Call of My Duty

A new chapter in life

2011-08-16T23:02:00.000+02:00

So. It's been a while since I posted anything and I've been through a lot of stuff that's just... *sigh* I don't know where to begin.
you know what? When it comes to my work with Army of One, check out my other blog. Although I haven't posted there since June or something, that's what the world knows about the project so far. This blog is about my personal life as well, and I'd like to write about things non-related to school this time.

So. During the year, my siblings started moving to Kuwait, one at a time. Then June came, and summer vacation began. I, my parents and my little sister packed as many things as possible and shipped them to Kuwait. The plan this time was to emigrate back to where we came from, and so we too left our home and took the plane to this odd country that we've missed for so long.

To me, this is the first time I'll really live in Kuwait. I left it when I was 4 years old, so I don't really have any memories from anything besides from mom's sister and her daughters, my cousins, and that thanks to all the pics we had saved throughout the years.

It's very different to live here compared to my life in Sweden. It's an odd place, and they have odd habits that sometimes make me just speechless. And those who just wouldn't follow vital rules like, you can't park in the road!! Or those probably unemloyed guys who drive around and look into every car they pass by, just to get a glimpse at - and hopefully get what? A smile from?? - any girl that would be sitting inside. What the hell?! In Sweden, I'm used to having my own privacy even inside the car, so this is something very new and strange to me, it should be humiliating for them, but I guess no one cares anymore.

On the other hand, we have things like late shopping which could go on til 11 o'clock - and now during Ramathan, malls stay open til 1 o'clock! It's amazing, you fast, eat, then why not go shopping at 8 or 9 o'clock? It's safe, all the families are out, in malls and on the beach, and in the parks... I usually never stay out late at night in Sweden, but here I constantly do that and it's no big deal. Is it because of the family atmosphere or maybe because I might feel more at ease/at home here?

So. The plan is to aim for a new chapter in our lives and "restart" living in Kuwait. So many things have changed, my parents say, yet it's the Kuwait they've always known. And now it's my turn to get to know it, and adapt my life to it. "How?" I've asked myself many times. I don't know, I really don't know, some things are just too crazy, but that could be said about life in Sweden as well. So what I'll do, is to follow the flow for a while, I'll give this life a proper chance, and see the outcome.

After the vacation I have several plans, one actually involves getting back to Europe - this time in London, so I might have to wait with the living-in-Kuwait issue. But so far, nothing's decided, it's Ramathan as said, and I'm enjoying the vacation here, leaving all decisions til after this holy month. For now, I'm all excited about getting started with Android app (game) dev, playing video games and making up for almost a year of no "quality time" with my family.

Ramathan Kareem

A pleasant day

2011-02-23T00:40:00.002+01:00

And just like that, I woke up feeling pleased by what I've accomplished and how far I've come in my life.
Yesterday my teacher told me to relax, I'm studying too much - lol yes, that's what teachers say to their students nowadays - and that I should take a day off to do something else. And there are two main things I've always loved doing: drawing and playing the piano. I've tried taking up my drawing, but I've realized that the piano, actually keyboard, is more giving and brings me peace, so I turned around to give it yet another chance in my grey life. Since I just watched the final episode of Kimi ni Todoke, a not so great anime, I simply Youtube'd a tutorial of its opening theme, one of the worse openings I've heard. Yet I stood infront of my keyboard and aped the female hands as they went right and left over a beautifully sounding piano.

Now I can play the entire opening with achords etc, yet still with a lot of flaws, but it's ok, with a little more practise I should be enjoying the song with no major problems.

This is pure joy to me. I picked a song I didn't even like, but the thrill in deconstructing it into notes, simple key presses, and then create amazing flows that follows a rhythm, a mood, and kind of create a predictable storyline, is never-ending. It's... pleasing. I have no words that describe the harmony I feel in deconstructing songs and reconstructing them again - in a way that I feel attached to! Like it was my turn to tell that story. It's amazing. I guess this is why I love being a programmer as well, I love construction.
I surely should play more piano.

In a few days I plan to learn another song, most probably it's going to be an anime song. Ages ago I began learning the popular Vampire Knights opening, but it's really advanced, so I wonder if I should postpone it and take something light and easy to remember. Oh well, I'll get back to this when time comes.

As for Army of One, the game project I'm currently developing - did I say that I'm going to publish it in the game portal Aluna Games? :D Head over to the Army of One Forums in Aluna Games if you haven't been there yet =)

The development is going well, today I managed to boost the speed of the "wurm" to over 400km/h, just crazy stuff! The slip ratio is much better too, it doesn't slide like before so more control to the people!
The vehicle flips are inevitable (especially when you fly off a cliff with 400km/h), but it's not a problem but a feature, as I'm dealing with fairly realistic physics here, and here's an example of how to use it - with atleast 150km/h, drive into a tunnel and up on it's walls, keep accelerating and you've made a flip with the entire vehicle! =) It already looks nice, and with sound effects it should be sweeeet!

Yeah... that's me enjoying work. I consider writing about the newly released Marvel vs Capcom 3, which I ofcourse had to buy already, as I got in love with it at a game expo in November. My 10 year old sister is beating the pride out of me, so I need to be better already! Until then - take care!

/Kweiko

Having a cool dad

2011-02-02T17:56:00.000+01:00

Yesterday
Me: *coming in to the living room* hey dad, how about playing video games a little?
Dad: ehh... ok, put on that fighting game that your sister was playing earlier...
Me: which one, this? This? Then which console, PS3? 360? How did the joystick look like when she played? You don't know..? Ok do you want to try out BlazBlue?
Dad: No I wan't men and women fighting.
Me: but these are men and women.
Dad: ...
Me: ok, let's try on Tekken (5) on PS2. *change console and start game, choose beginner mode and Lei Wulong, give the joystick to dad*
Dad: *BUTTON SMASH BUTTON SMASH BUTTON SMASH* I won!! Round 2! *BUTTON SMASH BUTTON SMASH BUTTON SMASH* I won again!!

Later on during night
Me: *entering the living, seeing my dad button smashing again* how's it going? :D
Dad: ooh that girl (Capoeira Christie) is really strong, I have to watch out! *beats her* like that! Now she learns to stop moving like a snake!
Mom: You're hitting those buttons too hard, I can't even sleep! :(
Dad: Ok I'll shut it down, just because I love you!

Today
Mom: I'm off to the doctor, goodbye!
Dad: Ok, goodbye! *waits for mom to exit and close the door* Yes!! Kweiko, put on that game while I run to the toilet!

Inspiration chock

2011-01-14T02:36:00.002+01:00

Lately, I've been spammed by artists for a concept artist position I announced a couple of days ago. Which is lovely, because I've been looking for one for a month and time is slipping away - almost time for next deadline!

Luckily I found a couple of great artists to help me out, and going from no concept artist to four concept artists is a big win, even though not all of them are professional or are working for free. With so little time to next deadline, I need all boost I can get. Question is how fast they can work? Remains to see!

All this talk about concept art made me hungry for drawing again - and inspired! I've been looking through maybe 40 different art galleries on fantasy and sci-fi and animanga drawings, some where astonishing, others where breathtaking. And there were those that weren't much of a hype. Nevertheless, they all inspired me to start sketching again, as I had put down the pen for quite some time now. Not that I didn't want to sketch, but partly because there where no time, and partly because I had this awful period of no inspiration whatsoever. As soon as I tried to draw a line, that line was horrible and had nothing at all to do with what I tried to accomplish.

Maybe something happend during my birthday - right, I turned 22 on Jan 8th *yay* and am leaving more of those freaky teenager hormons behind like never before! Seriously -.-' No big party or a birthday cake, just me, my sister and my friend spending the night i turned 22 with watching a cozy movie. Or that was the plan. The movie, Twilight Eclipse, caused both my friend and my sister to scream and shout and take sides like it was a football game, and there we sat rifftraxing the whole thing. Anyway, that could have had some impact on my inspiration!

And since my brother forgot about my online project and didn't pay for the webhotel where all my work is, the website is down at the moment. Ofcourse I've fixed this, but it will take a day for it to get reactivated. And that gave me time to start sketching! ^^ (turning bad energy into positive energy, check!)
Typically, I've started with manga again, and that's the way I want it. What I was surprised by, was that I tried drawing a masculine character, with some success!! Not even when I used to draw, did I manage to draw a masculine face, so I really feel the inspiration flushing my brain *wooh!*

With three, rough character sketches, I feel I've started to remember what I learnt during a character design course I took last year. And all those books and websites I've visited, and the tutorials I've followed... My hand has begun to have some connection with the pencil I'm holding (a BIC pen with 0.07mm lead, my favorite weapon). Honestly, I feel in heaven.

This year, 2011, is a promising year. Leaving 2010 has been such a relief, and now, not only do I think I'm ready for a job, but also that I think I'm more satisfied with myself, I code but don't have to stop drawing because of that. And I'm also building up my skills to become more administrative and a great leader.
Yes, I've discovered that I really enjoy managing projects, to put up a stable and exciting plan and to have everything planned out - I feel safe building the road before walking on it! And somewhere inbetween I also manage to act as a designer, writing my GDD, thinking properly about what's important, what to highlight, what to take on later, where in the process I am and what next step should be. It's a funny thing that if anyone had asked me about these things six months ago, I'd have looked totally dumb and wouldn't have anything to say about it. As a matter of fact - been there, done that. I wonder what my teacher thinks of my progress now... :P

More roles to take on? Well I finally bought a system camera, a Nikon, and shocked my parents with the total price - Happy new year mom and dad! - and now I'm so pleased by the control I have over the settings! I can finally take some experimental photos and have fun with capturing moments. And take awesome pictures ofcourse!
What more to come? I've been thinking of an iPhone lately... I'm not much of a cell phone person, I use whatever works to call with, but with an iPhone, I can try out that "Game Dev Story" game I've been longing for to try out, and have more games than Snake 2 and Sudoku to enjoy during buss drives. Hmmmm....

Reviewing 2010

2010-12-31T19:56:00.000+01:00

Finally. Another year.
So much have happend and I've been thrown on and off stuff to deal with. This year has really been a tough year, really torned me out, and I won't miss it.
Despite that, I remember my post January 1st 2010. It was chaotic and I was in panic. I was afraid not to be good enough for anything, I didn't know what to do after the graduation, and I had communication issues with my family haha. Let's review that.

First, the graduation, I nearly didn't get to graduate! I and my partner had problems with finding a subject and it was impossible to write about stuff as we had so much to do with another course and we weren't good at communicating with each other. Then I was on my own the last month, and failing would have a huge negative impact on me, I panicked. Three weeks before the final deadline, I talk to my tutor and I notice he's given up on me, although not completely, he knows I'm a hard worker, but with three weeks and almost nothing done... But I tried. I sat day in and day out and researched, read, wrote, organized... I slept at 5 o'clock and woke up by 7 or 8. Tough times, but I managed to write a thesis - and I'm proud to say I got a B (in Sweden we don't have B+ or B- etc) - two points from full points because obviously I didn't meet the previews deadlines. Oh well, it turned out really great, thank God.

Even the other course, my project work with 5 others, was a mere catastrophy, due to lack of passion and skills. I hard a hell of a hard time managing the development the last two months, and as the term ended I was so tired I could cry. But I also managed to get a B on it. Hard work pays.

As for the rest of my list from last year's promises blog post:
¤ MORE PROGRAMMING -> Check!! I feel confident enough to work with other, and to work independently. As a project manager I've a better grasp at how the process goes and how to use methods to manage that.

¤ Less stress! - well, I've been through a lot of personal things so I never fullfilled this one :( But thinking about it, I do think that I've more peace in my mind now as I've... well, leveled up in some way! I just hope next years don't bring as bad news as this year did.

¤ More drawing - yah! Although not at the moment, but I've taken a character design course which taught me LOTS of tips and to draw bodies.

¤ Organize time better - forget about that. Don't even bother to discuss is. Just.. don't.

¤ Play more games - Check! A bit better now as I've graduated. Although I'm still not an avid gamer (do I need to be one to become a highly skilled programmer/game developer?), I buy plenty of games, even old PS2 titles (while cursing the stores for not sharing my money with the developers since the games are too old).

The most difficult task I thought was:
¤ Be nicer to my family - Success! Well, it's a long way to go but we really are relaxed with each other now. I think after all we've been through, like when mom hada stroke and stayed abroad for three months, I and my dad had to face each other and like... talk! I mean really talk, like there was nobody else to talk to (there wasn't). And so our conversations began to be more relaxed and he actually tells me he loves me now :P man, we really had issues before... As for the rest of my family, we become closer, but my sister who's 18 yrs old, she been behaving alienish and it feels like nobody knows her anymore. I hope 2011 will bring some nice changes on that as well.

And now, here I am, I have a bachelor's degree in computer and system sciences, I'm much better at programming and project management, I'm studying international game produciton on an advanced level by managing a game project with 4 others located in Sweden, USA and Great Britain. I've organized everything myself and am working independently.
My promises this year are to finish this project on May/June and have a nice, polished game on my portfolio. Another promise would be to build a proper prortfolio - for this I'll need to gather my old work and make it downloadable or something. Oh and... hahaha, a friend made me promise to start looking for love xD

Well, this year's challenges, although harsh, have been a huge level up for me, and I'm not afraid anymore - I'll enjoy life and step proudly into 2011.

Happy New Year, everyone!
/Kweiko

New website

2010-11-28T14:26:00.001+01:00

After reading a lot about wordpress here and wordpress there, I thought I might as well start promoting myself a bit more (lol better late than never) and make an account there, blogspot was awesome, but currently only WordPress has a plugin to show content from Unity (the game engine I'm currently working with). I don't think I relly need any plugin to show the content, but it would make the process much faster and easier, so I went to wordpress.com and made an account!

I took my time choosing theme and organizing everything, but then I realized - I can't install plugins! Then followed a short time of research which resulted in the facts that I'm on the wrong site! It should be wordpress.ORG not .com, and that the .com site was for blogging, just like blogger.com (but I have to admit, I like blogger more, especially the stats that show where the readers are located!) while wordpress.org is a CMS (Content Management System) that's downloaded to a server to manage your site - and this one could be used with plugins. Oh! Luckily, I allready have my own space on my brother's server, I just thought it was too demanding to manage it, I've tried. Not that I don't have the knowledge, but I have no time, although I know how to code in xhtml and css, all I want to do really is to blog about my progress in game dev and show my work.
So wordpress.org it is!

It really felt differently, now I can manage my site much easier and effectily. But I had to search for hours for a good stats-plugin that shows where readers are located. I've found one now so I'm really happy :)
It still needs more stuff to get done, more content to come and fill the site soon, and I still need to figure out how to change domain name to the one I bought two months ago, www.kweiko.com, but meanwhile here's the current link: http://kweiko.abbascenter.com

Hope you like it!
/Kweiko

3 months and game making

2010-11-10T13:09:00.001+01:00

3 months since last update! That's been a while! I've had family issues and moving from one apartment to another and boring stuff that I'm glad is partly over. On the other hand, I've been working with my minigame Army of One (working title), that I originally started building with the help of a tutorial series on Youtube. That was during summer when I thought that my programming skills still sucked and I had to do something about it. Feeling a bit more comfortable with programming, I developed it and added stuff like score counter and timer.
One day I got email from my university, saying that they will show students' work during Gamex 2010, the biggest game convension in Scandinavia. I first hesitated to participate but two weeks later I signed up! It was really a fun and inspiring experience but I had to work really hard to make my game-ish prototype really playable and worth to show. I added better graphics (but still a programmer's art really...), made a highscore list, changed the environment and the whole menu design, added sound effects and more eye candy. I'm really pleased with what I've achieved during such a short time, and don't feel like a noob anymore :P

The evening before Gamex, I got an email from the responsible saying that my game isn't working properly!! I panicked and a started to try and fix stuff, the problem lied within the frame update because of the processor. I had from the beginning programmed all movements so they won't be frame dependant, but the problem now was that since it was lagging, the avatar leaped through the small level and even if that's fair in a racing game, it's totally unneccessary in my game. Then everything was different - what went fast on my computer went really slowly on the other computer, so I really had to customize the code for that computer from distance, fixing problems I couldn't see :S
Late at night I received the awated email, saying that it works, the character isn't as fast as it should be but it's still playable and working pretty well. Rest assured, I fell on sleep and the next 4 days, 4th-7th of November, I spent on Gamex LIVING the game industry :P

Gamex was the best thing happening to me during 2010, I slept a little, I didn't eat while there, and because of the high volume on everything, I screamed my voice off during the conversations. But I loved it, I really felt "this is my home" and enjoyed every minute being there - so much that the guard had to come get me when I and my friend was playing Marvel vs Capcom 3 after closing time! XD

I've also started "studying" in a distance based 1 year long course! During this year, until June 2011, I'll be working on a game project, and I decided to remake Army of One and really develop it to be a proper game to publish, this time also in Unity game engine. It's so exciting and I get great advice from different tutors and teachers, and I'm putting my soul into this one. Right now I'm on the conceptualization phase and not everything is set, but after two meetings with my tutor, my head is soon exploding from all the inspiration!
But I still need a few more people to work with me, I'm doing this project with my brother who's the producer, but I'm the director and need atleast one or two more to help me with the programming and with the design/concept arting. If things goes well, the production phase will start during January 2011.

I'll blog more about my progress so stay tuned! But right now I really have to wash the dishes!

Cheers
/Kweiko

Ramathan Kareem

2010-08-14T21:00:00.000+02:00

Today is the second day of Ramathan. This year, in Scandinavia the fasting goes on for 20 hours and I thought that I would die of hunger but after two days of fasting my body has amazingly allready adjusted to the new food schedule *level up*
I really love the family atmosphere during Ramathan. Usually everyone is busy with school or work or with life itself, not spending time with the family like in good old days, but when Ramathan comes, we all appreciate each other for helping each other out (everyone acts too lazy, and when one of us really do something besides lying on the bed or crashing on the sofa, he or she will be seen as a hero). Everyone tends to gather in the living room and just be together, watch TV or a movie together and we just LOVE everything that is served to us. Dad is the one who fill the plates and he really cook awesome food, but when Ramathan comes he's like an artist with food!! Atleast that's what it seems like, because that's how much we appreciate everything :P

I use to compare Ramathan with Christmas, living in Sweden I know how cozy and special Christmas is (even though Swedes aren't as Christmas lovers as the Americans) and I recognize the feeling in the air, everyone's happy faces and the dark, cozy days that makes you think coming back home to the family is just too wonderful... that's what Ramathan feels like. :)

Meanwhile, we're moving to my sister's appartment temporarily, so it's going to be really tight for a while! Nevertheless, I think for that mere reason, it's going to be even more cozy and family-ish when all the girls sleep next to each other, like we used to do when we were kids. The little room is filled with girlish stuff à la our family: PS1, PS2 and the PS3 :P Unfortunately, the 360 will be in my brother's room (well it is his after all...). 90% of the time, my little sister is going to have kidnapped the TV to Nickelodeon-land, while I and my other sister will have our laptops to do our work, study or spend our freetime by enjoying TV-series and anime episodes. My other little sister will surely have the floor for herself - she likes dancing! So yeah, it's going to be tight like hell, but we finally get to spend a lot of time with each other like before. That's what Ramathan is for, isn't it? :)

So, Ramathan Kareem, people!

Final project

2010-08-09T22:43:00.007+02:00

Ok, I'll keep the long story short. My project course... I still haven't get a grade on it, the teacher seems to have gone for a vacation and still haven't returned yet :(
But after a huge hassle with the hassle we managed to get an almost-a-game done in Unity3D. The last month of the course, half the group were inactive and we must have looked like Crusoe after all those years on an island, but what's important is that the teacher bought it. We could have done it more smoothly though. Here are three of, what I think, were our biggest problems:

Communication: We weren't synched with each other, there was always someone missing, people were too busy/lazy/sad to come to the meetings so half the group was always behind in the updates. We had MSN-meeting to enhance the whole thing, but some of us simply didn't take it seriously.

Effort: The more time passed, the less motivated everyone became. This was partially due to the lack of good communication, but also the lack of remarkable progress. We weren't experienced enough to do things right from the start, so there were a lot of "walking in cirkles" scripting until we, 3 months later, finally got a hang of Unity3D, C# and scripting in general. I think that's normal but back then we were allready tired of not having a constant, fine work flow. Most of our group simply gave up after that third month.

Production overview: Firstly I have to say that we had an extreme luck to have someone in our group who really knew the whole process of making a game. The rest of us were kind of aping around and guessing what's next to do. But because of the minority of experienced people - and NO tutoring at all - we often made wrong decisions and focused on the wrong things. Of course, I am really happy about learning everything and have gotten a great experience from it, but the learning curve never seemed to become to our advantage. We seriously needed to step back and look at where we really are heading, but I guess "young and naïve" works in this context as well.

But what's done is done. I'm still waiting for those last five points to appear in my uni account, so that I can officially graduate and have my bachelor's degree. I really need to get them soon, because of things happening at home right now. But more on that in a later blog!

Until then - take care!

The dissertation

2010-06-22T00:55:00.000+02:00

Wah.. it's been a while since I wrote something here. Ok some update:

I have been having problems with my friend with whome I wrote the dissertation, because she's been post-poning things and giving up on other things. This continued until a few days after my previews blog here, which was on May 8th if I remember correctly. I really tried all I could to motivate her, to make her work a little more, because honestly the main reason I teamed up with her was that she is a close friend of mine and that I knew she lack discipline enough to make it through all this alone, I knew it from the beginning and just wanted to help her. Even though I was painfully tired of everything.
Four days before the deadline for our submission of the last part and she still hadn't written the intro and although I was furious and totally disappointed at her I managed to keep myself calm and reason with her. Things didn't get better and we only had less than a month until the final submission had to be done if we were to graduate this year. So what I did is tell her to rest or something, she obviously had given up on everything and that is inacceptable for me. Ofcourse I was damn hurt by being forced to have such patience without being rewarded with a positive outcome, but there never was included in my plans to fail, not now when I'm so close to my graduation. What did I do? I continued alone ofcourse. I talked to the supervisor and he thought that I have to rethink everything and see what really matters, what I reallt wanted to write about, if it was fun. I had three weeks to compensate for 5 months and write a complete dissertation. Not to forget that I still had the final project to work with and my friend was a member of that group too and didn't work on that project either. She wasn't the only one. By that time two of six members were working fulltime on the project, me and the level designer who also did all the graphics except for the avatar.
My tasks were those that were my own plus those that should have been done by the other two programmers, but since they didn't do them, I had to. All my other friends tried to persuade me not to overload myself like that, after all I've done my part and would certainly pass the course. But I just can't handle undone things, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to calling things complete - I can't stop until I've reached a certain level of completion, which most often is set to flawless or something, resulting in me being "almost" satisfied with my work.

Anyway, I started aaaall over with the dissertation, searching for a smaller but clearer subject. I still wanted to write about AI in games because that's what I really want to work with in the future, and since one of my parts was about waypoints I've been watching a lot of youtube-videos revolving aroung waypoint systems and game AI, and one of them gave me the inspiration that helped me through the rest of May. The video was about the AI in Half Life 2, it's actually a really fun clip, watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DZX-Fq5N0I :D
I thought about it and rethought about it and all this during during the holidays. I started to search for references and everything I could get my hands on and whops! I found Lars Lidén's article about "Strategic and Tactical Reasoning With Waypoints", check it out: http://liden.cc/lars/WEB/Resume/Papers/2002_AIWisdom.pdf
Lidén is talking about how to calculate tactical and strategic positions and ways by using visibility tests between static waypoints.

That was my cure :) I surely had to reread it many times to understand all of it but I was very happy to have chosen the Logics course last year instead of going to the Narration-course, which I had been waiting for for two years! And so I started to write about it and about the analysis and all the background information needed. Ofcourse I had to read a lot of other references but that article became my main source of wisdom. During the following three weeks I woke up very early (8, 9 o'clock, and if you knew me the slightest you would know how early that is to me!) and studied all the time except when rapidly eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, and slept around 5 o'clock. Everyday! Oh I forgot, my mom forced me to take a shower once in a while.

But hey I managed to write an awesome, complete dissertation that even I, who's such a perfectionist, am satisfied with. :D :D
My supervisor must have looked surprised to receive my dissertation because time we talked I had three weeks and still nothing to finish, odds were kind of small to complete anything, whether it be the dissertation or the final project, to be honest.

I was allowed to make my presentation and "defend" it from all the critiques (which only could be done if my work was considered complete), and so did I. The examinator liked it and said it was ambitious and the opponents who critisized it said it was very interesting and well written. Of course I had to fix somethings, for example I was talking about tactics all the time, but never explained what "tactics" or "strategy" was :P I've fixed that and a few more things and now I'm totally satisfied with the paper, I really can't think of more things to add, change or remove from it. I've resent it and am waiting for the degree. Judjing from the initial points I got during the presentation I will get atleast a C, and now I'm excitingly waiting for the final degree - what will I get??? :D

Next blog I'm planning to write about how it went with the final project, but until then: take care!

Discipline ftw!

2010-05-08T14:22:00.000+02:00

Mom's back! Finally! She's been through so many troubles, that she's weaker now than when she left, but I'm so happy she's back - the housewifey version of me has been put on the shelf [NOT] once and for all.

As for the final project, the major changes has been on the level design, we've now got two tutorial levels with colliders, textures and lighting and the first real level is designed and being implemented right now. There are traps (spears traps and steam traps) set and ready to be used. I've become the one handling all interactions with the props and items in the world, and it's very fun, except that there are not a few naughty bugs in the physics implementations.
We now have a somewhat playable tutorial level, but now the real battle begins with the fun factor - we need better guidance for the player. For the real level we also need to make the pace faster by putting in more challenges, and I have to implement the scoreboard! The portals that is supposed to teleport you between rooms is working, but we need to place them in the game. Although it's very simple, it needs to be done. The GUI system is nothing near done, but much of it depends on whether we'll use achievements/collectibles/timers and stuff, and in which level we'll use them, but much of the implementation is done allready.
Our biggest problem right now is to point all undone tasks - which is my duty - and make people work - which should be their own duty! Two students in the team, who tragically are the two of three programmers in the team, seem to have taken vacation or something, they don't answer on email, or when I call or send them an sms. One of them has been like that since the beginning, the second has been like that for a couple of weeks, which really was bad timing since we had a presentation last Wednesday.

But we're still up and running! And I won't quit until I get my PASS on this course (and of course, as good a demo as possible), or die trying. Discipline ftw!

Are you Chilling?

2010-04-22T03:18:00.002+02:00

There's that extremely helpful guy who overheard someone talking in his phone: "Where are you chilling? You don't know the place? Ok, I'll try to find you!", and so he felt the urge to help and started to ask people around "Are you Chilling? No? Excuse me, are you Chilling? Hello, are you Chilling?"
A couple of hours later he found himself being on the beach. "Hi, are you Chilling?" he asked somebody sunbathing, who grinned back and answered "yepp!!". The exhausted man gave him a slap and yelled "Then what are you doing here?! People are looking for you!"

The first (and only) time I heard this joke was in high school, but somehow I remembered it while thinking about myself right now. I'm the producer of our team and have to plan a lot of things, I have important stuff to program, I have the GUI design and implementation to do, the dissertation to work on and the individual projekt to atleast START with. And what am I doing? Chilling!

Things are looking better, I have to admit that. Our level designer seems to be hyped by the fact that he gets to do the tutorial levels too and plan everything - good for him, really. But not all the team members are as optimistic as him and I really can feel the team power meter getting lower and lower. Have to do something!! My fellow programmer have worked her hands off and the designer seems to have given up on this project being fun to play. Our artist feels like hell's upon him and the third programmer in the team... well he disappeared again! He's been doing that all the time, but I thought I had him this time. Even the hands off-programmer tends to hide nowadays. Things that were supposed to be designed this week seems to be unfinished, but according to our plans, this sprint (which lasts until Sunday) is the last production-sprint and there will be no more drastic changes and new inputs. Next Monday it's feature stop!

Yet I'm still chilling. Is that ok? Am I still sane? I hope my optimism is not due to me loosing all my adrenaline. Maybe, my brain is being I Don't Care-ish, but my conscious doesn't get it.
Either way I think our game will be fun to play. I've seen the level design, it's not finished yet but our level designer seems to have some talent hidden under the hoods. At least enough for this project. I like the way he thinks and solve stuff, so I'm leaving that up to him. I myself am trying to get the GUI system up and running, but GUI design is harder than I thought. I'm not aiming at a complex system with lots of stuff to see and chose, but the look and feel of everything is so hard to determine! Why is it so hard to determine where to put a simple little button? Or how it should look. Does it even matter that much? I'll only push it to play the actual game for God's sake!! Am I missing something here? I definitely do, with my over-optimistic attitude and everything...

Let's take a look at another side of my life: my post apocalyptus, aka. after graduation. I have no clue what will happen, and since I'm such a planning freak, it freaks me out even more!!
Thing is, mom can't stand it anymore, she wants to live in our home country, so everyone is working to fulfill that wish. My poor parents have gotten through and sacrificed a lot of things for the sake of protecting us - now is our turn to return the favor! What that has to do with my post apocalyptus? Well, the initial idea was to study here in Sweden, but then mom persuaded me to rest for one year before continuing with the Master's degree. Then my brother persuaded me to go to London and do my Master there (he's living there now). But then mom got very ill and she went to Kuwait and now she refuses to continue living in Sweden. Understandible, I must say. But, now my brother is doing his best to get into business in Kuwait so that he gets a residence permit and buy an appartment or house where he and my parents can live. Eventually they will get an rp too. And now they try to persuade me to study in Kuwait. I can't find any Masters on computer games programming in Kuwait!! What I think that I've decided is to take distance classes while tagging along the family to Kuwait. But now I have to check for which requirements there are on courses to be counted as advanced enough for the Master's degree. With that approach I can manage to put up my own Master! Handy eh? And exhausting... But honestly, regaining harmony into the family spirit is priority #1 right now, so I can end up being anywhere on this lovely planet with neither a school nor a job to go to.

Jee, I'm really talented at WHINING! Gosh, I'll stop. You know what? let's turn this plate over to a better side:
I want to go indie! I think that suits me very well. Flexible, minding my own business, working at my own pace... I can have another job on the side, as long as I get to make my own games. I think it goes great with the post apocalyptus planless days - if there is no work to do, I'll make up work to do!

There are a few persons I already know I'd like to work with. Maybe I'm being naïve now, but I really look forward to work with people overseas, people from other countries, to get a mix of ways of thinking and percepting things. Also, there is atleast one competition I plan to participate in and I hope to find out more. I also plan to do some experiments in my games, I want to compare different styles of programming, different styles of games and even different graphics to see what it provides for the gameplay. I'm sure the answers are obvious but in this way I feel like making the game developing process only more interesting. Come summer and sweep me away!

I'm le tired

2010-04-15T23:35:00.002+02:00

[Note: This was originally written on March 29th but I just realized that I never published it lol]

Two months left and I drag my feet along the time, trying to do my best in everything I'm asked to do. It's been really hectic, these days. Only things we (the programmers) have heard from the other team members are negative things and sarcastic looks and stuff like that, it's so sickening! Yesterday, the other programmer, my best friend, couldn't take it anymore, she was so furious and mad and I could only agree with her. Not only were we beginners in this bransch, in Unity3D and in programming, we don't even have a tutor, someone physically present to show the code to and ask for help from. And all we get is crap. I don't think the others understand how much effort we put into this, how hard we try to make things work. If there's no desirable result, then they consider it as if there wasn't effort enough. I've started to wonder if this is some kind of an intro to my life as a programmer, if I'll be treated like this until I become senior or something.
Today we had a meeting and I could barely hold back my anger. I don't know if I made it clear that I can't take their attitude anymore, but after a while of my bitterness, they seemed to rethink a bit and talk to me with more respect.
I made them show more examples on what they want and told them over and over that they should take into account the team's competence, and that this and that will be hard for us to figure out because we've been trying to solve it for some time.

I really hope things will get better soon. They chose me to be the producer for the rest of the course and even though it made me happy that they believed in me, I knew it only meant more work. What's worse is that I didn't even get as little as a comment from previews producers about how things are going, how they were planning things, and stuff. Our backlogs were so dated and everything was so falling apart in disorder, that I think they chose me as the last producer just to blame everything on me later on.
Oh Jee, I feel the emoness embrace me. No, actually, what they said was that I'm the most administrative one and the group need that right now. I hope I'll be able to fix that part atleast. I'll do my best in everything I'm asked to do.

Using NavMeshes instead of waypoints?

2010-03-09T00:00:00.002+01:00

This gets harder and more complicated the more I read about it. On the other hand it gets clearer and not that magical any more. So to implement path finding in you game, merely path finding won't be enough. You have to translate the calculations into movements, meaning that you have to take into account that the NPC will navigate, hopefully, towards the right direction, and how it navigates, that's the really hard part where many have failed to implement.

I have read a little about waypoints, points that are placed in the environment and act as nodes on a graph, which defines the paths that an NPC may use if told to. One of the issues I'm trying to find a solution to, is how to make an NPC move elegantly enough when crawling on a wall. Yeah, the plan is that we'll have atleast one kind of wall crawling NPC that reaches for the player from a Z-direction (it's a platformer game, with 3D models and some use of the 3D environment). The problem is that the NPC could be anywhere on the wall and will probably crawl diagonally downwards to the player. Since the player is moving, the NPC will probably change direction all the time, due to the A* calculating a new fastest path to the player.
To achieve some kind of elegant navigation, I would have to place waypoints all over the walls, and that would be both computationally expensive and riddiculously unnecessary since the NPC won't use all of the waypoints.

Today I came across a very interesting article about using a navigation mesh instead, which seems so much more convenient, especially for 3D environments and for the wall crawling NPCs. One of the first questions that popped into my head had apparently allready been answered:
"But isn't it slower to do pathfinding on a navigation mesh?

Not at all. A navigation mesh is a graph, just like a waypoint graph is, and the core pathfinding routines are very similar. The difference is that a navigation mesh has a polygon associated with each graph node."

Navigation meshes have much more pros when compared to waypoints, and seems to be the better way for using path finding in games. I don't know when it began to be used, but although this article was written in 2008, a lot of games still use waypoints. I don't know if it's due to waypoints being more convenient for them or due to unawareness of navMeshes, so I need to read a lot more about this.

What's more to take into account is, how this will affect the collision. There're collision meshes especially for collision, and even if it's possible to use them for the path finding it's really not recommended. I won't pretend I know everything, but from what PaulT (the writer of that article) is saying about collMeshes, I get the picture that we'd be better off using simple waypoints.

And lastly but maybe the most importantly: how advanced is this? Am I diving too deep now? Will I even get this done in time? I tend to be naïvely positive about everything, which often makes it very hard to put my plans into effect.

Last week, one of my teachers lended me a book called AI Game Programming Wisdom, by Steve Rabin. I have to say that it's an awesome book! Totally worth every crown (well I do live in Sweden). There is a lot to read about path finding, especially A*, in this book, and there's at least one section/chapter about navigation meshes. More about important information sources in a later blog, but I hope to get a bit wiser after reading this book.

Path finding: One for all and more for me

2010-03-01T21:28:00.000+01:00

Somewhere between New Year and School start, I and my friend realized that our plans for building and programming two robots with path finding and simultaneously work with the final project to make a game were waaaay too unrealistic due to time press and resources. So we've been trying to find a new subject, that is more related to our project, to write about.

In the final project, my part right now is taking care of the NPC's AI (non player character's artificial intelligence) (say that five times!). It's very difficult, that's one thing I've learnt so far. I have huge problems finding good resources and tutorials, so I've been struggling like hell with it. We're doing the scripting in C#, I use the VC# Express to edit, since Visual Studio is awesome aaaand you can integrate it with the Unity3D game engine, which we use for the game development as I've mentioned before. (If you happen to know good AI tuts, or can point me at the right direction, please share the information!)

I've been waiting for help and some tutoring for like two months now and I keep asking the teacher who's responsible for our course when to get us a tutor, but everyone's so busy and everything is so chaotic, there's no one to ask for help yet. I can't imagine why the teacher didn't find tutors during the previous semester, it really bothers me.

But enough about complaining!

Individual Project
To get an A or a B in the final project, we're supposed to focus on something specific and write/blog about the process of learning more about that specific thing, making an individual project out of it. I've decided to focus on the NPC's path finding, and I want to implement the A* algorithm to our NPCs, which will behave differently while chasing the player. Quite a task for me, imo!
The good thing is, I've implemented the Dijkstra's algorithm some year ago, in Java, so I have a clue on what it should look like and what to expect.

... so to wrap it up, we've been thinking about what to write about for our thesis, and at last I had enough and told my friend that we should write about path finding. She was worried about me doing all the work, since I'm the one responsible for the AI in the game, but that's the thing - I'm going to do all the work anyway, she could help me research and write the thesis, I've come to dislike such academic writing for some reason. So I've written a promemoria and sent it to the teacher and he thinks it's a great subject to write about!
And now, the real battle begins!

How did we end up with C#?

2010-02-09T00:19:00.004+01:00

Hell with it all! Right now I'm so frustrated! But not extremely frustrated, so it's aaall cool.
We've began the new course, working in project and making a game. Our idea is awesome, but that doesn't matter right now. I want to talk about Unity! I feel disabled :'O
I know nothing about Unity, except that it's alot of drag and drop and stuff, and it's a graphical editor, where you use scripting, not classes like decent people taught us to do. Oh, it's asset-centered, meaning that it's the object that is focused on, and then you make scripts and attach them to it. Instead of code-centered were you connect all the code together, independently from the assets.
And somehow along the way we chose to use C# - you may either script in C# or JavaScript - but it appeared, no, we allready knew, that all the tutorials and stuff were written in JavaScript. Oh did I mention that none of us have worked in C# before? Well, none of us have worked with C# before. Sure, we understand it because it's very close to C++ and Java (not that we know those languages well enough...), but that doesn't mean we can use it! So stupid! We should have gone with JS. How did we chose C#? Oh yeah we had a fight about the decision to use Unity, and not try XNA out a bit more, and then there was a moment like:
- Fine!!
- Fine!!
- What will we use?? C#??
- Yes!!
- Fine!!

Or something like that...

And now I need to make a damned state machine for the monsters, in Unity, using C#, and I have to be done by the end of the week. Damn it, damn it, damn it!

A couple of weeks ago mom went to Q8, to recover and stuff, her doctor was like "She have to leave this place! NOW!"Obviously she's suffering from depression and stress and is totally worn out. Poor mom. Both she and my older sister are in Q8 now, leaving me, my little sisters and my dad "alone" here buhu T_T
Well, accepting it all I soon enough turned into some kind of housewifey student to cover up for them. Now, my doggy little sister is 18 yrs, one would think that she'd help out but I expect more help from the devil! She comes home by 6.30 pm, excusing herself with her most frequently used phrase "I don't feel like doing that right now."
God in Heaven just let me slap her once. But she's too scary, if you say something she'll let loose hell on you. Not even my mom or dad can handle her anymore, she's like a freak gone mad! My parents should send her to the army!

My other sis, the youngest one of us, is 9 yrs old and well-mannered. But her voice tends to cut through my eardrums, leaving me with tinnitus and headache all day long. Sometimes I don't even notice her speaking (e.g. when I'm concentrating on my work) but I suddenly feel nautious and hear some strong *peeeeeep* inside my ear. "What is that? You? What do you want?" and when I ask her that, that's when she begins talking for real, you know with tea and cake and the whole "let's play Barbie" kind of atmosphere. It knocks me down. Everytime.
I try to be nice to her, really, since she seems to be very attached to me, drawing manga and stuff. Especially now when mom and big sis aren't around, I have to take care of her. So I try to do my best, but it's exhausting, I've even thought of dropping out of school for a while and take care of the home. I've discovered that it's not that bad. I can still do my programming, watch anime, draw manga and play the piano even more. I can actually play video games - I haven't played for a while, except for those 10 mins freaky spells of play I forced myself to have a week ago (I bought Splinter Cell and Wild Arms 3).

Where were we? Right: damn it, damn it, damn it. I spent three hours on goofing aroung, reading a bit here and a bit there about things I don't even remember... and writing this blog. Mom says I have to stop being a retard. I must be more efficient. I can't say she's wrong but waaaah what am I to do? xO (oh gosh this font sucks!) Allright, I start with efficiently watching a pair of anime episodes and taking an efficient nap. Then we'll talk!

Darn good SDL Tutorials!

2010-01-05T23:32:00.001+01:00

You know the feeling of being dizzy and nautious and you just had, say, a fever? You walk around your little appartment with a smelly sweater which is too cozy to change.
But suddenly! Someone noisy and energetic rings your doorbell and burst into your death hole and drags you to the bathroom and fearcely dips your head into a fresh mint and citrus smelling bucket of water. Of course it's ice cold. What do you do???

I craved for more of that near-love experience!!! x'''D At least mentally, because that's how Mr. Tim Jones's tutorials felt like when I began with them! I was so anxious about failing to understand and program in C++ and not to mention SDL. Oh I can say that I had to retake a course because I couldn't manage to write a 2D game in SDL :(

A week ago I sat down, furious at myself and everything around me (my desk, my cup of coffee, my baby sister in one corner of the room...everything) and I googled on C++ SDL tutorials games. I started clicking and felt how releaf started to fill my body as I read some tutorials. I decided to start with Dev Hub's SDL tutorials as they felt more noob-friendly and the site was user friendly. I checked both SDL and basic C++ tutorials, and decided to go with SDL directly because they were very similar to my lecturer's examples.

Yes, some parts were exactly like my lecturer's examples during the lectures, but oh my God how easy it was to follow and actually understand what Tim was saying!! *____* During this week I've learnt so much so much so much I could cry out of joy!

So I highly recommend all beginners in C++/SDL to start with Tim's tutorials!! Read them, follow them and make a Donation to Mr. Tim for his hard work and generosity!! (ò_ó)/) You won't get served with silver plates like this often!

Even a retarded person like me understood them, and I made a nice Tic Tac Toe! ;D Of course I'll continue with the tutorials myself but after doing 4 of them I felt the urge to blog about it :P Oh and I will also try out other programming sites and make a list of those I find the best/most suitable. This will help both you and me to get ready, set and go with our projects! ^_____^ (hihihi anyone checked out the contest at NeoGaf?)

Now it doesn't seem impossible for me to make a 2D game for an assignment with a deadline in 15th of January. I'll do the other tutorials on animation, maps and collision (YAY!) and by the end of this week I should be ready to start with my assignment.

If you happen to know how to create applications/exe-files out from VC++ projects, please tell me/link, so that I can make my "games" into applications and let people try them out! :)

My First Blog 2010

2010-01-01T22:28:00.001+01:00

So folks!
A new year, a new decennium... What are your promises, your wishes, your sacrifices and your plans this year?

I have been waiting so long for this year to come, because I'll finish school and.. (see?) I'm still used to say "school" even though I'm a graduate student x) If all goes well, I'll receive my Bachelor's degree this summer!

This means a lot of changes to come, it really is scary, so scary I can't decide what to do and what to expect. All my life I've been relying on going to school. Sure, I have worked during a couple of summers and stuff, but this year it's for real! I guess it's called "starting a carreer". Scary! Do I know enough to do my work? Do I have the proper attitude towards other people? Will I be accepted as I am? Am I prepared for getting a real job??? OMG Where would be suitable for me to work and do they even recruite noobs like me or should I just go commite suicide?

*calming down*

My first blog this year and I'm freaking out. Good start for my new plans. (What plans?)

But let's NOT call them plans then.

But I have made some promises:

¤ MORE PROGRAMMING - as a programmer, I suck! My goal is to graduate in June, without sucking in programming! X(

¤ Less stress! - I stress a lot and sleep a little, and I want to get rid of that! Even though someone told me I was born programmer because of that xD

¤ More drawing - I love drawing and I know I can get much better. If I only spent more time drawing. I need to organize my time MUCH better! Yes, that should be included too!

¤ Organize time better - Or maybe I should say: Organize time. Hopefully I'll get to the "better"-part soon enough.

¤ Play more games - I don't play games often. And ironically, since I began study game development I've been playing even less than my sister who's a researcher on Rheumatology -.-' (I AM ashamed)

¤ Be nicer to my family - that's a kind of secret one. Everyone is talking about how smiling makes your life longer and "love the ones who loves you" and stuff. I DO love them. I really do. But I'm not gonna fake any smiles or pretend I'm not irritated by their mistakes. This year I'll try NOT to get irritated. People DO mistakes. And I'll try to appreciate my family more. Then I won't have to fake any smiles.

Sadly, the last one seems the hardest one of them T_T

Happy New Year To You All!

Saving Private Lego?

2009-12-10T00:36:00.001+01:00

And lastly we put words on an idea that our teacher suggested to our thesis!

Shortly put, it's about two Mindstorm Lego Robots that co-op to get an object (or more) out of a labyrinth. The first goes in and puts lego pieces as a trace mark.
When finding the goal, it sends signals to the other robot to come, the other robot follows the trace of lego pieces, gets there and brings the first robot back. Since Robot #1 is carrying the object, Robot #2 will have to carry the lego pieces on their way back to the start point, and put them in some sort of holder.
It all sounds like Saving Private Ryan. I like it.

The programming language we're planning to use is LeJOS. There are other alternatives, like RobotC, pbLua and BrickOS, but we felt going safe and use LeJOS - it's based on Java, which is the language we're most familiar with.
RobotC gets a lot of credz, but it's C-based and that scares me off. I started with C++ directly. Oh, good, because BrichOS uses that. Well... I'm not THAT good in C++, even though I want it to be my major programming language in the future.
And pbLua is based - as most of you have guessed - on Lua! Nope, we haven't studied that script language.

Besides, Java IS fun and according to Wiki and some other sites, LeJOS have a plug-in for Eclipse and guess what: we have worked in Eclipse before! *banzai*

There are more information on these and other programming langauges on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT#Programming
This fellow had the same problem and chose LeJOS as well, but it's interesting to read the comments: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/664615/lego-mindstorms-programming-which-language-ide-do-you-use-recommend
And this one has a table on the languages' attributes: http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html

Hopefully I made the right choise here. If you know of other helpful sites, especially on LeJOS and programming languages that uses C++ (like BrickOS), please feel free to drop a comment about that.

And now the real work begins. I think I'll get a hell of a new year, planning both thesis and a game project, making games in both Java and C++. I don't know if I'll manage, but I'm so glad that all of it sounds exciting, or I'd be dead by now.

/Kweiko

Director-problems solved, thesis-problem next!

2009-12-08T23:37:00.001+01:00

Jahoo!
I know you won't believe this but we actually got a [pass] on our Director-assignment! Well, I don't believe this! We didn't even fullfill all the criterias! And there were only three of them!

Well, we did a lot of cool stuff that never worked anyway, but he (the tutor) saw how much we tried to get things done. I guess the result is not all that matters. The way to get there was a pain in the *piip*!

Mondai ga aru! I have a problem!
I and my friend will soon start with our thesis for the Bachelor's Degree. "ooh" you say? Well, we don't know what to write about!
The thing is, we have a pair of the latest Mindstorm robots that we thought would be fun to work with. But every single idea has been rejected because it seems too difficult/wide. We need something narrow, yet fun, yet "important", you know, something that could be more motivated than merely "because we liked the idea!".
And now we're still thinking. The funny thing is that we're both game development students but we're thinking robotics here.
I confess. It was my idea. I've always liked robots.
So yeah. We're stuck with robots and no plan. T_T

I am seriously thinking of forgetting about the robots and just go for a plain game or something. But I really like the idea of programming a robot X(
Hëlp hëlp!

Director is NOT fun!

2009-10-03T22:12:00.001+02:00

And so a new year has started. My last year before getting a bachelor's degree in Computer System Science with specialization in Computer Game Development!! (\(^___^)/)

We started off with having a programming course, where we'd build a project team and make a game demo, which I and my friends really looked forward to. We teamed up with three more and became seven members, four programmers and three graphic artists. I (one of the programmers) was elected to be the project leader and we started with the design of the game, schedule, deadlines, rules and guidlines.

When we started to program in Adobe Director, using the script language Lingo, we all got reminded of how to get pissed off properly - nothing worked fine and we all felt like helpless beginners, totally lost! It was even worse than when we began to learn C++ by handling a game engine!!
Fortunately we got a lot of help from the tutor, but it took a long time to understand how Director works, with scripts instead of classes, and score and cast and everything... Four weeks have past and we've become happily wiser, but we've all agreed never to work on Director unless we really had no other choice.

In the seminar last Friday someone recommended Unity3D, another environment that's best suited for game programmers. Maybe I'll test it someday, if I don't get a phobia for everything that remind me of Director, that is.

For now, we still have two weeks left to work on our game demo, so we'll have to bear with it. X( But, [almost] everyone in the group are hard workers, we'll manage well! ;)

Coloring and shadowing in Photoshop

2009-08-19T19:58:00.001+02:00

More than a month ago a girl made a tutorial on how to colour in Photoshop. An extremely basic tutorial, nothing advanced - just my level, that is. I began to colour a piece of a manga page and it became quite... coloured. o.O

Then I went to Q8 and yada yada I came back. I asked whether there are any tutorials on shadowing, since I suck at it and 6 days later the same girl upload a tutorial on that, made by her because she didn't find any proper tutorials. She's the sweetest! It's a very handy tutorial with great tips about how to use the tools and the benefit of duplicating the layers when working with them and stuff.

Anyway, I'm trying to follow and I was almost done but suddenly photoshop dropped dead, I fell a few steps backwards. Luckily I've learnt my lesson long ago and do save often ^^

Whenever I'm done I'll upload my "piece of art" here.

Please feel free to comment, and if you have any tips please share!

Take care

/Kweiko

Entering The Stage

2009-08-12T05:07:00.001+02:00

I'm so bad at keeping this up, maybe it's due to me being both lazy and busy - there're always things to get done.

My previous blog was too complicated so I quit writing for a long while - of coarse due to me being busy. Now I'll try this blog to see how well it suits someone like me - from what I've seen, this may be a good blogsite for me (it's google stuff, after all) so I'll try to update it often, at least for the sake of getting my memories and thoughts written down somewhere.

Yes, Welcome to my world! Have a seat and enjoy, but mind your time - you might forget about that while being fascinated by me! ;)

Take care
/Kweiko