A long time ago (well, 5 or 6 years ago anyway) corporate anthems were all the rage in the world of the internets. Back then I worked for a computer games company called Infogrames. Infogrames was quite a big company at the time with offices in France and New York and was responsible for games like Unreal Tournament and Alone in the Dark…our studio however was in sunny Sheffield so we were that little bit removed from the corporate side of things. I still remember the day when we all received the company email announcing with pride that we now had our very own corporate anthem to stir our proud souls. It was a very funny scene as a studio of hairy programmers and geeky artists listened in stunned silence to what follows, which I found thanks to the wonders of Facebook, just click the little arrow but be warned, it’s stirring stuff:

Forget Transformers…this is the computer game adaptation worth seeing. Very funny film for anyone, like me, who’s wasted too many hours playing “just one more game” of Minesweeper.

Well, I’m off on Sunday to London for the London Games Festival, well, specifically the Career Fair, so I’ve my bags packed (well, almost), my CV printed, my showreel burned and a couple of interviews lined up. I’ll have a day and a half in London to do some touristy stuff before the fair while Matt holds the fort, and the toddler, back here. I’m hoping we’ll have no outbreaks of chicken pox this time.

The games world is a pretty small one so I’m counting on seeing some familiar faces otherwise I’ll be wandering around the fair trying to pluck up the courage to go and talk to recruiters. I just never know what to say in those situations…everything I think of sounds like a bad chat up line.

A little over a year ago when I started this blog, my intention was always to use it as a way to learn a bit about webpages so that I could get my portfolio online. Well, I got a bit sidetracked when I realised just how fun (and time-consuming) blogging is but I finally sat myself down and got my portfolio done. That’s what a looming deadline will do for you.

You can find it here, or by following the button on the sidebar, and I’d appreciate any feeback, particularly if you find something is broken or I’ve forgotten to link all the dots. It’s sure to need some tweaking and I’m still getting my head around compression of movie files. It includes some animation from the game I was working on for the past year since it was released last week, as well as animation and artwork from older projects.

If you know anything about webpage design and you peek under the site’s skirts…yes, I hang my head in shame…the code shows I’m winging it I’m afraid. Still, if it works until I can figure out the enigma that is Dreamweaver, that’s all I ask for now.

The game I’ve been working on for the past year and a bit has finally reached the end of its extended art deadline. The end of a project is always such a strange thing; you have months of ever-increasing panic when you try to meet all the milestones and mini-deadlines. Then you have weeks of working late into the night, through the weekend, with such a huge list of things to be done that you know you can never possibly finish them all. Everything else (including blogging) goes out the window. Then, all of a sudden, it’s over. You sit at your desk one morning and there’s nothing more for you to do. The game isn’t actually finished, there are all sorts of bugs to be fixed, testing to be carried out, marketing and packaging and translations. But the animation part, the part I’m involved in, is done and now I feel like Wil E Coyote in the Looney Toons cartoons: still running like the clappers even though he’s gone off the cliff.

I can’t say on the blog the name of the game yet since it won’t be out until around October and this industry is very protective about these things. I am proud of the animation I did on it. Game animation is quick and dirty compared to the beautifully crafted work done in film animation but I tried to make the characters look alive and as if they were actually thinking about what they were doing which is something that is often lost in the rush to get a game out. I’m looking forward to seeing the final product.

So, now, I guess I’d better go find some more work! Anyone need an animator?