Update News: Maths is officially over!

Two units down already, where is the time going? The next unit on the list is RenderWare. The assignment hasn’t been completely finalised (as per usual) but it should be tailored around creating some kind of prototype game.

So what game you going to create? At the moment I haven’t got the faintest idea but hopefully as I get to grips with RenderWare I’ll start to formulate some ideas on this subject.

On to RenderWare, well it seems like a very versatile kit. The RenderWare user guides are well written and the underlying concepts are fairly easy to get to grips with. I’ve only done the first couple of tutorials which are based on loading in files, lighting a scene and picking those objects but I haven’t experienced any problems so far. I’ll keep you updated on RenderWare in later posts.

Lately I’ve been playing two games, The Movies and F.E.A.R..

First Encounter Assault Recon (F.E.A.R.) looking past the silly and pointless acronym is a great game. Fully worth the hard earned money I paid for it. I haven’t finished the game yet but I am a fair way through. These are some of my thoughts so far. The level design is nothing special but certainly nothing ugly. The game is well paced, the developers have tried to space out the scares and combat sections evenly. This design tactic means you’ll spend enough time fighting to forget about the horror, when all of a sudden it’ll creep up on you.

The fighting sections are kind of like the combat in Hardboiled (minus the cheesy eighties sound track and dodgy dub). The decals look very sexy. When bullets hit brick walls you do feel like you’ve just taken a huge chunk out, dust spreads out sometimes filling the whole room leading to the A.I firing wildly in your last known direction. This brings us to the games A.I. Fighting enemies in this game definitely feels far more satisfying than say Half-Life 2. They communicate, call out your position, attempt to flank you and generally try and make life very difficult for you. The horror isn’t too bad either, nothing too scary but they have been a few occasions that have made me jump. I haven’t played much multiplayer but from the odd games it was a blast of old school multiplayer action. This game is definitely worth the purchase.

I’ll talk about The Movies in my next post but for the time being my current view is this, it’s an excellent and very creative game and one which you should all purchase or at least play. If I make any decent movies i’ll upload them and link them here.

I am currently preparing my portfolio which is being up loaded as we speak but more on that later.

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Well, this will hopefully be the first of many posts about total randomness, video games (sorry… murder simulators) and my portfolio. Seems like everyone is jumping onto this blogging bandwagon and I really don’t want to be left behind, so “tadar” I am SideTrack is born.

This website is really dedicated to showcasing my portfolio or lack of portfolio as it stands at the moment. Over time, I’ll be adding more content. This will either be in the form of personal views on life, games, films and TV or on the ever expanding portfolio of DOOM!

You can check out some of the work I’ve already done at Hidden-Source. You can check the hidden source website out for yourself to see what it’s all about. Other stuff I am currently involved with is over at Calibre Studio. Calibre Studio is a small indie games company setup by a group of past and present Lincoln University students and Yes… I am one of them.

That’s really all I can say for now. Keep checking back because I promise to have something more substantial up and running later on in the week.

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