Showreel of 2012

What I've been working on this year.

Super Jetpack Penguin

It's out, it was out since Friday. I've been busy working on reports and models, I totally forgot to post about it! Try it, it's free to play :D and here is some artwork (I made 5 promotionals) and a video of course.

Available at the App Store

Silly doodle I was doing when I got bored.

Applejack's Apple Hunt!

Here's a game just finished by Christian Skogen and I, it took a few months on and off.  He coded the engine from scratch with C++ and LUA, and that alone took him a few months. This is a great achievement for him, :D and I'm sure he'll qualify for the Blitz Open Day.

Code: Christian Skogen
Assets (except for sky dome): Gemma Suen (me)
It should work for Windows 7 and Windows XP, since he had to optimise it for XP especially.

Download Here!

Explaining Aperture for my Aunt, Caroline

Aunt Caroline is doing a filmography course, and she recently decided to get a DSLR Camera (Digital Single-Lens Reflex Camera) as a way of learning about the technical side of photography and filming. So she asked me the other day to explain what the aperture is. I'm no expert but I've read up enough and experienced enough to at least know the basics. So here I made a small crappy tutorial (left click it, then right click, view image to save):

Links
About Bokeh
More information about Aperture









Video comparing Auto Focus and Manual Focus when video recording:
This is using the 18-55mm kit lens with my Canon 550D. Set at the lowest f/n (f/3.5-f/5.6).


While it requires more effort, you can clearly see and hear the benefits of manually focusing your camera when filming. This is when you can also take Aperture into consideration. If you set your aperture to a high f/n (so there is a wider depth of field) you will get less blur in your capture than you see in the above video. And therefore have less problems with focusing.

Video Mode

To do this with your Canon 550D or 600D, look for the video setting 'Movie Exposure' and set it to Manual. Then it will follow your manual settings. You can change your ISO and Aperture like usual. To preview your settings when in Video Mode, gently hold down the snap shot button.

This of course entirely depends on the capability of your lens and the conditions you are shooting in. If it's very dark, you probably won't be able to widen the aperture all that much. Also recently I discovered (since I don't film much with my DSLR) that the camera will stop your video if the conditions are really too bad to film in (aka you've set it so that the film is too dark). I suggest taking a bit of time to fiddle and experiment in the area you are filming. I hope it's in sunny weather!

For good Camera and Lens reviews, I recommend this! http://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalRevCom

Merry Christmas! Hot Pot?

Every Christmas, we gather our friends and family at our take away shop to set up something called Hot Pot. My friends keep asking me what it is. So this year I decided to film it and explain in a short video. This usually happens at around 12midnight of Christmas Eve, so we eat well into Christmas Day and pack up by 2AM, to play Mahjong. Well, my parent's friends play mahjong not me.



We had two cool special guests this Christmas; Christian and Peilin came to join us.
From left to right, here is Christian, Andrew (my small cousin), Peilin (my brother’s online friend from Holland) and Darren (my brother). My dad is at the back enjoying his Hot Pot meal!

Around 2AM, Peilin and Darren were ready to go, but we stuck around a little since Christian wanted to view the ‘pros’ playing Mahjong- he was pretty impressed and even thought that the moves they were making seemed accidental, but was just their way of moving tiles quickly.





My parents' friends playing Mahjong, well until early morning.

On the same night, my pretty Aunt Caroline asked me to teach her a little bit about the DSLR. This is probably a post I will make for the next day on a different blog.

Finally another post, for our dinner on Christmas night, I’ll be showing what our special Chinese dinners are like.

Puddles Puzzles release date!!

On 18th August, Puddle Puzzles will be released for the iphone! I contributed a small amount of work to it, and while it may be a small mobile game, I'm still quite proud. It feels silly to say this since I only really did the promotional work and influenced the image of the game by a very small amount. It was during my first ever work experience with a games company, in this case for small mobile games called Chaos Trend Ltd. The Chos Trend Blog gives more information:

Learning a New Language

I woke up today, feeling the laziest I've ever felt for the past 6 months; today is the day of rest, since I only have one deadline left. I sat down on my PC and thought... 'I really wanted to learn a new language, maybe today I can dedicate some time!'

The only problem is, I don't know what to learn- and it seems really out of the blue, but I have been thinking about it for some time... preferably European or Asian, I've already narrowed it down to:
German, Mandarine/Cantonese, Japanese, Norwegian.

Rosetta Stone is great but I couldn't find a Norwegian course, and yes, because it's the one that's inconveniently unavailable I decided to pick it. Why? No idea, you always want what you can't easily get I suppose.

Group Work: Level Design

Today we had our last presentation of the academic year, showing our group level design. It wasn't meant to be finished, and just required us to make a game level that was playable. In the end I think we did well, although I regret not putting more time into it: I modelled a few assets and the character (textures and rigging too). Here are the concepts and video showing a demo of the level:

Concept of our level Asguard

Concept of main character Loki

Level & Asset Design

Thomas Hamilton

Murderer of 16 children and a teacher.

Madeleine Mccann

I did this for an assignment- it's obviously being posted on the actual blog for it.

Why did I choose these subjects? Because Gerhard Richter is the influence haha...

The blurred eyes are what Richter did a lot to his paintings- in fact it was a lot like fuzzy tapes that fuzzed out the whole thing (more than just eyes). But I don't like having to deform everything, otherwise the whole image would become incredibly boring- even if it reached the goal of being eerily ominous.