Some hired work from the 2011 - graphics and mockups for tablet games

Back in 2011, I had the pleasure of signing up for a part time job with Cogworks studios  -as artist/animator . I made graphics and mockups for a bunch of iOS games/Apps. There was an opportunity to go full time, however I was in the middle of my second year at the University of Bradford - there were a lot of assignments stopping me from doing that. Also UK students are not allowed to work for more than 20 hours per week.


We used toggl to track my time each month. Sadly university took a lot of it and as you can see from one of my reports- I wasnt able to spend too much on concepts.

There was of course a non disclosure agreement with the job. Those type of agreements usually have a period of time - in this case 3 years - in which I am not allowed to release any information or show any of my work publicly. Well since 4 years passed I said to myself - What the heck, Let's do it. I am going to share with you some of the more fun ones. :)

Please note that some of these were quickly made sprites - used to put together a prototype for a few games. They were in no shape or form the final product. The names I am giving the games are not the final product names.

One of the projects was to do a game in a frame concept for Team 17. The deadline was very tight, so it's not very polished. I am not going to go into detail about the game ideas or design, since none of that was my work.

There was another ongoing project for a Jenga-like game where you stock blocks ontop of each other. I made a title screen, two backgrounds and animated sprites for the blocks. Each block had a face with a different character. Doing the backgrounds was really fun, since they were vertically very tall. We had a level where you stack blocks all the way into space, another one which started deep underwater and kept going until reaching the surface and so on. I had to use illustrator on that one, since it had better export tools.

There was a Bird in a factory game project where I made a number of bird concepts for. Then when we picked one of them - I made a fully playable animated sprite for the bird- run, idle, death, etc.
Some of the background elements also had to be animated - smoke, saw, travolator, etc etc. Those were simple enough to just do in Inkskape. I had set up for myself a script in linux that exports the svg layers as an image sequence. And another one which makes a gif file from the image sequence  (for presentation purposes). That saved a lot of time.

 I made an entire spritesheet in inkscape. There was no premade concept art, but the guys at Cogworks gave me some direction as to what animations they are going to need and some of the specific gameplay event items. I had some creative freedom in coming up with various hazards for the little bird though.

Overall these were fun projects for me and working with Cogworks was a real pleasure!
I do hope that they get to complete/release some of these games some day. Looking at my work from 4 years ago, I can't say that I am completely pleased with it. Surely it can do with a lot more polish! If these games ever get on production schedule, I would be more than happy to work on them full time.

Jobs I did this year and some musical collaborations

Today I want to let you folks know what has been slowing my ongoing projects.

To do that, I need to tell you about my jobs.
Starting the year 2011, I had a part time job with the University of Bradford which I did for about 3 months. I was the teacher's assistant during lab sessions for the 2d animation module. That was an excellent opportunity for me to meet with the majority of first year students and get to know their work. I helped the class with anything technical Flash cs4, also helped with constructive feedback on animation when asked to give such.

My other job with university was as an open day assistant. That basically sounds like advertising university to people who are thinking of signing up for it. But what it really was - assisting people in their decision to pick a university
; answering questions about accommodation, on going modules, chances one might get to get industry jobs. The tuition fees have tripled this year thanks to the UK government.If you want to work in USA though as a CG artist, then you really do need the diploma to get the work visa.
Education is a topic by itself, which I am going to postpone for some other time.


Then in March this year, I got a job with Cogworks Studios !
Work there continued to end of June- almost half a year. Unfortunately I cant post anything done there because of the disclosure agreement.I did the graphics and animation on two iphone games, using inkscape,toonboom studio and then Adobe Illustrator.




Some time during that period I applied for an intern ship at a couple of places. One of them- Disney Interactive invited me to an interview. A week after that I got a call confirming that the position is mine. There were over 100 candidates from the uk and only two placements.
From what I gather, the thing that gave me advantage over the other candidates was not so much the showreel and the cv as much as my game pitch and ideas.
Signing the one year contract ,I found a disclosure agreement with the size of a book. You will understand if I don't write (or say) anything about my work there. :)

So all I can do now is write about past projects. Here are some of the ones from this year- before starting work at Disney.




The sound assignment
For this assignment I worked with Thomas Mcfadden. The task was to put together an animatic with sound and music. Tom made the animatic. I made the music and helped with the sound effects. What you'll hear is the result of a couple of hours in the uni's sound lab. The music is really an improvisation- stuff made at the spot. They have a bunch of really nice one octave M-audio keyboards there, hooked to mac computers with garage band and Logic.

Tom has an excellent sense of humour and voice acting talent. He's doing all of the characters btw. You might see me doing some cartoon project with him next year ;)

And while on the subject of Music, there was another project that I took part in. A group of final year students from my university just finished an xna game, called

Steamsunk:

They needed music for it. So this time I decided that I want to work with a friend on it. I got Preslav Jordanov assigned to the project. I really needed him to take charge of this one, because I didnt understand the music software really well. He's also more into guitars, while I personally prefer pianos and rpg music. My contribution to this was in adding more progressions to the track, also the boss battle bit.

If you would like to hear more of my music, there is an online gallery where i keep most of the melodic doodles.
http://soundcloud.com/blurymind