Raygun Gothic

May 09 2012

The Digital Toybox: "Radio Play" →

‘Radio has long been a brilliant medium for provoking empathy.. so what if we were to take the “video” right out of video games and present the player with an interactive, audio-only experience?’

Apr 20 2012

Side-By-Side: Timeline and +Me →

‘It occurs to me that despite most of my work actually being written, I seem to be sharing none of this work here, on my tumblelog. By way of remedy, here’s the latest piece from my game design and gaming blog, The Digital Toybox.’

In which I muse upon Facebook Timeline and the new Google+ profile layout. Which feels more homely, and what are they trying to say about me?

Oct 12 2011

Curriculum Vitae ‘I’ve been revamping my CV for the past few days, giving it a nudge from being a plain old OpenOffice Write document. Naturally, I opted for a raypunk theme to match my website. It’s been a fun project, not least because it gave me more chances to experiment with Adobe InDesign; it’s also allowed me to think carefully about the design of a single document, rather than focusing on quite generic templates which might suit a design document. The CV is available in PDF format at my website.’

Curriculum Vitae

‘I’ve been revamping my CV for the past few days, giving it a nudge from being a plain old OpenOffice Write document. Naturally, I opted for a raypunk theme to match my website.

It’s been a fun project, not least because it gave me more chances to experiment with Adobe InDesign; it’s also allowed me to think carefully about the design of a single document, rather than focusing on quite generic templates which might suit a design document.

The CV is available in PDF format at my website.’

May 01 2011

“DarkConduit” Sector Map: Here’s an example of DarkConduit’s rather hands-on level editing process. Essentially it involves me laying a grid on top of artist Liam Nicholson’s nebula and galactic sector graphics, and then picking out spots where there are no star systems to populate. Thse are represented by yellow dots. Once my map is completed, I then makes notes of each dot’s co-ordinate, forming an array inside a .txt file for programmer James Oates to place into the game database. The result is an engine which has been old where *not* to render a playable grid space on-screen. We then have our galactic sector maps.

“DarkConduit” Sector Map:

Here’s an example of DarkConduit’s rather hands-on level editing process. Essentially it involves me laying a grid on top of artist Liam Nicholson’s nebula and galactic sector graphics, and then picking out spots where there are no star systems to populate. Thse are represented by yellow dots. Once my map is completed, I then makes notes of each dot’s co-ordinate, forming an array inside a .txt file for programmer James Oates to place into the game database. The result is an engine which has been old where *not* to render a playable grid space on-screen. We then have our galactic sector maps.

Sep 26 2010

I’ve recently been adding much more to my samples page at Raygun Gothic. There’s still a lot of work needed in translating my maps, articles and illustrations from ‘working format’ to something presentable, but it’s coming along.

The bulk of my recent efforts has been my articles, written for:

I’ve written on:

  • Achievements in online games and why they wouldn’t translate into online worlds;
  • The future of printed news in a cyberpunk context;
  • Instance groups and the unspoken rules for World of Warcraft’s social players;
  • World of Warcraft’s jewelcrafting profession, and how the recipes and materials break down.

These articles are included below. The thumbnails link to the live, web version of each article - I’ve also made some PDFs available at my samples page.