A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

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.

I’ve been following the terrific blog of David Bicho, a Photographer who shares very nice information of how he works and facts about photography! April the 18th he posted a contest where you could win a Canon lens, and naturally it was a photo contest. The theme was “a potato in a bathtub”. I found this very funny and instantly decided to enter the contest :)

After some brainstorming and juggling ideas with a few friends I had formed a plan. The day before the deadline, last Friday, I went to a toy store and bought a doll house bathroom set. I used this bathtub to let my potato get some relaxation time! He got hot water and soap bubbles, while being monitored by rubber ducks. A disappointment was that the ducks were molded solid and did not float, but at least they look cute!

The location was at a friend’s place as I had been invited over that evening; and because I would have no other opportunity to make the shoot that week I brought all my gear to her place! Preparing and shooting took all in all around 1½ hours. This was the first time I tried using my eBay flash equipment, and I have to say it makes working with a scene way more interesting!

Up top you can see the image I submitted to the contest, and below are a few behind the scene shots!

Oh, and the result of the contest? This Saturday I got an email from David himself with the message that I *shock* was the winner!

This is actually the first photo contest I have ever won, and I have lost count of how many I have participated in. Though often the theme of a contest is very broad, like “summer”, “motion”, “pets” or “Christmas” which can be just about anything. The theme this time was much more specific while still leaving many parameters up to creativity, I like it!

There was a few questions in the email and I couldn’t help myself so I just wrote down everything I thought of in my response; it was received so well that the reply was hacked into a fake interview and promptly posted! You can read it in Swedish or in English translated through Google.

All in all I thank Mr. Bicho for a fun contest and I greatly look forward to future contests that he might host :) I hope they will be of the same inspiring nature!

Update: Today, May 6th, I finally got an adapter to use the lens I won on the GF1! I have not had much time to experiment yet, but it fits quite nicely on there :) I can’t wait for Panasonic to release an official adapter, perhaps with more functionality than the one I got now, which does nothing except being a solid lump of metal. See pictures below!

This one was fairly simple to draw on paper but turned out to be quite complex to pull off when recreating the concept on the computer. When drawing by hand I often end up unintentionally distorting proportions and angles just to get the figures to fit together, cheating if you will, something that cannot be done if you are drawing correctly using perspective points.

Intersect
2010-03-29

Linework | Fillwork

If you travel along the top and then along the bottom you will keep going in the same direction, in or outwards. At the same time the top and bottom are connected vertically at several places.

As a bonus today I’m also attaching a picture I put together by superimposing all the different steps I had saved while plotting the lines. I found it pretty interesting to look at. Actually, it might be the best way yet to visualize my technique and give you an idea of the amount of work that is involved. Enjoy :)

The 19th of November I got an exciting email through this blog. It was from a creative studio in London called Remote Location, they asked for permission to use one of my impossible figures as a base for a CD cover. Excited as always about things like this I hardly hesitated and quickly complied to their request!

I recently got my hands on the final product as I received a few copies in the mail just a few weeks ago. The production is called Elevator Music: Vol. 1 and it’s a various artists collection from a London club called Fabric. I can’t say that I’m very familiar with clubbing as an activity but I greatly enjoy electronic music. The genre of the music on this disc is called Dubstep and it kind of requires a phat bass to make it justice; you can listen to samples here :)