A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

As you have noticed I have not had time to sit down and type up my experience of Japan yet, life is waaay to chaotic right now. And now I’m in Greece! (for real!) Yes, too much is happening at once, which makes me wonder when I will get time to make this months figure… this, in any case, is the figure I managed to make last month, enjoy!

Box2
2010-06-25

Linework | Fillwork

The center surface is the back wall, flat with the front and standing out from the front; all at the same time.

As you might have noticed contests do motivate my creativity. This time it was the annual contest of Tenimages.org that seemed interesting, even though I got into it quite late and was very stressed out because of my planned trip to Japan. I was actually leaving the country on the deadline for submissions! In spite of this I managed to submit an entry, though sadly it did not even make it to the 142 finalist posters, but I’m happy anyway :) It was fun to participate!

The theme this year was: labels

A label is any kind of tag attached to something so as to identify the object or its content. Labeling means naming. It is human instinct to group things with what they are most similar and name them as a whole. We live in a world filled with labels antagonising each other to win our preference. There are labels associated with consumer products and fashion. People voluntarily label themselves in order to have a sense of belonging to a group, but there also labels that people use to categorize others stemming from feelings of racism and xenophobia, political and religious discrimination, etc. What is the role of these labels in your life? How can a label describe the world you live in? Can a label give the infinite set of experiences, beliefs and desires that summarise each human being?

I had a number of ideas, but with my limited time and brains I only managed to realize one of them.

Recursive Labeling

re·cur·sive
–adjective
pertaining to or using a rule or procedure that can be applied repeatedly.

la·bel·ing
–verb (used with object)
to affix a label to; mark with a label.

As you can see I had created labels in different sizes and tied them together as a chain of labels that labeled each other… it’s a bit abstract, I guess. The picture with the black background also looks a bit dark, but I guess that depends on it being next to the other picture.

The process was quite straight forward. I printed a bunch of labels in relative sizes, cut those out and used them as templates to cut the actual labels out from table placement cards I had bought at the book store. Then after deciding in what order I should put the different colors I made string holes that were supposed to fit the scale of the different label sizes. Lastly I glued the labels which I had grouped together to create the final labels and then I just tied them together with pieces of string!

The harder part was to get them to look good in a photo. I messed around with many flash configurations, mainly because I’m a newbie strobist with little experience, but after two sessions I had to be satisfied because I really had no more time. The pictures themselves had to have a high resolution so they are both made from three pictures each stitched together as panoramas.

Again, the entries did not fare well in the contest, but perhaps next time! If you find a creative contest you figure I should participate in, send me a message! That was how I ended up creating something for this contest! :o

As I was going on an early vacation from the end of May and into June I made an effort to finish this figure before that. I got a weekend to sit around doing doing little as I got some problems with my back, so I spent two days figuring out how to make it work. I actually got to redrawing it completely but that is sometimes required in order to figure out how to pull it off.

Tower
2010-05-09

Linework | Fillwork

The yellow path goes between all levels of the tower while being completely horizontal.

I got to make this one late at night and during Church activities, because I ended up making it so late in the month. That has become a trend the last six months, and when looking back, it was 12 months since I made more than one per month. I wonder if that says something about how my life looks right now.

When looking at this figure I myself don’t think it looks very impossible, that is mostly because it is hard to see that surfaces perfectly follow a vanishing point even if they only look slanted, slanted surfaces would be differently affected by perspective, but that is pretty hard to see.

Waves
2010-04-30

Linework | Fillwork

The top of the figure does not match the bottom.  All five surfaces in the middle which face upwards are all perfectly flat and facing the same direction, straight up.

(A link to the game!) To make a long story short! Mig over at HBO contacted me about two weeks ago to make a Flash game to help distribute codes to the Halo: Reach beta. I pondered the project and said I would do as good as I could muster, in my busy spare time. When I finally got to working on it last Sunday it was pretty close to the deadline, the game had to be public Wednesday night!

How did I manage it? To start off I opened up an old project I had never finished from 2007. Why the progress had stopped back then was because the game ran so slowly on my computer hardware at that time, but now that was no longer an issue. I began with writing a list of things to do, to be slightly organized. The list of changes and additions is probably not very interesting, but the important stuff I did was adding a new collision detection model, copied over database connectivity from another game I have not finished, added an actual UI (though incredibly basic), designed all the obstacles and finally a level for people to play. Half of these things I did the evening before the game was published, which is kind of nuts when I think about it.

So on Wednesday night at 2am my time it was posted in the HBO forum, and I could finally go to bed, after a three day headache :) Before falling asleep though, I checked the reactions popping up on the forum, and I have to say I have not felt that feeling you get when people are playing a game you have made in quite some time! I can’t even imagine how it would be to release a retail game you have worked on constantly for several years… but I enjoyed this very much in any case!

All game sessions were registered in a database and nine winners were picked. The categories you could win in were not only highest score, but also most runs, most quits, longest time played and so on. There is a summary of it here.

About the game itself.

The game takes place in a cramped tunnel on the last level of Halo: CE, The Maw, where you had to race towards an escape to safety while all these parasitic life forms that are The Flood were bearing down on you. This rendition of the event is a bit calmer with only static flood blobs, but they are instead incredibly dangerous! Touch one and you are assimilated!

The style is quite clearly based on Stuntmutt’s stylized version of Master Chief, the famous One One Se7en. I greatly enjoy using Mr 117 as it makes content creation quite quick but also instantly recognizable by the right crowd. Win win!

The only tips you get when it comes to controls are what keys to use, the rest is for yourself to find out through experimentation! Personally I feel like more games could be made this way, as I greatly enjoy exploration even in that sense… but I guess that much depends on the complexity of the game.

Afterthoughts? I wish I had time to do more things like this, more often, for sure.