I don’t have the time or energy to commit to the monstrous task that is getting my website (mainly the projects tab) up to date just yet, but I thought I’d share another little sign of life for you all. After all, it’s been a while since I shared anything My Burden to Keep-related, so here’s what I’ve been working on during my free time for the past couple of days.

This was actually my first attempt at making a serious pixel art walk-cycle. I’m still shocked by the fact that it actually looks like he’s walking.

If you feel like it, let me know what you think in the comments below.

Until next time!
Marcus out.

As usual, school has kept me busy so there hasn’t been a lot in the ways of updates on here, as you can see. Worry not, though! When I get the time to do it, I’ll update the site with what I’ve been doing lately and also, hopefully, throw in some cross-posts here and on my Blogger blog, The Caffeine Gamer. Involving video games, of course!
Until then though, I guess we’ll all have to settle with this heap of text? Guess so, sorry about that!

Anyhow, since the last update, I’ve been working with finishing up the dungeon me and Mike made in UDK, I wrote an essay on futurism, which is not the same as the common term ‘futuristic.’ It’s actually about Italy, speed, unconventional architecture and noisy music, to name a few things! I’ve also worked on another game with Mike, involving zombies-in-office-management.
Right now, I’m partaking in a 10-week project along with six other cool duders and we’re making a little something along the lines of Dear Esther meets Mirror’s Edge/Prince of Persia (the old one from the disk days). There’ll be crystals, caverns and memories perhaps better left untouched. Stay tuned for more!

There’s not a lot else to add right now, clock’s already ticked past bedtime. That hasn’t stopped me from just a few minutes of Legend of Grimrock, though!

Marcus out.

Who cares? Let’s get to what’s new instead!

So, me and my pal Mike made a little trap-filled dungeon level in UDK for our project for the course we just finished. It’s short, but we’re both pretty satisfied with what we managed to make in the less than two weeks we had to work on it. We’re just gonna fiddle with it and polish a few things, then you’ll probably, hopefully see it up and available for download here before the end of the year (no promises though, but fingers crossed!)

That’s about all I had to say for now. Work on My Burden to Keep has unfortunately been stalled a bit due to the recent courses in school, but rest assured, it’s still alive and well!

That’ll be all, safe travels through the snowy lands, lads and gals! (What I really mean: play Skyrim!)

Marcus out.

Yup, it’s that time again. School’s started and as usual, I keep myself occupied with stuff a lot more than I’ve estimated. So, there hasn’t been a lot of time for me to work on My Burden to Keep.
Let’s not pout over that, though. A lot of the time I’ve been busy actually having a social life. It’s the most incredible thing! I’ve also made some new, awesome friends at school. Simply put, life is pretty damn swell right now!
I wish I could say my wallet is feeling as optimistic as I do though.. But that’s not really important. Money is such a silly invention anyway!

So, since there’s a been a lack of, well, everything here on the site, I decided I’d let you all have a few peeks at the background art that’s already finished for MBTK. Hope you all enjoy! (Click on the pictures to enlarge them.)

 That’s all for now, hopefully I’ll have time for a proper, large update soon. Fingers crossed!

Marcus out.

PS. Play Bastion! It’s an amazing game for a very good price.

I’m about 65% done with the new background art for the game, which I’ve decided to render fully in Maya instead of using the process that I used for the first version I made. Here’s a comparison shot of the interrogation room;

Left - original version, right - new version (duh!) Click the picture for bigger version.

The original process involved rendering the scene in Maya with just ambient occlusion, then colouring it in Photoshop and finally reducing the amount of colours to give it that grainy, old-school look. It worked allright, the results were fine, but I felt I could improve it a lot.
For the revised backgrounds, I decided to go with a fully rendered approach. Some scenes were re-modelled, all of them touched up and all elements were given appropriate materials. Then they were lit and then rendered in mental ray.

As you can see, the characters have also been given proper sitting sprites (detective Francis even has standing frames in all four directions now! Progress!) and  there’s an added question to Francis’ dialogue choices.

I hope you found this quick post interesting, as I like to share not only the stuff I create, but also the thought and process behind it. It’s more personal that way, we wouldn’t want it to be all stale and secretive like the big companies do it, right?

That’ll be all for now, rock on, folks!
Marcus out.

PS. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share regarding the posts content, then the comments field is the perfect place to do so. Go on, it won’t bite!

As you can see at the very top of the page, the new logo for this site is live! I’d very much appreciate any input you readers might have about it, so get to commenting! Pretty please?

Other than that, there’s not much to report. Been playing a lot of L.A. Noire lately, and I’m loving it! The gameplay style is a bit less free than I expected it to be, but what’s there is really well polished and the acting is superb. Lots of big names fill the list of actors, but it doesn’t end there, they all do a terrific job as well. Very well directed, the new facial expression scanning they’re using really shows and works well.
I’ll probably have a review of it up on the Caffeine Gamer-blog sometime soon, when I’ve finished the game, that is.

That’ll be all for now. Hopefully, I’ll have some things to report/pictures to post of my ongoing projects soon.

Until then!

Marcus out.

I’d like to start this post by apologizing for the decreased frequency of blog posts lately. Been wrapping up the last course for school for this term (a project which you’ll see popping up here pretty soon, hopefully.) My first year at BTH (Blekinge Institute of Technology, the abbreviation is for its Swedish name, though) has been a lot of fun, very educational and sometimes stressful, though in tolerable amounts. I’ve learned a lot, not only about game design but about my own weaknesses and strengths, how to better split up my work and the magic power of deadlines (actually getting projects done has been swell!)

I’m looking forward to another two years at the school, during which I hope to learn even more and become even better at what I do. For now though, summer’s here and I’ll try to relax a bit, get some work done on other projects and, hopefully, make some money too. Nothing like the comfort of having a few extra bucks in the bank (there are a lot of awesome looking games coming out this year, after all.)

I’ll make sure to get our final project from school up on the site soon. It’s a short underwater exploration game, in which you explore the remains of a downed military ship from the cold war era, searching for the personal belongings of the crew members.
I’m also working on putting together the character art and animations for My Burden to Keep, so that’ll hopefully be out and ready to be played before the end of the summer.

That’ll be all for now. Look out for some hopefully more frequent updates on this blog!

Cheers!
Marcus out.

So, activity’s been a bit low lately, mostly due to being busy with the last school project for this term. It’s a group project, a short ‘interactive experience’ made in UDK. You’re a diver searching through the shipwreck of a military ship from the Cold War days.
It’s turning out great, I’ll let you guys have a peek very soon, promise!

Other than that, life’s pushing forward as usual, and I can’t complain. It’ll be nice to have a couple of months free after this project, but I’m afraid I might become bored after a few weeks of catching up with lost sleeping hours…
I shouldn’t worry though, I have stuff left to do for My Burden to Keep. Namely all character animations, and integrating some music. Then, it’ll be ready for public release, so look out for that.
Also, me and a friend’ve got a few things cooking behind the scenes. More on that as we start to make good progress..!

That’ll be all for now. Peace!

Marcus out.

Today’s the final day for the project, as a school assignment, so to say. I’m working on throwing in a couple of last-minute things to the game to make it easier for our teacher to play. More temporary sprites to see which character’s which and some more visual cues to the clues that Francis has to find.

The presentation went well, I received a lot of positive feedback for the game and some very good constructive pointers as to how to improve some details. I’ll be working on integrating all those things more thoroughly later and finally release the full game here on the website when it’s completely finished. It might take some time, but be sure to keep all your eyes peeled for it!

That’s all for now. Some few final things to do before I can send in the project (as an assignment.) Wish me luck!

Marcus out.

Just checking in for a quick report. As I said yesterday, the game was more or less finished, and today I worked on adding a title screen and fixing bugs. My brother helped me out with finding a few quirks in the dialogue and one fatal (gasp!) bug that crashed the game. Thanks, bro!
I also poked around in the dialogue a bit, fixing things that my brother pointed out and shortening a few unnecessarily long sentences (for better flow and sometimes to fit in with the character better.)

Tomorrow’s presentation day and I anticipate that it’ll go quite well. I’m satisfied with what I’ve done, hopefully I can somehow relay that to the audience, convincing them of the game’s old-schoolish awesomeness. We’ll see how it goes!

I’ll probably post again tomorrow, as a conclusion to these two weeks of intense, but not overwhelming work.

Until then..!

Marcus out.