Well the Lash La Rue team had their first meeting today, we went over many things, including the large amount of work that needs to be done in order to have it at a finished state.

I have allocated myself the tasks of

• Design document
• Squirrel and Duck interactions defined
• Chosen level destinations
• NPCs
• Asset list
• Scale chart
• Level designs
• Menu screen
• How to screen
• Backgrounds for each level - day/dusk/night (TBC)
• Character animations
• Other characters
• Assets
• Foreground
• Images from holidays
• Profile images
• Cutscenes for the ends
• Finish screens

Of all that work I set myself the task of the more design based work, so it can all be sorted before going into the more art based side of things.

So for a deadline of two weeks I will be doing:

• Design document
• Squirrel and Duck interactions
• Destinations
• NPCs
• Asset list
• Scale chart
• Level designs

As long as my dissertation and Void don't take up too much time I may be able to get some Lash La Rue work done.

So I thought I'd do another Jon Burgerman related blog entry, this time round showing off my anxiety wall image I got. Although I was a little pissed off with it as it had been raining the day it came in the post and obviously my postman couldn't care for what he was delivering and he got it all wet.

I really love it, and at the exhibit they looked amazing all spread out on the wall, must say though I was at heart hoping for the Mario Kart one!

Since then I've also gotten his book, and I must say I had no idea that Jon designed a level for Wipeout Pure. Also that I was a little disappointed because of the lack of Game On imagery in it. I am quite fond of the book cover without the poster.

I also got myself one of his new Dunnys which I must say is lovely, I really like the pastel like colours on him, makes me think of Pete Fowler god knows why though, anyway I got a cute doodle on the box too, which seems to of gotten a little smudged at some point. I was almost tempted to not take it out the box, but a day later I decided I would anyway.

I also added Jon on Twitter the other day, and shortly after doing so received a message saying he'd popped my photo of my coloured in birthday card on his site, hoping I didn't mind. And of course I don't but I've been promised a doodle for it, which is amazing, and I hope to get him to doodle on my netbook at some point, because that would look beyond spectacular. I just wish he did less abroad at the moment and did more stuff in the lovely old UK, perhaps something in Wales too!

I am now a very proud owner of a Dell Inspiron Mini 9, I had for a while wanted a little netbook, mainly because everything else I've ever owned portable computer wise has been really heavy. And to be honest if I ever want to go back home, round my boyfriends or go to a convention or conference, it's not fun lugging around something that weighs 2kg+, along with of course everything else I need.

A while ago, we're talking months and months ago, before Dell actually sold the mini 9's my boyfriend sent me this image, and at first I thought it looked silly, as why would a computer be so small.

But then after lugging around heavy stuff for so long it made me realise that something like that would really be beneficial to me.

So far I've used mine as my notes for a presentation, and just to be able to do work at university without having to bring in my large bag to carry a bigger computer in. Instead I can carry it in a small bag I own for example this one.

Which I bought from the wonderful Spun Out store in Northampton, and I can actually fit in, along with little bits and bobs, my mini 9, my journal for writing and a couple of small books (that was its contents on Tuesday anyway).

Here's a little picture of my cute new toy as I've put it in the title, I've currently got it running the beta of Windows 7, which is lovely and way better than Vista. It runs so fast on it, and it's also very quiet which freaks me out when it boots up.

But yes, I recommend people to get a little netbook if you're tired of lugging around a big bag (and don't want to use a smartphone or PDA as a portable computer) and want something small and cute to fit in a little bag. I do recommend getting a netbook that has an SSD hard drive though, just as it makes a netbook better than your average laptop.

Also if you do decide on getting one, I recommend having one of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD players as it came in handy for installing things, or of course just an external disc drive. I also bought a 16gb SDHC card for it, which works as another hard drive really. And don't forget even though it only has in my case a 16gb SSD hard drive external hard drives, networks and USB sticks are your friends.

It also acts a nice thing for playing point and click adventure games on as they are of course perfect games in my eyes for while your travelling, and just so people know they can actually run WoW, as I had my boyfriend round the other day and he got it working, was a little slow though. Good thing with the Dell mini's though is if you wanted to upgrade it you can. He's just purchased one, and more RAM and a 32gb SSD, just means he has to put them in himself. But it will of course run WoW better for if you want to do that.

It has a really nice screen, although it doesn't really do it justice in my image.

And just to show how small and cute it is, here we have my "mini kitty" as it's called with my DS, just to show how nice and small it is. Now if Dell actually did full on different colours like the Eee pc netbooks, I would go out and get a red one that would match my DS. But Dell only change shells, so I'd only have a different colour top. I would actually pay more to get one completely in one colour keyboard and all, but I don't think any company does that.

It's shiny top is just waiting for a Jon Burgerman doodle now I would stick stickers on it, but a doodle in a black pen would look so much better, here's to waiting for that day.

Dear Readers,

As well as reading about the work I produce for the Void game on this blog, the group I am a part of also have a collaborative blog for every piece of work produced to be published on. As reading it from my blog it's quite one sided as I will tend to only post up my work.

I am currently putting up most items on the blog, but I am sure other team members will contribute over time. Either way it's a place for everybody's work to be shown together, which fills in all the pieces our individual blogs are in some cases missing.

On the blog at the moment there is all the pre-production work that has been produced up until now, and there will hopefully soon be images from the production phase as well.

You can find the blog at http://voidthegame.blogspot.com.

Thanks for reading my blog, feel free to visit every now and again.

Catherine.

Ok we have started on the production stage of the game, one part which I'm sure the majority of the group has really been looking forward to. I must say I am really looking forward to seeing all our work envisioned into an actual playable space, especially the orange pads from The Anemone Sea as I really love the design of them.

Well I plan to start off white boxing in the mechanics with Andy, while also rigging the main character and doing a bit of modelling on the side perhaps.

Really to be honest though I don't mind what work I do on the project as I'm always willing to give everything a go.

I'm currently trying to come up with a plan of how we should space out the production of our work, although I feel the whole group needs to go over this plan so we can all decided what time is needed for what. Although in the mean time I've put together a quick planner for us to use and stick up in either E8 or H2 at university.

Our deadline is around the start of May, along with us all having to finish and hand-in our dissertations in March as well. I think as long as we put our minds to it, it can be achieved, especially after taking part in the Global Game Jam and seeing what was produced in just two days.

Although i have been devoting more of my time to my dissertation recently so that I can get it out of the way, but that does mean I'll be able to use my time just on working on Void once the dissertation is out of the way, as opposed to worrying about both of them at the same time.

This Friday just passed marked an event called Global Game Jam, of which I took part in. Originally I wasn't going to, as I have enough work of my own to be doing for my third year project, but Charlotte convinced me to go with her and Tim.

Global Game Jam was an event where people all over the world, I think just over 2000 in total maybe, all get into groups and attempt to make games in 48 hours. We started on Friday the 30th at 5pm and then finished on Sunday the 1st at 3pm.

After pitching ideas and everything we all started working on our games, so by about maybe 6/7ish we had started designing stuff, in my groups case I was designing the characters.

We were called Super Cute Animal Attack, our group compromised of myself, Charlotte (my twin sister) and Tim (her boyfriend), Tim graduated from the Games and AI course at Newport, and Charlotte is a film student wanting to get into the games industry, and I of course am a Games Design student wanting to also get a job in the industry.

Our idea we went with in the end was firstly titled "Mmmm" which was a game about the relationship between a Cajun squirrel and a Mexican duck and having to make their way through an area, which was slowly being destroyed by a giant robot koala, think the boss in Dynamite Headdy right near the start, not the cat though. We had a few constraints to the game these being the following:

• A play session must last 5 minutes or less
• Theme: As long as we have each other we will never run out of problems
• Choose an adjective: in-between, rushed or growing

The game evolved over time, including the title of it being changed.

After 48 hours we came up with "Lash La Rue on holiday featuring Juan the duck"

The developed story of the game is:

Best of Friends Lash La Rue and Juan the Duck are travelling the world together. But everyone has their own problems, proud of his culture Juan never leaves behind his poncho, and therefore cannot fly. Lash La Rue on the other hand, is terrified of the water, together they will successfully tour the world's jungles, deserts, wetlands and mountains, and they both know that if they didn't have each other they would get nowhere.
Although, having their own busy lives, the two only booked out a certain amount of holiday for their world tour, with only a fortnight's travel to go, they must be as quick as possible if they want to visit all fourteen destinations before they close, and if they don't work together, they'll only spend their whole holiday arguing

For submission we were asked to submit a press image for our game, ours is particularly nice as we managed to get David Surman to draw the main image for us, the smaller drawn image is also done by Bill Kavanagh (as photos are a big part of the game, this is down to the fact that memories are best kept in photos, in the finished game the two below drawn images will be shown during play, along with others showing the two friends working together).

You can play a copy of the game from here on the Global Game Jam website, you can also view all the other games made in Newport and also all over the world.

As you can tell from the game, it is in a quite unfinished state, but we intend on finishing the game with a bit of our free time, in fact I have already started on a new splash screen along with the instructions page, which will nicely fit in with the concept behind the idea.

A few bugs which are quite noticeable, which I will point out are:

• The animations are running too fast as we didn't have time to change them.
• There are no assets in the foreground as we didn't have time to add them
• The squirrels can't swim sign is too big, we didn't have time to resize it, although I feel it looks nice large, just it needs to look better.
• The game doesn't really end
• The squirrel can walk on water, it was hard to figure out how to stop him from doing it, so it never got finished
• The parallax scrolling on the background and foreground didn't work
• We didn't have time to put any other characters in the background which would help populate the space
• We didn't put in a little orange tree, along with an orange that fell
• We had to cut out about half the level as it didn't all work properly
• The duck gets a little stuck after diving in the water
• They both turn at the same time
• Plus many more

As you can see from the items I've listed we realise that there are a few problems, but they will get ironed out and then a newer build will be posted up, the version on the GGJ website is 1.0 we hope to have 1.1 sorted at some point, at least with actual titles.

I would also like to point out that the music for the game was created by Rob Bennion who if I get this correct is a Jazz Musician/composer who very kindly produced our group a whole bunch of music in the space of a few hours, while also helping other groups at Newport. I would like to thank him very much for creating so much music in so little time. We will hopefully be using his services a little more while we get the game to a more finished level.

I must say the weekend was an unforgettable event and that it was a lovely way to start the year, and even though we didn't get a completely polished finished game out of it, I'm amazed at what can happen in 48 hours. Of course when sleep isn't exactly involved it's not a good thing.

Super Cute Animal Attack did also want to do their other game, which we also hope to do, either while finishing off Lash La Rue on holiday or once it's finished. I won't be posting up anything about it though as it hasn't been started, but it is a bit simpler than our Lash game and both myself and Charlotte agree if we went with it we would have had a finished game.

Either way expect more small games coming out of this blog.