Drawing Business » Video Games

Flick Golf riding high

Administrator — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:40:08 +0000

It’s been very satisfying watching Flick Golf riding high in the US iTunes App Store. It’s currently at number 8 in the Top Paid chart, after peeking earlier last week at number 3. At that point, it was even beating Cut the Rope, which is quite an achievement.

Screenshot of Flick Golf

Flick Golf is the third iPhone release from my employer, Full Fat, and the first I’ve been involved with. Our first two iPhone titles, Deadball Specialist (featured by Apple in the Rewind 2010 and App Store Essentials), and Zombie Flick received excellent reviews, but neither have achieved the success of Flick Golf.

I designed and created the logo for Flick Golf, along with all the interactive elements of the game UI (buttons, titles, dialogue panels, etc). The wonderful loading screen images and UI backgrounds where created by Heather Sheppard (who you can also find on Twitter masquerading as DinobotTwit), who also painted the beautiful background for this Flick Golf marketing poster (click the image for a huge version):

Swanky marketing poster

It’s very nice to be involved, even if only in a small way, in a product that has been so successful, and received consistently high praise from reviewers and casual gamers alike.

I’ve added some more videogame concept sketches

Administrator — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:30:53 +0000

I did an art test for NCsoft a few years ago; I’ve just added those sketches to my new portfolio pages. The art test required me to match the character designs and art style for a unpublished game that was under development at the time.

New videogame concept sketches

Administrator — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:56:35 +0000

I’ve just added a set of spaceship concept sketches to my portfolio. These were done for an MMO space combat game that is currently being developed by a small independent studio.

Introducing my brand new portfolio pages

Administrator — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:44:27 +0000

This evening I am very pleased to be able to announce the launch of my brand new portfolio pages, featuring more than 100 samples of artwork from the last 15 years that I have been working as a professional artist.

This is made even more exciting for me as I’m using new slide show software that I have designed and written myself. For the last few years I’ve been using an open source solution called Gallery to display my artwork. Despite being an impressive piece of software, some time ago I came to the realisation that it’s not the best fit for my needs. It’s very feature rich, and with that comes a level of complexity that isn’t justified by the number and type of images that I want to display. It also uses a lot of hacks to maintain compatibility with older browsers, and despite my best efforts I haven’t managed to set it up so that it produces standards compliant HTML, something that is very important to me.

Some months ago I had the seed of an idea for creating a very simple, lightweight browser image viewer that can be configured just by editing very clean, simple, standards compliant HTML (or XHTML). This seed has grown to become Image Engine 4.0, and sees me returning to a home grown solution for displaying my images after nearly 5 years using Gallery.

I’m very pleased with the results; I think it looks nice, and it has made adding more than 100 images very simple indeed (it only took me a couple of hours to add all the images, including typing all the descriptions). I’m so pleased that I’ve decided to make the Image Engine available as free to use software. It’s still in the early stages of development, and there are a number of features I’d like to add as time goes by, but at the moment it works, and works well. I will be adding content to the Project Page over the next few weeks, so if you would like to use this software on your own site, please check back soon, or contact me.

My Jambo! Safari character artwork in the wild

Administrator — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:33:24 +0000

Although I’m not able to publish any of the artwork I created for Jambo! Safari myself, there seems to be plenty of examples of my environment and character concepts, and character artwork scattered around the interwebs. Below are samples and links to a few of my images:

Amy Wildman character artwork on Gamblog.fr

Max Söderström character artwork on Gamblog.fr

A selection of concept sketches on the German Nintendo Power site.

Luckily I am not responsible for the awful box art or the terrible, lazy logo that Sega chose to use.

Concept Artwork

Administrator — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:54:38 +0000

I’ve actually managed to add a couple of new images to my portfolio recently. I had the chance to colour up a sketch I did a few years ago for an NCsoft art test:

I’ve also just added a spaceship concept I did recently for an space combat game currently under development by an independent studio:

Click the images to see a (slightly) larger version.

Jambo! Safari Ranger Adventure

Administrator — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:42:10 +0000

Since starting work full time at Full Fat, I’ve worked almost exclusively on titles for the Nintendo DS, including Biker Mice From Mars, The Sims 2: Castaway, and most recently The Sims 2: Apartment Pets, released in August 2008.

However, the end of November saw the release of the first Wii game I’ve worked on: Jambo! Safari Ranger Adventure, published by Sega. It is based (loosely) on the Naomi based Jambo! Safari arcade game that became a cult classic after it’s release in 1999. The game has received some surprisingly favourable reviews, despite the Wii version being aimed squarely at younger players, and despite it suffering from a number of crucial flaws (more on that in another post).

I’m excited to see a game that I had a significant role in on the shelves, even if that game isn’t all that I had hoped it would be when the project started more than 12 months ago.