Recently on the Women in Games (WiG) blog, Emma Westecott wrote up a post about needing a student blogger for two events, I'd say I jumped at the chance of it, although I had forgotten until last minute before the deadline to actually send my email I had composed. All because I'd been super busy with moving house the same weekend.

So I rushed to McDonalds to use their free Wi-Fi (pretty much the only place in Aldershot with free Wi-Fi), as I'm currently without the internet.

A couple of days later I heard back from Emma telling me I'd been chosen, which I'm ecstatic and completely blown away by, I never would have thought I would be picked for it, but then I don't really know how many people tried to get the little job.

Either way it now means that I get to go to Develop and DiGRA, which I am very happy about, as I originally intended on buying myself a ticket for Develop, and without much money at the moment it may have made living a problem and DiGRA I could have only afforded once I had a job.

So keep an eye on the WiG blog as hopefully there shall be some posts up by me soon.

Huge thanks though to everyone that had to do with me being picked as well.

So it’s finally come to the end of my three years at University and I happily have come out with a nice first like I posted about before. Now my life begins, I’ve moved to Aldershot, Hampshire, as opposed to going back to Chelmsford, Essex, as I felt I would be less productive if I lived at home.

So why Aldershot I hear you ask?

Well it’s not as expensive as Guildford, Surrey (a key place in the games industry, plus close to London and home) but it’s just down the road, and close to London, along with everywhere else that Guildford is close to, just add or subtract around 20-30 minutes on top of travel time when going in certain directions.

I will honestly miss Newport, but there was no real reason to stay in Wales, so I had to leave. Unpacking is almost complete give it another day maybe to get everything nice and neat and tidy. I also need to finish work on Void, send out more CVs and get my business cards designed, coloured and printed all before Develop, which should be interesting.

Well it's finally happened, three years have passed and I have now finished University, (I don't actually get my official degree until September though).

I passed with a first which I am extremely happy about, I guess my hard work paid off in the end, I wish I has pushed myself a little harder at times, but I now know how well I can work thanks to Void.

Void is getting close to completetion which is great, got a couple more games lined up to be doing once Void is out the way. Which will be done alongside applying to games industry jobs.

I shall post up my CV on here soon, and it'll be on my website too.

Other than that congratulations to everyone in my year of Computer Games Design for their grades, and everyone else at Newport, I'm sure I'm really going to miss Newport, made a lot of friends here.

Onwards to Aldershot.

My blog has been a little quiet as of recent, due to a large amount of time being spent on Void, but with that almost being finished I thought I'd do a quick little entry on my graduate show, or at least share a few pictures.
It was a very successful graduate show, loads of people came, we had lovely homemade food, great music and of course lovely people. The pictures are from the opening night, but we were there every other day too to make sure people could play the games.

Well the title is kind of a lie, as it's not a new website, it's a modified website, either way my website is now very different and much better from before.

It now features a welcome which changes dependant on the time of day, along with changing images! Plus a twitter feed too.

Oh and you can visit it here the name of the website is simply catmoo.co.uk

Finally in my third year of University I managed to get a place at the Blitz Open days this year, this is partially thanks to my group for us pulling together such an interesting game.

Anyway so on the 13th of March I had the pleasure to head down to Leamington Spa to attend the open day, instead I popped down the day before to have a look about Leamington, which I must say seemed like a lovely place.

I stayed at the travel lodge in Leamington Spa (which I must say was the oldest hotel I had stayed in to date) and it was amazing, the image below is a stained glass window on the first flight of stairs. Then there was a mirror the height of a wall on the first floor. Was a bit of a shame though, as the building was old there was the hugest gap under my door letting in lots of cold.

On the open day we sat in various presentations combined with a tour and one to one sessions with our chosen area of games development.

The day was all-round great and the best part has to of been going to the pub with various Blitz people, plus the three other games designers that stuck out with me, and especially liking the the few Blitz guys who stayed out still 1ish with us.

I would recommend the open days to anyone needing an insight into the industry, especially if they haven't been to any companies before, as a lot of the people attending the open day were surprised with what they saw. Was interesting as the company seems to be structured like most others, with the exception of having so many divisions, which made more sense to me if other companies did that too.

Was nice to see people I had previously met before from Blitz, or others that attended Newport University, shame I was the only one attending the day from Newport though.

Well as I mentioned in a previous post about my graduate show I recently ordered some stickers and our invitations off of moo.com.

The only real shame about the stickers that moo.com prints is that they are square stickers, so what I'm going to do, as square stickers are a little boring is cut them out, similar to Jon Burgerman's stickers.

And here are our stickers!

So that's the stickers and here is the more important part of what was printed by moo.com

If you receive one of these invites, think yourself very lucky to have been invited to our graduate show . Now we just have to get the posters printed and the advertising and invitational side is all sorted, can't wait to see how the show goes in the end.

I shall also be getting mini cards printed off Moo.com very soon, I was going to do it at the same time, but the stickers and postcards came to a fair bit including postage .

Don't forget you can also check out our graduate show's website here

After finding out we will be able to get changeable characters in our game, thanks to our programmer. The heavy character got rigged quickly so that animating could start being carried out.

Below is a video showing the controls of the rig with its texture applied.

As you can see his rig is quite similar to the neutral character, with the slight changes being a fat control on his tummy and no face control. Caryn is now busy animating him so expect some animations on here soon.

We have recently jumped a huge step in our game, mainly because our programmer Rachel Cordone sent us some script which allows us to have changeable characters from trigger points. Below is a small video just showing what it allows us to do.

It is currently using the unreal defaults, but we are getting our characters in at this present time with her help. Although as you should be able to see with the run through that each character that the test changes to has their own speed and abilities.

The first character can run very fast and jump, where as the second character cannot jump and is much slower, and then the third character is even slower and cannot jump either.
It is just amazing what she has given us, as without her we may have been in a bit of a sticky situation.

Over a month ago now at University we had the lovely Lawrence Philips come in and give a quick talk on SK Gaming, and the joys of competitive gaming. From this he wanted some writers for a new consoles section that was appearing on the site.

I was very eager to help as I've written for websites before, but none that that receive as many visitors that SK do.

I have of course been quite busy with my final year project, along with Lash La Rue, my dissertation and having to work. But I finally wrote my first article for SK gaming.

Following the announcement of Max Payne 3 being in development by Rockstar Games I felt it to be quite fit to write up a news entry on it, not only being a console game, but while the Max Payne series are a very well known string of PC games.

Being quite sad I took a screenshot of my entry on the website on the front page, I was quite happy with it and only look forward to writing more for SK, I'm constantly trawling the internet for interesting articles to post up.