Finally had my latest class graduate and most of them are already employed. That is a good sign. One of their projects is a finalist in the Crowbar awards.
This has taken a huge amount of my time and energy. Additionally, I had been working full out on getting Medaware started. E-Commerce is not my forte.

I have done some personal art in the guise of teaching exercises, which has been great. Overall, though I haven’t been enormously active here, I have been extremely active overall.
More stuff coming up soon, now that I will have some time not grading until 9pm every night! Woo Hoo!

We have finally moved into our new place in Whangaparaoa and moved our PorterAdventures site over to Wordpress from Blogspot.  The problems we were having with Blogspot was adding images and the amount of time it took to get anything accomplished on that site.  Go on over to that page to see the new house and our view.  Click the image below to go there.

In addition to the new place I have finished a Skunkape.  For those outside of the U.S. the Skunkape is like Bigfoot, but in the Florida swamps.  The are supposed to be slightly smaller than the Pacific Northwest cousin, but smelly like a skunk.  Skunks have a very (VERY) distinctive smell.  What is odd about anything smelling like a skunk in the Florida Everglades is that skunks wouldn’t be able to traverse the swamp easily as the water is anywhere from knee high to well above a grown persons head.  What is making that smell there… This is what some people think it is.

I will be adding him up to Cryptolicious soon.

Also, I am working on a project with an old friend and hopefully I will have stuff to show from that once it gets published.  Sorry for the spotty updates.  I am still working on building the new course.  It’s a bit more work than I had anticipated and completely different from what I am used to and what I have been doing for the last 15 years.  No worries, as the Kiwi say, “She’ll be right” soon enough.

Getting ready to move to the Whangaparaoa peninsula next week, so the packing is getting underway.  We are extremely excited to move over to such a beautiful area.I am a little concerned about the commute into work every day, but what’s another 30 minutes on the bus. 

About a month before we moved from the states, I started going to a driving range, trying to learn a bit about golf.  I was enjoying the driving, although, have a wicked slice.  I started to tame that a bit before we left and decided I wanted to be able to play a round of golf.  I looked up how many golf courses there were here in New Zealand and thought, that will be a goal.  I then looked at the golf club prices and decided, if I were going to get into playing, it wouldn’t be a cheap proposition.  However, before we left, I found great prices on complete sets of clubs at a second hand sports store.  I have been out to some of the reserves here (parks for the stateside people) where I have wiffle ball golf balls and I have been doing a bit of driving again.  The area we are moving has a two different courses. I am excited to try and play my very first round once we move out that way.

I am still working on some Cryptolicious stuff, and now a friend is asking me to help him on a game that he is working on.  You can see his other games here.

http://planetidiot.com/games/

The Crysis Wars level is not going right now, not enough time, but I will get back to it.  Working on this project will allow me to do some old school sprite art, which I haven’t done in quite a while.  Should be fun.

Will update soon with more stuff.  Keep posted.

Adding to my Cyptid collection, the mighty North American Thunderbird!

While this may be a cryptid everywhere else, in Aotearoa (NZ), Haast’s Eagle used to hunt the mighty moa.

I have a few more of these I want to do, the Chupacabra is in the works!

I have added two more shirts to Cryptolicious.  The Mothman and Sasquatch.

I have some more ideas I would like to do for these.  I am hoping that once I get a few of these in the pipe, that I can get after the level design stuff.

I have more stuff in the works.. keep on the look out.  I will do a better post soon.. Promise!

Those of you who know me personally will know that I have a fascination for all things paranormal.  My favorite shows are things like Destination Truth and Ghost Hunters.

Having had some weird experiences myself, I have always been drawn to bizarre stories, folklore and legends as well.  I decided that I would start making some things that really appealed to me.  Maybe these things are everyones cup of tea, but I like it.  I have started a cafe press store that shows two designs that I have painted so far.  You can see them below along with a link to the cafe press page.

Legend of New Jersey, the Jersey Devil!

Bigfoot ala DiVinci

I plan on doing quite a few, but why not get two up and see how they do.  I have also been playing around with the Crysis engine.  I want to make a level to run around in, just to keep my mind in the game.  What better way, than do include some train stuff.  Here is a shot of two LPG tank cars that will go into the level.  See, I still love trains, even though I don’t really have an outlet for them!

I hope to keep building stuff to keep myself up to speed on all the latest tools and games.  I will continue to build train related stuff because it is just a good time.

I will try and keep more stuff coming with my personal art and some train art, but teaching and building a new course is taking a little bit of my time away from it.  Hopefully, once I have the new course information in place, I can start doing more of this for fun!

Porter

Unfortnately, it’s not what you guys have been waiting on.  It is however, what has been occupying all of my time lately.  As you may, or may not know, both of my kids are Type 1 diabetic.  We decided that we wanted to do start a business that not only helped raise awareness about being properly tagged with medical ID jewerly, we wanted to make sure these items were something our kids would want to wear.  After lots of work on the website, logo and help from family and friends, we have finally launched MedAware.

This has been many months in the making.  We are currently only shipping within New Zealand, but plan on expanding once we get our heads wrapped around that part of the business.

Sorry this has nothing to do with Cascade Game Foundry or any other simulation or fun items you were looking for.  It is however, something I have poured many hours into. I am glad to have this done so I can move onto some of my other projects!

Well, it’s been about a year since I was laid off from Microsoft and Aces.  Since then I have had a rollercoaster of a year. I could recap it for you, but I am not sure many people are still interested in this blog.

I haven’t been able to update what I have done with the CGF guys, they will have to do that when they are ready.

I have some other things I am working on, but can’t talk about them, because then it wouldn’t be unique if I can get it done.

Game development sucks a bit.  It’s covert and sometimes you feel like it shouldn’t be, but it is and has to be.

I was reading back through some old blog posts about my SW1500 tutorial.  Seems like a waste of time to finish since there is no more TS2.

So I am gonna post two things…

1. http://www.porteradventures.blogspot.com  My wife blogged about our year

2.

I have been wanting to get back into creating real art… I gave away all my art supplies before moving to New Zealand, so like a good Kiwi, I worked with what I had.  This is a collage made from magazines.  The rust colors are actually skin colors from make-up ads.  Very close to finishing it.  Work has been pretty demanding lately, so I am not spending the time I want on it.

I am not spending the time I want on a few projects. Hopefully I can rectify this once I get the course work completed. 

I know my posting has been spotty.  I don’t like that either, but I felt that if I couldn’t talk about what excites me, I should talk at all.  Unfortunately, keeping quiet is all part of the games industry.

I have been working on learning several different game engines and that has been a blast.  Unity and UDK are great fun.  I am also looking for some free isometric  engines and have found a really cool fghting engine called MUGEN.

Lots of the old street fighter type games were made with this MUGEN engine and there are thousands of characters and environments to download.   I am planning on trying to add this sort of engine into the course as I go for the game art graduates to sink their teeth into as many types of games and engines as possible during the two academic years.

I found the link for the MUGEN engine here:

http://www.gamediscovery.com/game-design/game-design-software.asp

Well we are going to give this a go again.  Things are still plugging along with multiple projects.  The server issue was with the size of the photos I guess.

Hopefully making these half the size will correct the issue. 

Sorry for the extremely long delay.  Getting sorted in a new career and country is a bit daunting.  Here are the pictures.