1 post tagged “who wants to be a millionaire”

Live in London? You've no doubt fully experienced the joy of thick flurries of snowfall, rolling large snowballs at people and filming them on your mobile phones to upload on YouTube and building elaborate snowmen which have been photographed by lazy paparazzi and turned into newspaper stories. Now I love the white stuff - totally adore the way it transforms the environment. I treasure every scrunch of snow underfoot, and any wide expanse of white which has remained untouched is irresistable. Sadly the snowfall wasn't as spectacular as Down South, and as such was a bit underwhelming.

The walk into work was embraced with a blizzard which caused me to grin like a chimp with the aforementioned scrunching into work as workbound cars cautiously crept at low speeds on the freshly-laden white gold. A lunchtime was well spent taking some snowy pictures to overload Facebook with, plus the discovery of a huge expanse of untouched snow. Ohmy! I scrunched all my worth. The walk home was unfortunately rain-sodden and the snow slowly disappeared - something I was expecting. There was traces of fun had by others - sledge marks down the hill on my road and a confident snowman grinning at me. Meanwhile back in London, there were more photos of people sledging down hills and generally having a lovely time. Bastards.

I remember living on the Wirral and seeing Winter weather reports - huge white snowclouds over Northern England and Scotland. "Ah, how nice it would be to experience that." I thought. So now I'm living here, all we seem to get is one-day snow. It's there and then it's gone. It doesn't linger like it should, and leave me empty the next morning. I do have vivid memories of the one time it snowed when I was back home to the point where it was an impressive couple of feet of snow. We'd go down to the park and use cheap (and dangerous) sledge-equivalents - bin liners - to drift down the hills illuminated by a low sun. That was something which I still remember and wouldn't mind it happening again just once before I shift this mortal coil.

So get this - Wheelman is done. It's finished and out the door! I've been spending some time off work hanging around the flat and getting out when the flat reminds me too much of my freelancing career. There's still some work to do on my side of Wheelman's other tendrils - work on the demo version of the game and tweaks to the PC version of the game. Once that's all done, I'm going to take a break to Edinburgh and just explore - I've not been to Scotland before, so it's another tick on my imaginary list of things I've yet to do. Swimming with dolphins can wait. As much as I look forward to going, it's a shame there's no one to go with - it's always been me on my own most of my life, so it's become something of a norm.

Wheelman's been getting more positive press too - the latest is from Eurogamer. They've recently posted a very favourable write-up which mentioned the lack of multiplayer near the end, but here's the thing - the game has a respectable amount of stuff to do. It's strange that the reviews of Fallout 3 failed to mention multiplayer, though it's not been designed to be a multiplayer game. Wheelman can't be multiplayer due to all the stuff we've got going on - slowing down time, etc. I've played multiplayer with slowing down time and it always doesn't seem to work. FEAR comes to mind - it felt like a horrible interruption which you couldn't really control. The game also feels a lot more together, especially the side missions. Street Showdown? Some of those are insanely frantic affairs - a couple of months before it was a more sombre and toned-down affair. Completing a Showdown in 1st place is a pretty nice feeling as it feels like you've earned it.

I'm just happy we're finally winning the hearts and minds of gamers online - comments have been more positive in recent months, and I'm glad of it. The game's development has been a long and varied one - we've had ups and downs, some wrong decisions but ultimately some extremely right decisions which have gotten us to the stage we are now. I've definitely learnt a hell of a lot working on Wheelman and when it comes to the next project, there's going to be things which I will definitely put into motion early into the project so mistakes aren't made. "That's not going to happen in the next project". It sounds like familiar naivety, but I have hope in my heart.

The next project though. It's coming on nice. Very nice. I am the Keeper of Secrets though, and cannot utter what is being worked on. It is coming on nice though. Mmm. Nice!

The tumblr of an Adobe "fan" is now my new favourite thing ever. Basically it's a blog of gripes of new Adobe products in terms of their UI. It is pretty mind-blowing what stuff has been found too - I'm always refining and polishing the UI I've produced, though it looks as though the UI in Adobe products hasn't been thought out that well. I can testify to that as I've used Flash CS3 throughout Wheelman's development, and sadly Flash CS3 is no way developer-friendly. It's bug-ridden and full of all kinds of UI horror. I'm tempted to send some pics or gripes to that Tumblr...

In other news - I caught Slumdog Millionaire yesterday at the wonderful Tyneside Cinema in town and it was pretty enjoyable stuff! If you don't know of the story, basically it's the story of this "slumdog" called Jamil who appears on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in India, and answers many questions successfully. There's questions asked - how can this guy who comes from the slums know so many cultured questions? The genius is that the film will show you through flashback how he knows. There's a love interest and also It had moments of grimness though - which was a bit surprising for the "feel-good film of the decade".

The film was produced by Celador Films who also produce... Who Wants To Be A Millionaire! So in that respect, it was pretty authentic. Danny Boyle did a majority of the direction (the fact there was an Indian co-director wasn't mentioned in write-ups) and it definitely feels very Boyle-esque, even down to the soundtrack which has a superb mash-up of the sounds of India with MIA. I'm definitely eyeing up the soundtrack. One more thing - the Indian host of the show comes across as a right bastard. I like this.

I've been having fun finding animated music videos and also incredible live action music videos on YouTube - I favourite them and make them into playlists, although when checking back on my playlists, I'd find that I would see ominous "video unavailable" warnings in red, meaning that copyright owners have got hold of YouTube and politely asked them to remove that content. It's kind of creepy that when I uploaded some portfolio footage not long ago, YouTube actually knew what music was on there and it would possibly invoke some kind of copyright issue. Gah.

Anyways, those videos had to be removed and I'm making a list of them. A list. Christ, this is the future. We are living in a world where we can oggle videos to our hearts' content and check out constant streams of constantly-updated information pages. A list. Sheesh. I wonder why YouTube offer up these video-related treats for so long only to have them removed suddenly. Don't these copyright holders know that all those views can become purchases? Interest? A fanbase? I do like collecting animated videos though, speaking of which...

The Cult of Karl. It's been on-and-off in terms of getting the final version done due to all the Wheelman work, but now I have no excuse. Working hours are back to normal and now I am time-rich. To be honest, I miss being creative for myself. Sure, it's great to be creative for Wheelman, but I need to have some "me" time and create things which aren't going to go through a bazillion design decisions. I want to get a book together of artwork too - I need an art book! It's not an ego thing, it's more like a thing I can show my Mum. She hasn't even seen any Wheelman screenshots, video... *sigh* She definitely has no idea what I get up to. If she had a 360 or a PS3, she could download the forthcoming Wheelman demo and get a better idea!

Soooooo, I'm about to start getting all creative on this final day of my first break, although I'm bound to be playing Fallout 3 all afternoon. Or Gears of War 2. That thing still hasn't touched my 360 yet. Can creativity wait? It's a question which is getting easier to answer every day I get through.