Those around me will no doubt by now be sick of talk about the diet I’ve been on for the last few months. For the record, I’ve always had a distaste for what I call the “Game Developer Physique” sported by so many of our contemporaries, so any slip towards that abyss I consider a total failure on my part. While I’ve never been shy of the gym, a recent trainer schedule ended with the shocking realisation that my weight and BMI placed me just into the realms of “overweight”, which by some twist of fate coincided with the symbolic humiliation of a button bursting off my jeans.

So in addition to ramping up the gym attendance, it was high time for my first serious stab at a diet – specifically one that would kickstart the old metabolism to make it sustainable when going back to “real life”. Thankfully, I have the support of a similarly enthused exercise nut in MJ who has joined me in this challenge and proven invaluable in terms of forcing good food habits on the both of us.

As such, I can say that after just a couple of weeks of cold-turkey I found it really easy to manage, all the while eating better quality food than ever with the only downsides being the extended time to prepare meals and, hardest of all, facing the social challenge of not drinking around others, (each of the major spikes above being a piss-up). In addition to completely changing my food intake and greater exercise, part of this project involved picking up Wii Fit as a means of exercising at home while playing. However, much like every other Wii enterprise, I quickly found the exercises tedious and low-quality to the point of the balance board being a mere gimmick – how can you possibly get fit by balancing alone anyway? While I used it nearly every day, its scope was dramatically reduced to being nothing more than a fancy set of scales.

What I didn’t count on though, were the reinforcing effects of having your scales directly linked to a self-updating graph, charting progress (and regress) over the following months. These little triumphs are what drives decision making during the day, whereby not only are achievements and mishaps recorded, but calorie intake becomes something of a game to try and go for the “hi-score” in weightloss every day. The latest issue of Wired magazine has its cover and a sizeable section inside dedicated to exactly this – the power of personal data-tracking, with articles on Nike+ and other gadget-related accessories, though for some reason overlooks Wii Fit and its hidden weightloss meta-gaming.

Now with just 9lbs left to achieve the ideal BMI of 22, but with a 2-week holiday and the parents visiting from Scotland in a few days, I’ll once again have to run the gauntlet of alcohol and other temptations – which can be considered something of a boss fight.

The other day the fancy laptop turned out to be not so fancy after all and crapped out on me after just a few months, so in the interim I’ve been using the iPhone for surfing duties and comandeering MJ’s computer while she busies herself ranking up on Call of Duty 4, (it sounds great getting your girlfriend into online gaming, until she really gets into it and you can’t get near your Xbox).

A pleasant surprise, however, has been my awakening to the joys of cloud computing. Some time ago I placed all my bookmarks on Firefox’s Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) site after experiencing the pain of rebuilding my surfing experience during the initial move to the laptop, which really paid off during this situation.

Additionally, I’ve been dabbling in image editing with the AMAZING online photoshop-like suite of Aviary tools. This is really impressive stuff, especially the Node-based UI of Peacock for generating effects and really sparks the imagination for what could be available in the future – 3D animation software perhaps?

Lastly I’ve been writing up documents and spreadsheets with Google Docs – something that’s certain to continue even after the computer is fixed as it’s opened up a world of non-static, shared documentation. Having spent the last decade working out of server-based file-management systems like Perforce and jumping in and out of Maya’s referncing system, (not to mention several years tinkering with .html and .php), I find it abhorrent to work on documents static or local.

I’d be interested to know if there are other cloud-based software out there I should be aware of?

Still on my pixel art trip, I created this out of fridge magnets the other day. Coincidentally, one of the guys at work forwarded this page by SNK Playmore illustrating their methods for pixel art creation, (which they refer to as “Dot Art”.) While I’ve always been a fan of Capcom’s games, I do appreciate that SNK’s character art and animation are superior, with a personal preference for the realistic style of Shinkiro below.

There are instructions as to the various stages of the art creation but unfortunately the text is image-based so I can’t babel it. While there are 5 characters at the time of writing, it looks like it’s going to grow over time so certainly something to check back on.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jason Porath for swiftly providing a translation for the stages of production:

1. Get the design of the character, usually from the art director, or sometimes Rough Design. One character usually takes about 3 days.
2. Make a 3d model of the character. This usually takes 2 weeks per character. You also make the ranges of motion, which takes around 2 months/character.
3. Render out the 3d character. To bake out all the animation for one character usually takes around 2 weeks.
4. Touch up the render, according to art director’s wishes. This usually takes 1 week per character.
5. Add in additional stuff like wrinkles, muscle creases, and the like, while maintaining the form. This takes each character around 6 and a half months (!). This is where all the character’s consistency in form is checked.
6. Adding in gradients. This takes 2 and a half months per character.

Each character usually has around 500 frames of animation, but some are up to 4x that.

Here’s the product of a rainy Sunday afternoon – a twist on the original purchase here. I took bad when we first moved from pixels to the anti-aliased imagery of photoshop because of the loss of control, so it’s nice to see pixel art becoming a decorative retro-style all of its own.

On a recent road trip down to NYC for the long weekend, MJ and I were customarily delayed a little extra at the border control due to my non-Canadian status. The conversation with the patrol officer went a little like this:

Officer: What is your status in Canada?
Me: I’m on a work permit.
Officer: And what kind of work do you do?
Me: I make videogames.
Officer: Made any famous videogames I might have heard of?
Me: Well… perhaps. My last big one was called Mass Effect? [...] It’s kind of an eighties sci-fi story in a similar vein to Star Tre…
Officer: Is it rated E for Everyone?
Me: No, M for Mature. It’s quite grown up.
Officer: [Indignantly] Well I’ll make sure my kids never get to play it.
Me: Well you make sure you do Officer, so you can carry out your job as a parent with every bit the efficiency of your day job.

OK, so the last line only played out in my head as I nod politely lest I wish to follow up with “Step on the gas!” and and ensuing police chase all the way to the Big Apple, but it’s one of the few times I’ve witnessed first-hand the ignorance of opinion that all videogames are for children. When are these parents going to finally get it that they are in fact QUITE RIGHT to ensure their kids don’t play senior-rated games? That’s the whole reason the ratings are there in the first place.

I’ve been criticised in the past for my practice of taking over-long bathroom visits, as well as the variety of entertainment I’ll take in there with me to make those extended stays more productive – ranging from books and magazines to my DS, ipod, laptop, and even the guitar. The truth is, I can’t think of a better place to brainstorm and have come up with some of my greatest breakthroughs and solutions on the job. In a panel at this week’s GDC, No More Heroes creator Goichi Suda clearly shares this practice too, stating that:

…he gets his inspiration from films, TV and other games, as well as art. But perhaps his best ideas come from a different place: “Being alone is very important. I go to the bathroom and then I try to poop and I’ll come up with a good idea.”

It would be interesting to know how many others in this creative industry find inspiration from unusual places and states of mind. For me it’s the bathroom, plus the acoustics are great in there too.

[via gamesindustry.biz]

…for not screwing it up. In the likely event that I’ll change this sometime, here’s my XBOX avatar as of January 20th 2009, for posterity.

After months of studied deliberation, (as well as being sidetracked by the new condo), I’ve finally taken delivery of my first ever laptop – the new Sony VAIO VGN-FW190 – with this being its virgin post.

It was becoming painfully obvious that my old PC just wasn’t cutting it for a supposed game developer, (I’ve never really been a PC gamer), especially when it wasn’t even hitting the minimum requirements for some of even the most basic of software. I was, however, loath to give up the dual-screen setup I’ve grown accustomed to at work and at home so have found some solace in the FW’s unique 16.4” widescreen.

If it even allows two documents or webpages side by side during my various forays into graphic design or simply gives the 3D viewports a little more breathing space, it’ll be worth finally breaking free of the constraints of the desk. Now to find a café sur le Plateau…

Nothing’s been posted for a while because I’ve been on holiday, first in Scotland for a friend’s wedding then off to Sweden, (it seems so much closer to the UK now that I live in Canada), in the search of design inspiration. I did, however, find Sweden to be rather lacking in cutting-edge design, though perhaps that owes a lot to oversaturation by IKEA.

Instead, the imagination was piqued by historical sites such as the 1000-year-old Lund Cathedral above, complete with a crypt full of knight-adorned burial chambers – a somewhat familiar scene considering I’m currently forging my way through Bethesda’s Oblivion – one expected the Daedra to appear around every corner. More photos of the trip can be found here.

In more relevant news, I just recently landed a pass to this week’s ADAPT 2008 Conference so expect to see writeups of various lectures and feature presentations in the near future.