I make games and toys for the web, Mac OS X and iOS. I'm also an illustrator and looking for QA or Art/Design work in the games industry.
This tumblr will only cover screens and dev updates. My personal blog and other creative projects are elsewhere.
Personal Tumblr
Mixelmagic.com - Stuff I Made
MFDawes - Graphics / Art Portfolio
CreepingMeOut - Webcomic
This is a strange one, and I guess somewhat of a warning to anyone without smoke alarms. :/
Kat’s Macbook went up in smoke last night, obviously it was the battery, but the laptop was by the bed and almost set fire to a laundry basket next to it. (melted a hole through that) It wasn’t plugged in.
Thankfully Elizabeth slept through the whole incident. Kat woke up because the room had filled with horrid chemical smoke. She got it to the bathroom burning her fingers slightly, then I got it outside on concrete before it made its final dramatic death throes (pooofff… fizzle) but it was smoking like crazy the whole time and ridiculously hot. The smell really lingers too.
The weird part though is this wasn’t the original battery, it was a replacement from a couple of years ago, well after the recall.. and I’m pretty sure that I checked that it wasn’t one of the recalled S/Ns. I can’t find any definitive list/explanation of which A1185 were recalled though which is frustrating me! The laptop had been treated well, there haven’t been any sudden impacts or unusual events in its entire lifespan. The battery was holding a charge fine and hadn’t swollen or shown any signs of wear… Until it blew up.
Obviously we’re all a bit shocked.. So glad it didn’t do any real harm.. Strangely I think the HDD might still work. it’s a bit black in places but didn’t melt like much of the rest of the machine. Sort of funny how the touchpad fused with the screen. Ugh.
Thought this was relevant to both sets of my watchers. Laptops - watch out!
Next week is MineCon week. That means we’ll release the full version of Minecraft (which will be called “Minecraft”, and have a version number of 1.0. The current version is “Minecraft Beta”). We’ll keep working on Minecraft for a long time after the full release, but it’s a huge milestone.
That…
It will get great scores! As long as everything doesn’t have to be worked out by checking wiki pages at least. :) I’d consider that a bit of a game-breaker traditionally, but I’m sure you have it covered. (ive been purposely avoiding some prerelease info to shock myself!)
I didn’t really keep an up to date blog of my time at university, and the experiences would’ve been jumbled and confusing anyway. Looking back at that time it’s become increasingly clear how much I miss working there. I think we all knew we would but the reasons are a bit different to what I’d expected.
I got a lot of useful advise and support from students and tutors, and working among a group of people creatively (however distracted we could get) to external deadlines really helped get things done. A lot of the projects were actually pretty interesting and I’ll blog about them retroactively soon, I think.
I’ll be putting those Game Design related posts on my GD tumblr (mixelmagic) so don’t follow that if you aren’t interested. I wish Tumblr had a better system for managing multiple blogs, I don’t like reblogging myself.
Not enough to stop me from doing it though.
Back in uni our group of intrepid games designers were working on a FPS we called “Get Stuffed” .. I’ve been wondering what it would be like if the tone was darker. Something like this. It’s fun working on projects years past their deadlines.
Wrote an article for GameBlob about the ill-fated PS3 game LAIR - and dragon combat games in general. Decided to mock up what a modern equivalent of “Dragon Strike” might look like. Eventually I’ll do a series of these and work some to be better than thumbnail quality, i like the dynamic perspective.. Never thought to draw much in a simulated 1st person view before.
Click-through to read the article, if you’re interested.
I have a personal tumblr too, which is more likely to have pictures posted to it.. It’s going to be more a personal blog and frequent comic sketch dump.
http://creeping-me-out.tumblr.com
Tumblr really should let us switch primary accounts as it’d make a lot more sense for that one to be my primary. :( This one is for dev stuff, but I can’t do anything about it!
So, working on something predominantly for children has meant I’ve had to think a lot about what might be scary to kids. It’s difficult! I remember when I was young (admittedly older than pre-school age) really strange things got to me.
Ellie, my two year old daughter isn’t scared by pictures of anything she’s seen to my knowledge - but she can’t stand the vacuum cleaner.. Just the threat of turning one on can make her really upset.
But I’m making an ABC application focussed on creepy stuff. How can I be sure I’m not going to upset someone? Aside from the concern for children there’s also all sorts of potential religious pitfalls to avoid. Witches might offend some pagans/wiccans/etc.. Devils might offend Christians.
At what point do you have to self moderate? Witch and devil imagery is everywhere around halloween time.. Who knows!
Anyway, here’s a preview of some of the new (not quite finished) friends, I’m particularly concerned about the gargoyle.. Is he going to be too scary?
1.1 is still on its way and will be uploaded for Apple review by the end of the week.
Okay! New to the whole tumblr thing. I’ve had years using Blosxom, LiveJournal and lately Wordpress. This seems a lot simpler.
Anyway, Mixelmagic is the team name/moniker I use for game development now. If you look in the itunes store for it you’ll find my first title; Spooky School ABCs!
I wanted a simple development log separate from my other sites so the info doesn’t get lost among the comics, family updates and general silliness. This is it!
Expect news on Spooky School’s first update soon.
Very strange.
Lets see what happens when I post this, woo!
