Peter Harries

First off I would like to introduce my new website! http://www.peterharries.co.uk/ It's still under construction but there are a few interesting bits on there to have a look at. Including a development diary and post mortem of the pre production stage of Double cross. Here's a direct link to the preproduction development diary and post mortem. So please have a look and let me know what you think :) Since my last post I've mainly been working on those documents but I have done a bit of modelling, you can check out below: I'm realy tired so I'm going to go and play minecraft some more, then maybe sleep.

So I'm going to do it a bit different today and instead of making multiple posts just update this one with my texture progress! Here's the first shot, pine end of the house, Haven't done the stones at the bottom of the wall yet.   update #1: got bored made this out of parts of the main building!    Update #2: Just got a comment on Polycount about how the wall texture is grainy, I do agree so I may bump the texture up to 1024 for the bigger parts. Here's a texture shot of what it's like now. (actual size). update #3: Door done! update #4:WHat I've done today, may revisit the wall texture but I want to get it finished in the next few days so I'll use it for now and hopefully have time to go back to it later. The roof texture needs working on as well.

So texturing isn't my strongest point and I find it really tricky and difficult. Especially when working with anything under 512's. I'm quite happy with them but will probably re-visit them later. Having to do the artwork with a mouse at the moment because I don't have access to a tablet, so that's a bit of a pain. May go hunting for a cheap one tomorrow. Overall happy with progress, was hoping to get more items unwrapped today but don't know how many I'll get done. anyway here are some screenies. And a shot of the texture.

Broken the house down into seperate assets. Hopefully this will let me re-use them if i decide to create a full scene with this, will also let me tinker with the model as I go along. Edit: Here's the re-assembled version!

This morning I've been adding some details. Plan for the rest of the day is to finish that up, then start breaking it down into sections for unwrapping and texturing.

So I've been pretty quiet on here recently! Mostly due to the fact that a lot of the work I've been doing has been paper based design and dissertation work. Some of which is quite interesting and hopefully I'll get a chance to post about it on here. But I much prefer to post visual stuff when I can, gotta love pictures!! I'm back in Newport Gwent now after spending Christmas and New Year back in Pembrokeshire with the family which was great! Now I have to face the looming deadlines and get the work done for them! Which does include some modelling work so hopefully I'll be posting regularly throughout the process. The last of those deadlines is on the 13th after which we'll be jumping straight into Double Cross production! Which I'm really excited about! So January looks like it will be busy! Happy 2011 everyone!

So this week I'm up at GameCity 5 in Nottingham! We got here on Tuesday, Nottingham is a nice city and the talks and expo's have been great! Also seeing several Newport students showing their games ( colour runners , Q.U.B.E. and Mush ) was really great! If everything goes to plan it would be great to be in a simmilar position to them next year! So far The talks that I have found most interesting have been Jonathon Blow talking about the development of BRAID , Chris Hecker talking about Spy Party and Niv Fisher talking about Confetti Carnival . All very interesting and inspirational talks. One key points that I have picked up on throughout the talks is that plot should be secondary to gameplay and that pushing for what you want the players to feel should take priority. Making the game scary rather than figuring out why the game is scary. So in essence designing with how you want to affect the player in mind rather than the story. Ofcourse this could depend on the game ...

I've done a very sketchy city concept for our third year game. Next I will continue to research and concept ideas for the general feeling within the city. At the moment I'm going quite a modern city that feels very cramped as it's been built on a cliff. So I will be looking modern cityscapes and also places where people live in very cramped areas. I'll post again with full details of our project later on!

Between Monday 9th of August to Wednesday 11th of August I was in Cardiff / Newport working as production designer "Tiny". From the facebook page: "Tiny" is a 35mm short film about a young couple settling into a new house and preparing for their first child. This is the first time I've worked on a film set and I have to say I really, really enjoyed it and would love to repeat the experience. W started on Monday buying props and preparing the house that we were shooting in so I got to get stuck in right away with deciding on what props to use and how to place them. On the Tuesday shooting began it varied between a lot of sitting around whilst the scene was shot and the sound recorded and a lot of rushing around to prepare the next scene for shooting. Because of the amount of equipment and size of the house we had to store anything we weren't using in the rooms that we weren't shooting in then move it all as we came to use those rooms, and then I would...

I did this for some friends studying film & video. Their sending the film hey recently finished off to a load of film festivals and needed some DVD artwork done. Here's what I came up with, they seemed to like it, so it's all good! Oh, and watch the film here! : http://vimeo.com/11686493 It's brilliant and definatley worth a watch!