

Yeah, about the 4 week Gamer Camp dooflip mentioned before? Well it turned out to be just the one week for me. Apparently I lack a bit of focus and sticking me on a game development team would be too risky. Laaame. =( That's not to say the week was a total waste mind, and for the interests of student blogging, I may as well post about it.

The training week for the Gamer Camp (which I had managed to get into thanks to one of the previous members dropping out last minute) was held at the NTI in Birmingham. We had a couple of tutors from the games industry, including one guy (I think his name was Guy as well) who had worked on the Colin McRae and Sega Rally series, and another who made a fair few iPhone games, including one involving Santa shooting elves.

The course was revolved around the development of apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, with the hope of getting a finished product on the App Store (and I was gonna make a real cheesy trailer for it too =(.) I'm not sure if I was particularly gonna head towards iPhone development, since I have an affinity towards Macs, but I was keen to look at how these kind of games are made and what restrictions were involved.

The first two days mostly involved reviewing various iPhone games, such as Jelly Car, Edge, Geo Defense and, most reoccuringly, Flight Control. I think it was quite evil that they also had Peggle installed on their Touches, so damn distracting. We also got an insight into the development cycle of how this stuff gets on the App Store, going real deep with icons and screenshots and stuff. I was kinda accused of looking disinterested during these sessions, but that was mainly because I had suddenly shifted from a late morning, late night routine to a 6:30 wake up and a 9 to 5 straight working, which took its toll on the ol' body.

The third and fourth days were focused on the art aspect of the stuff, and there were quite a few things to learn from this, such as the Actions and Animation uses in Photoshop, which I'm sure will come in handy. During Wednesday though, one thing was clear.
Macs + Flash CS4 + Drawing with a mouse = FAIL
One of the tasks involved drawing graphics of a road that could be repeated. It was only after I had gotten a good deal through a hot piece of secks road at a sort of Excitebike kind of angle, did I turn my head and notice everyone else was doing top-down roads. This was one of the apparently fatal reasons according to the course dude.

Thursday was focused on drawing animations to be packed for the software. Thankfully, I had managed to get the tutor to lend me his Graphire, though it was still a little hard to draw due to its small size versus massive Mac resolution. I made a semi-decent Cap'n Zappy walk cycle, followed by a pretty neat arm cannon blaster, which looked neat, but again it was used as critique cos I wasn't focusing on one thing. We were introduced to a packing thing, where we get to see where all those Sonic Sprite sheets come from. There was much internal sniggering everytime someone mentioned the word 'p-list'. The second task involved drawing a character doing idle, walking and death animations. I originally planned to do the thing in Flash, but I was too self critical about my drawings to go with it. Instead, I did what everyone else was doing and tried making my animation in Photoshop. The character I used is an assassin named Hitmantis, from one of my personal projects. Using the sprites from Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth as a guideline for height, I gave the stuff a go, with flapping cape and scarf and everything, and the end result was pretty neat.

Despite this, come Friday, they stuck me in the awkward room and said they don't think they should take me on for the next few weeks. They did mention that I did pretty well to get this far, considering most of the people on the course were postgraduates and stuff (evident by the fact I could not understand anything they were talking about). The rest of the day involved looking over Flight Control and listing all the assets including in it, which turned out to be lots. These things tend to look much easier when you just wing it. There was apparently a chance to talk it over at lunch, but I was very hungry at lunch, and at the end of the day, it was pretty much broadcast that I wouldn't be staying. Would you like some wound with that salt?

So yeah, much suckage, but at least it frees up my daily schedule to concentrate on getting Date for One done. I get the feeling my head would've exploded trying to juggle both that and the Camp, and it probably would've definitely exploded if Weebl randomly decided to throw me some work in the midst of it. I'll still take to heart the stuff I did manage to learn, in case someone approaches me for this kind of work in the future.