Gaming Information

Knowledge base

   After buying and selling games for over 12 years I've played most of the best and the worst games around today. I've had to juggle the budget to enable me to buy 400 units of games like "Gran Turismo 2", "Formula 1 '97" and "Resident Evil 2" only to find out that all my stores sold out by saturday lunch time and had to turn some people away. It's a constant battle to find the correct amount of units to buy as an error can prove fatal. The game industry itself is almost a game, but it changes like the wind, for a few years it becomes far more of an unlevel playing field, then it will change and the independent stores get some support but it never lasts for long and again the uphill battle resumes. So I am now out of retail and diving into the world of development.

I've watched people like Cliffy B pursue a dedicated successful career in game development and I have sold many of the games he has worked on through my stores. Cliff is an inspiration to many budding game developers but I doubt he has got to his current status without sacrifices.

Being realistic but not defeated I know my chances of finding a career in game development are getting slimmer but I will always have hope. I do however have good solid real world knowledge of business and I hope that I can develop some useful applications to support businesses in the future.

The Good, Bad and the Ugly

Games are still a hobby and a passion and I love to create things that previously did not exist. I have been working on a text based web browser game called GBU for a little over 9 months now, with university and personal life taking up most of my time I have found it very difficult to get the time needed to complete the last two sections. GBU will be completed in 2007 but with the complexity of over 30 database tables the logic is something that I require several days to focus on rather than a couple of hours here and there.

DM Toys-Story

Using Epics Unreal 2004 Engine I put my basic modelling and Photoshop skills together for a friend to produce an accurate map of his house. It was made for Clamhoy' sons, Liam and Callum who have enjoyed playing the map for many months. The map is still featured on Epics official server stats and is played daily, I do feel that although I may not have achieved next generation graphics, I have produced something that is fun to play.
PLEASE NOTE: I have not produced any other version of this map however someone has decided to modify it and release it under my name. Only the original is my work.

You play as the toys, you are 9 inches high and run around several rooms of the house trying to hunt each other down. I spent a total of 100 hours creating textures and meshes to put into the level and around 20 hours play testing the map.

Read more about it on the DM Toys-Story page.

Personal

Of course no self respecting games lover can only own a PC. 6 months ago my PS2 bit the dust as it finally lost the will to live from the continuous play of Grand Theft Auto, so I decided to jump to the Xbox 360 and have not looked back, I'm not going to get into the argument of 360 'vs.' PS3, yes I do have an opinion on it but that's my own and not for print here. Microsoft have just created an awesome piece of kit that connects gamers together rather than forcing them to fight against one another. I hope in the future that more software companies will realise the change in peoples playing behaviour and produce multiplayer games that you play as a team and not against one another, mentioning no name ('cough') EA ('cough'). How about a footy game that you can play on the same side as a friend online, without being in the same room!

My current games list consists of only a few titles: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Gears Of War, Project Gotham Racing 3, Fight Night 3, Table Tennis, Blazing Angels and Tiger Woods '07.

I visited a seminar from Microsoft regarding Xbox 360 development using XNA. XNA is a framework for homebrew game development on the Xbox 360 and PC platforms. The University of Wolverhampton is looking to set up a club for game development students to work on a project to actually enforce and experiment with what they have learnt in there lectures. With a Good source of tutorials for XNA now out there on the web it seems an ideal platform to allow students and game enthusiasts to expand there knowledge and feel like they have actually created something real.