#it was the same day our portfolio for the creative writing class was due. i’d stayed up until like six am working on my second short story

[lexalovesbooks]

Tomorrow/Friday is the anniversary of one of the weirdest days of my life, yippee!

[afoolforatook]

Thank you, Wellies

So. I’ve been trying to do both class work and working on wips and just nothing is clicking. So, I thought I should go ahead and do this post, that I’ve been putting off, because.....it’s next week y’all.... So here goes. 

Here’s my original post, that explains what this comic meant to me four years ago. 

And here’s what it means to me now. (this is really long, sorry)

Man, I don’t really even know where to start this. How to start to say thank you. To Ngozi, to all of you.... It’s not possible to fully express what all of you have been for me the past four years. What this story has been for me. 

So many things have changed since I made this post almost four years ago. 

So many things haven’t. 

I’ve been way less active in the fandom since starting at SCAD, and I really was never that incredibly active to begin with, outside of my small group of friends on a discord server. 

And at times I feel bad about that. 

But it’s not because I don’t care about or need this community anymore. 

Rather it’s because this community, this story, gave me the strength to keep moving, and now I want to keep doing so, and make something that might one day even barely begin to show my gratitude. 

So until then, all I can do is say thank you over and over. I can never possibly say it enough. 

But still I wanted to thank you now, and try to explain to you what this comic about hockey and pies has meant to me, one last time before it ends. So that’s what I’ll try to do. 

It was surreal rereading this old post earlier this week. Reading 

“I think I could write a book just of our history and everything leading up to now and the details of this whole event” 

When I wrote this post four years ago, I honestly couldn’t imagine a future where I’d be anything other than incomplete.Or even a future at all. Everyday was just getting up and making myself keep breathing, keep trying to push towards something, even though I had no idea what that could ever be. 

For the first year I wrote daily journal entries, telling Emma about what happened that day, screaming at the universe for doing this, trying to help my future self remember little things, because everything was so hard to hold on to. 

Update days were always something nearly sacred to me. And really not even from a fan point of view. I don’t read them around other people. I sit somewhere quiet, by myself, and read slowly. Because they are little moments I try to share with her still. The only person I want with me when I read them that first time is her, in whatever capacity I can bring myself to imagine. 

A few months after the crash, I found one of Emma’s Spotify playlists. She made playlists for everything; birthday and Christmas presents, mood playlists, friend playlists, monthly playlists. 

This was her May 2016 playlist. Last updated May 16th. Two days before the crash. 

That playlist was literally the only thing I listened to for months on end. 38 songs.Over and over. 

And as I listened I started to think that, just maybe, some of these songs she put there for me. 

West Coast; the song me and Emma would send to each other after high school whenever we wanted to let the other know how much we missed them. 

All I Want is to Be Your Girl. I mean?? 

Slowly I found lyrics in every song that even if just in my own fantasy, were little messages from Emma, telling me to keep going, how to stay strong. 

I was always looking for stories, books, movies, songs, anything about someone grieving the kind of loss I was. Nothing I found felt like it really represented me. If it was about someone young, it was due to suicide or violence or illness. If it was a car crash, it was about a parent or child. If it somehow fit my other demographics, it was never queer. 

I felt totally alone in the exact manifestation of my grief. Like no one else could understand all the tiny details that seemed, to me, to make this all more and more cartoonishly cruel. 

(though one of the most touching moments of my life will always be when Emma’s step mom, the only person in her family who knows about us, sent me a book about grieving a spouse. I cried for hours when I opened that.)

I didn’t have outside representation, support. But I had journals. I had Emma’s songs. I had poems and a handful of inktober drawings. I had my little update moments of connection. And I had so much to say. 

Months, years, of isolation gives you a lot of time to examine your feelings, to question the meaning of things, to think about what exactly grief looked like to you and about how you wanted to live the rest of your life, as someone grieving a love. 

And slowly I began to connect those thoughts to individual lyrics from Emma’s playlist and that helped me actually write all those thoughts out, organize them. 

And that’s how The Mixtape Project started (I still hate using the word memoir. I had to find something else to call it). A book about us. About Emma. About all those thoughts I’d had so long to sit with. Structured around the songs from her playlist. 

I remember the exact moment that I realized that Check Please was going to actively change my life. I was talking to my dad about it, about why I loved the storytelling, the characters, the art, so much. 

I’d told him many times before. But it was always tied to Emma in a way, or to the reasons that I identified with Jack. It was always a little sad in some way. 

But this time. This time it was just excitement. It was just a kid who has always loved words, gushing about a story that fascinated them. 

And I realized. It was the first time I had been just happy, excited, in the months since losing Emma. I remembered all those ideas Emma helped me with in high school, how we gushed over stories like that. I remembered what it was like to just love something and want to create, just because it made you happy. 

I knew I couldn’t go back to UNCA, and none of the other creative writing programs I had looked at seemed like they would fit the new person I was. 

So, for the hell of it, looking for some idea at how to start my life over, I looked at Ngozi’s personal story. And there was SCAD. There was sequential art. 

Now. I’d never ever considered myself an artist. I went to an art high school, I knew art kids. I was never one of them. But that sequential part? That. THAT was what I wanted. That was what I could still be excited about. 

That was how I could pull the Mixtape Project together. The writing, the poems, the art, the music. Comics. Sequential art. A graphic memoir that played with the format. That was the project that kept me going. That was what I was working for. That was the first future I was able to see now that Emma was gone. 

So, for the first time since literally elementary school, I took an art class (also took a mythology class at the same time, which really helped keep my art and storytelling tied). 

I loved it. I was actually happy with my work, surprised by my work and how quickly I felt like I improved (I wouldn’t learn about aphantasia until I got to SCAD, and understand that that drawing 1 class had been so fun, and in a way, easy, because it was all direct observation, and that drawing from memory and imagination would be a much steeper learning curve for me.)

So, when the class ended I thought ‘you know, maybe some kind of art school could be a good idea.’

And then one of my life long best friends, a SCAD animation student, encouraged me to apply, to just go for it. 

And I did. It was a long shot, I was sure. We couldn’t afford it. Why would I get that in that kind of commitment, debt,  after 1 art class? It wasn’t logical. But it felt good. So I did. 

And then I got accepted, and the initial excitement soon fell away, to me and my parents knowing that it really wasn’t doable. 

But we went to admitted students day, just to see. And when we got home, both of my parents cried for a long time. The first happy cry in our house for over two years.

Because they had decided that they had to figure out a way to make it work. 

Because standing in Haymans hall was the first time they had seen me excited about the future since Emma died. It was the first time they’d seen me feel like there was somewhere I was meant to be, that there was somewhere I could fit again. 

So we made it happen. I’ll still be in debt for years, and it’s not necessarily something I’d wholeheartedly recommend to kids getting out of high school, that debt isn’t worth it for many people. 

For me it wasn’t really even worth it exactly for SCAD itself, and you’ll have plenty of professors tell you here that really what you pay for isn’t the education but the networking. 

But for me. For me it was worth it. 

Because I wasn’t wasting away in my basement. 

And I really wasn’t where I’d have liked to have been, ideally, before starting. I was a BRAND new artist. My portfolio for my application was solely my writing work. I hadn’t ever done anything more than scribbled fan comics in my sketchbook. I was coming in wayyyyy behind where most other people were. But I couldn’t wait to feel like I was good enough to be there. There was a strong chance that it was quite literally, a matter of survival. I was reaching a breaking point after nearly three years of isolation and grief with no outlet. The future debt was less of a concern than making sure I didn’t have a complete mental breakdown or worse. 

Now, of course, it hasn’t all been easy or fun or happy once I got here. I’ve doubted myself, I’ve had awful weeks, months, been stressed, unmotivated, in pain, near burnout. 

The first quarter I was absolutely miserable because I had literally no social life. 

Because I was an agoraphobic 23 yr old, living with 17/18 yr olds fresh out of high school. And if I wasn’t careful, I’d dissociate so easily. I’d let myself believe that I was still a teenager fresh from high school. That the past three years of agony hadn’t happened. That I could call Emma and it would ring again. She would answer again. And that illusion was a dangerous pit to fall into. 

And it wasn’t until this fall that my social life really started to improve, beyond one or two close friends. And even still, while it’s much better, it’s nothing like UNCA, like the tight knit family I had that made me identify with SMH and the Haus atmosphere so much. 

But I was moving forward. Agonizingly slowly sometimes. But still forward. 

And then last Spring quarter, just about a year ago, I was in Survey for SEQA. Basically comic book history class. And our final was a 4 page research comic on a comic artist we admired. So of course, I was going to do mine on Ngozi. 

The comic was due at the end of the quarter, the end of May. 

Now, that quarter was the first time I was actually in SEQA classes; Survey, and Intro. 

And those four pages would be the first fully colored, refined comic pages I had EVER done. It was intimidating. I didn’t want to mess it up. Especially because this wasn’t some big name of some far off artist you would never have any connection to. This was someone who all my professors knew. 

I ended up getting extremely lucky and had the chance to email Ngozi and ask if she’d be able to give for a quote for the project, advice for current SCAD students. 

She replied to my email the weekend of the 3rd anniversary. (I then spent hours on a thank you email - because that’s who I am, I can’t not over analyze anything I’m sending to someone important - and then I managed to save it to drafts instead of actually sending it...something I would not notice until literally months later and be absolutely mortified about my apparent rudeness of never thanking her.)

I still am not really happy with how that project came out. I still had (and have) a lot to learn, and it shows. I have, in no way, become an amazing comic artist overnight. I wasn’t expecting to.

But that short email exchange, falling on that weekend; it felt special. It felt like some speck of proof that I was doing the right thing. That things could actually go well in my life again. That if I kept going, I might actually get somewhere that I wanted to be. That maybe I really could make The Mixtape Project happen, if I just kept at it here. 

And then I found out that in the fall, Ngozi would be the SEQA mentor. 

Unfortunately by the time I had all the details about how to apply, the quarter had started and there were only a couple of weeks before it was due, and the only pages I had even anywhere close to being portfolio ready were either my research comic or a few older Check Please fan comics, none of which I would even have considered putting in that portfolio (I’m not 100% certain it would actually have come across as sucking up but it sure felt like it would have). And despite my best efforts, it just wasn’t possible, with how slow I work and having to keep up with classwork, for me to get a portfolio ready in time. 

That hurt for a while. I felt like I had this clear sign of perfect timing. How could I pass up that chance? How could I forgive myself for not doing everything I could to earn that experience? How was I not letting Emma down if I ruined this opportunity? 

It took a while to get out of that negative thought spiral. But I did, and it’s still a bummer, but it’s okay. 

And something that really helped? 

In October, Ngozi still came to campus to give a lecture. And that would have been good enough; just sitting in on that helped me feel excited, encouraged again. But then, after the lecture (with my amazing roommate waiting patiently behind with me, to make sure I didn’t actually have a panic attack on the way home) I got to talk to her. 

We all hope to one day get to talk to the people who inspired us, whose work we love, to tell them how much they mean to us. And yes, I was a little version of starstruck. 

But that wasn’t why I was shaking. That wasn’t why I told her I was going to do my best to get this out without crying (and I did, I’m proud to say). 

It was because I had the opportunity, while at the school that had given me a chance to start my life again, to thank the woman who was in all likelihood, one of the main reasons I was even still alive. If it had not been for Check Please I wouldn’t have had that good thing to keep sharing with Emma. I wouldn’t have found sequential art, at least not for a while longer probably. I wouldn’t have been able to finally picture a future I wanted to get to. 

And I’ll be honest, I don’t remember 90% of what I actually said that night to Ngozi. 

But I told her my story. I told her about Emma. About how Check Please was the last thing we got to share. I thanked her. And she was wonderful and kind and emotional and hugged me a couple of times, and even though I don’t remember a lot of what I actually said; it was something that will be one of the most important, affirming moments of my life. 

I didn’t have a panic attack on the way home. I somehow managed to not cry until we were back to our dorm. But I was stunned. 

Not even because of the amazing moment I had been able to have with Ngozi. 

But because it hit me. 

I was doing it. I was there. I had actually made it this far. 

Somewhere that just over a year ago I never would have believed was possible. 

A time when, two years before, I hadn’t even been sure I could make it to alive. 

That weekend was my 24th birthday. And it was the first birthday since I left UNCA at 19, that I didn’t just hate the fact that I was getting older. That I was moving away from the happiest parts of my life so far. 

Yes it still hurt getting further from Emma, putting another tick on the years that I got that she didn’t. 

But I was actually finally excited at the idea of even having a future, let alone having an idea of what it could be. 

February was a difficult month for me. I have another (entirely way too long) post about why everything that happened with RWBY and Fairgame was so difficult for me, but to put it simply; my hope for the future was shaken.

I was back in the toxic negative thought spirals I had fought for years to train myself out of. 

I was seeing Emma, or her brother, or her mom, in crowds; something I hadn’t experienced since the first few months after the crash. I was in one of the biggest crisis moments I’d had since Emma’s death. 

But I was more experienced than when I was 20. 

It wasn’t fun, a lot of it probably wasn’t the ideal way to cope, but I did it. And I kept up with my work. I isolated more, but not completely. I made myself vent on snapchat or tumblr, and not worry about oversharing or annoying people, because it was either get it out or let it fester in my head.  And I couldn’t afford to let that happen. 

In mid March, I made a pitch packet for my comic scripting final. 

It was for The Mixtape Project. It was hard, and nerve-wracking, and there’s still mountains of work to be done. 

But after my initial synopsis (first of like seven versions, cause trying to put this thing in a good synopsis format is a nightmare) my professor told me that he thought my story had potential. 

That he could see it being published. He suggested, knowing that I was planning on taking his advanced scripting course this quarter (hey remember how mid march was only a few weeks ago?? Huh?? wild), that I keep working on it, and see about taking it to Editor’s day (SEQA students’ opportunity to basically pitch themselves and their ideas to publishers). 

Now, my professor is by no means an overly harsh critic, and is plenty supportive in general. 

But I also knew that that was not just something he said to students all the time. That he meant it. 

Editor’s Day (now online) is in mid May. The week of the 4th anniversary of Emma’s death, to be exact. 

Everything is a mess right now, and I’m stressed and tired and scared and heartbroken (this will be the first time since I was 9 that I have not had Merlefest; the highlight of my year, and since Emma’s death; the last big happy thing before I plunge into the nightmare that is May). 

Tuesday will come. Check Please will end. I will continue to support Ngozi and her work after Bitty’s story ends. 

But it will be sad. It won’t be easy. 

This thing that has been my tether to the most important person in my life, will still be there, but it will be over. 

It will have a concrete end. It will no longer be part of the future I am pushing towards. 

But I am a different person than the shattered kid who wrote this post four years ago. 

I’m not who I was before Emma died. I never will be. I’d never try to be. I want Emma back more than anything. But that won’t happen. And as long as this is all real, I never want to pretend this didn’t happen. 

That I didn’t shatter in a way that will never heal like people expect. 

I’m still all those shattered pieces that wrote this post. Maybe a few have had the edges dulled, maybe I’ve lost a few, glued a few together perfectly, maybe picked up a few stray pieces that didn’t come from the me from before. 

But I will be those shattered pieces for the rest of my life. 

They won’t magically fuse back together. I work every day to hold them, to keep myself in some shape that resembles a functioning person. 

Some days I fail. Some days, I am too tired to even try. Some days, I am so angry, I’d rather hurl the pieces at whatever power or fate or god or chaos decided that I got to live and she didn’t. 

But those days pass. 

And I learn how to hold the pieces better, how to avoid the sharpest edges, how to take care of the wounds when I inevitably cut myself on one, how to allow other people to help me hold them, how to accept that some pieces may feel safe and smooth and comforting but they are traps, illusions that are the easy way to do things, but not the healthy way, not the way that will help me achieve my goals.

That person, made of all those unholdable pieces, four years ago, was staying alive for everyone else but themself. 

And some days I still am. 

For my parents. For Emma. For all the other queer, mentally ill, grieving kids and young adults and just people, who are looking for the same representation I was, who feel as alone as I still do so often. 

But some days. 

On those really good days. 

I’m alive, carrying all those pieces, just because I want to be. For me. 

I want to spin around in the morning, singing along to my bluegrass spotify. I want to get excited over finally figuring out how to write that line that was giving me so much trouble, or finish that sketch that I never thought I could manage. I want to hope that despite how awful everything seems, there’s still a good future out there. It’s still possible to be happy some days. 

I want to cry because I get to see Jack and Bitty get the happy ending that me and Emma didn’t. 

And now, unlike that version of me from four years ago, when it ends, I will have things still. 

Things that I have worked everyday to reach, to deserve, to hold out to people and say

 “Hey, sometimes everything hurts and you know that things will never be what they were, and parts of you will always miss that. But there are still things you can find that hurt less, that ease the hurt, that teach you how to better hold the hurt, to stop trying to say it doesn’t exist or trying to get rid of it completely and hating yourself when you can’t. You can still be hurt, be irreparably broken in so many places, and still find the happy things. You are still worthy of love, no matter how broken you are. Your worth is not tied to how much you are able to heal.  You are worthy of so much love, just because you are still here, no matter how many tiny pieces you are in.”  

The thing is, I will still always have a future that includes Emma. Because I couldn’t tell you exactly which of my pieces are from her, but so many of them are. 

There is no version of me, from here on to the day I die, that does not have her influence embedded in every piece. 

These days I try to be a little kinder to myself. It doesn’t always work, but I try. 

Because, to Emma, I was Bitty. I radiated that “thing”. 

Whether or not I saw it in myself, doesn’t matter, because she did. 

But to me she was the one who radiated. 

And she is a part of me. She can’t radiate that “thing” herself anymore. 

But I can, at least I can try.

Because If this person I loved and trusted so immensely, saw something worth loving in me? There must be something there worth loving, right? 

And if she is a part of me for the rest of my life, how can I hate myself? How can I do anything but keep going so that, even if just in my head, a part of her gets to keep going too. 

My family and friends joke that every friend group I’ve ever had calls me something different. And really it’s not a joke. In middle school I was CB #4 (that’s a long, terribly embarrassing, story). In high school I was Pond (and many variations there of: Pondala, Pondy, Raindrop, Puddle, you get the picture). At UNCA, when I came out as nonbinary, I started going by Auden. When I went home it was back to Meagan; Meagan always felt right with my parents. 

With Emma I was always Meagan. We were Meagan and Emma. Megma. Meagan and Emma have online adventures!

After she was gone, Meagan didn’t really feel like me anymore. I loved Meagan, I missed Meagan, I wished I could still really fully be Meagan, and I’m okay still being Meagan sometimes. 

But that real Meagan. The Meagan that was Emma’s Meagan. Doesn’t exist anymore. I lost that Meagan somewhere in that first night of screaming and trying to break my hand against the wall, so I could just feel something other than the agony of Emma being gone.

When I joined a Check Please chat group, a few months after the crash, we gave each other hockey nicknames. I was Farley. 

My second quarter at SCAD, I started going by Farley. It stuck. 

That’s who this version of me is. This new artist, still figuring things out, but still going. 

I may not always stay Farley (other than ya’know artist ‘branding’. We’ll see) but that’s okay. Farley is who I need to be right now. 

Farley is who will finish The Mixtape Project. 

(because of two people mishearing both my nickname and last name I will, at least once in my career, use the pseudonym Fartley McFarmland and no one will stop me). 

I can’t imagine what, who, will come after Farley, if anything.

But Check Please will always be a part of making Farley, and every future version of me, exist. 

I could go on and on about how beautiful this story and these characters are, how inspiring Ngozi is, how genius her storytelling is, how powerful and important her work is. I could go on for days about all of that. But this is already so long, and I know that so many of you can go on about that probably way better than I could currently. 

But, as many of my professors tell us over and over, only I can tell this story. My story. Emma’s story. Our story. And it’s one I plan on telling for the rest of my life. 

And Check Please, Ngozi, will forever be the thing that made that possible.

So thank you. Those two words that are way too small to say it all. 

Thank you. 

Every fic writer

Every artist

Every rper 

Every chat friend

Every shitposter

Every theorist or meta poster

Every fan

Thank you. 

B. “Shitty” Knight. 

Larissa “Lardo” Duan

Adam “Holster” Birkholtz

Justin “Ransom” Oluransi

John Johnson

Ollie O'Meara 

Pacer Wicks

Jenny and Mandy

Nicholas and Jean-Claude

Coach Hall 

Coach Murray

Suzanne Bittle

Richard “Coach” Bittle

William “Dex” Poindexter

Derek “Nursey” Nurse

Chris “Chowder” Chow

Kent Parson

Alicia Zimmermann

“Bad” Bob Zimmermann

Tony “Tango” Tangredi

Connor “Whiskey” Whisk

Denice “Foxtrot” Ford

Fry Guy

Georgia “Georgie” Martin

Alexei “Tater” Mashkov

Sebastian “Marty” St. Martin

Dustin “Snowy” Snow

Poots

Randall “Thirdy” Robinson

Jonathan “Hops” Hopper

River “Bully” Bullard

Lukas “Louis” Landmann

(I’m almost certain I had to have missed someone)

Thank you.

Jack “Zimmboni” Laurent Zimmermann

Thank you.

Eric “Bitty” Richard Bittle

Thank you.

Ngozi Ukazu

Thank you. For everything. 

For having my back. I’ll always have yours.

Always yours, 

Farley M.

[atlafan]

The Game: Part 6

Rucas au multi-fic. Lucas and Riley have been best friends for as long as they can remember. They finally tell each other how they feel, and are able to get together, but some friction occurs when Riley’s Uncle Shawn introduces everyone to his new wife and daughter.

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

Lucas woke up around two in the morning and realized he fell asleep in Riley’s bed. They had some light kisses that night, and must’ve fallen asleep. He looked at his sleeping girlfriend. She looked so peaceful, he didn’t want to leave her, but he knew they’d get in trouble if he stayed. He kissed her on the forehead and headed out the bay window.

Riley woke up for school a few hours later, a little confused. Last night felt like a blur. When she thought of her little makeout session with Lucas she felt butterflies in her stomach. She still couldn’t believe how lucky she was that they felt the same way about each other.

She took a quick shower, put her hair up in the perfect messy bun, a pair of light blue jeans, and a black top. Something simple for her second half day of senior year. Riley went into the kitchen and saw Auggie sitting, eating some cereal.

“How come you’re already awake?” She asks, making herself a bowl of cereal.

“Couldn’t sleep...also I wanted to catch you before you left.”

“What’s up?”

“About the arcade-”

“Auggie, I’ll take you, it’ll be fun. Besides, I owe you one.”

“I actually don’t want to go. It was great coming home yesterday and being able to do whatever I wanted. I took a nap, made frozen pizza, and got to watch whatever I wanted on TV.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”

“Relax, I just mean I kind of liked not having to share. We both have full days tomorrow, so I was kind of hoping whatever you did yesterday that made it so you didn’t come home until five, could you do it again today?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, sometimes even I need some quiet time.”

“Okay, sure.”

“What were you doing, exactly?”

“Oh, I just went to the bakery with my friends. And then I went over to Lucas’ for a bit.”

“You’re not being scandalous are you?”

“Scandalous? Auggie I am not talking to you about that kind of stuff. You’re too young.”

“I just want to make sure you’re not doing something I’d regret covering for you for.”

“Oh, no, everything was totally PG.”

“Cool, so we have a deal.”

“Mhm, but you call me if you need anything.”

Riley puts her finished bowl in the sink, grabs her backpack, and heads out the door. She bumps into Maya on the subway, and they end up sitting together.

“Hey.” Maya says with a half smile.

“Good morning.” Riley replies.

“So, I uh sent you a friend request last night.”

“Oh you did? Must not have gotten the notification.”

“Right. So because you don’t like me, that means your friends can’t?”

“What?”

“Well, I sent them requests too, and no one responded.”

“Maybe no one wants to be your friend, did you think about that?” Riley took a deep breath. “Okay, that was really mean, and I’m sorry. I don’t want to become some bully, that’s not who I am. You’re just so abrasive, it’s unnecessary. I don’t think you’d fit in with my group of friends. Farkle and Smackle are brainiacs, Lucas is a jock, and I’m overly cheerful.”

“So don’t you think you could use someone like me? You’re missing the brooding, misunderstood asshole.”

“Nope, I really think we’re all set. Look, I don’t mind being some type of acquaintance to keep things civil, but as far as us being friends, I really don’t see it happening.”

The train stops where they need to get off, and Riley is practically the first one out the door, leaving Maya extremely confused.

Lucas is waiting near Riley’s locker when he sees his beautiful girlfriend walk down the hall. He notices that she’s not in a great mood.

“Morning beautiful. You just as tired as I am?”

“Nope, I slept great.” She says opening her locker door. “Of course, I didn’t have to get up at two in the morning to drive home.” She puts a few things in and closes it to face to him. “Try not to make a habit of that on school nights.” She gives him a light kiss on the cheek.

“How about on weekends then?”

“Lucas.”

“You just said school nights. It was so nice to fall asleep with you. You’re so cute when you’re sleeping.” Lucas takes a step forward to be a little closer.

“Careful, my dad could hear you. What if he walked by?”

“You’re right, sorry. So are we taking Auggie to the arcade today?”

“No, actually, he wants the alone time at our house. So we can do whatever we want again.”

“Great, I was thinking we could go out to lunch. That new Mexican place opened up a few weeks ago and we haven’t been yet.”

“Oh yeah, that would be great.”

Right as they’re about to kiss, the bell rings. Riley grabs Lucas’ arm and tugs him towards the classroom. A few people were already in homeroom waiting for everything to start. Cory was sitting at his desk shuffling through some papers.

Lucas and Riley go to their seats. Farkle and Smackle follow in, and go right to their seats to greet their friends.

“So, have you made a decision about the friend request?” Smackle asks.

“I don’t know. I had a conversation with her this morning, and it seems like she does want to be friends. I told her I wanted to be acquaintances at the most.”

“It’s just a stupid Facebook friend request. I feel like we’re spending too much energy on this.” Farkle says.

“Fine, then approve the request then.” Riley says. Farkle doesn't move. “Well, there you have it. I just don’t want her snooping through my profile, but at the same time, I don’t want her to feel like an outcast. Okay everyone, phone’s out, lets approve.”

The four friends take out their smart phones, and simultaneously accept Maya’s friend request. At that moment Maya walks in and sits in her seat. Her phone goes off, and she sees the Facebook notifications. She has four new friends. She looks over at them and smiles.

After Cory gives the second day spiel, the bell rings, and they all go to their separate classes. These would be the classes that they would normally have in the second half of the day.

They all had one elective together, and that would be the last block of the day with Cory. Technically now they were off to their fourth period class. Lucas had an English elective that was required. He walked in the class and saw Maya just sitting down. He sat in front of her.

“Is this an okay seating arrangement, I wouldn’t want your girlfriend to get mad.” She whispers to him.

“You know”, he turns around half way, “if you didn’t make remarks like that, she might actually want to be friends with you.”

“Well what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you have a grudge against me? I mean let’s be honest, she doesn’t like me because she feels threatened.”

“And why would she feel that way?”

“Because I openly made it clear that I was attracted to you, and she’s always gonna be scared that someone could take you away.”

“No offense, but short, blonde, and attitude isn’t exactly my type.” Lucas turns back to face the front.

“Then why did you sit in front of me when you could have sat anywhere else?”

“Because I was trying to be nice, but clearly that was a mistake.”

A few more people come in, some baseball players spot Lucas and they sit around him, which means they’re sitting around Maya.

“Dude, you and Riley are finally together?” A boy on the team named Mike asks.

“Yup.”

“You must be stoked, you’ve been waiting forever to get with her. Man, if you two hadn’t had that like unofficial thing I would have tried something with her a long time ago. She’s an absolute smoke.”

“Yeah, maybe not talk about her like that to me.”

“Right, my bad, what I’m trying to say is, way to go.”

“Thanks, it does feel pretty great to actually be dating her.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, a bunch of us were wondering, is she like a prude or has she been climbing you like a tree.”

“She’s definitely not a prude, but I can tell she wants to take things slow, which is fine with me.”

“How could you be fine with that? You’ve been dreaming of tapping that ass for two years.”

“Yeah I know, but I want her to feel comfortable. Plus I’m a guy, it’s different. If she said hey let’s go do it in a garbage can I wouldn’t even hesitate.”

“Friends to lovers. Hey, you should totally right about that in this class.”

“We’ll see. This class will probably get minimal effort from me.”

The bell rings and the teacher tells everyone to settle down. She explains that it’s a creative writing course, and what that will entail. They will do a lot of free form writing, and will need to pass in a portfolio by the end of the semester. Since the class period was only a half an hour long due to the half day, the teacher let the students chat amongst themselves for the last five minutes. Maya made sure to keep listening in to Lucas and Mike.

“So, what are you doing after school?” Mike asks.

“Oh, Riley and I are going to grab lunch.”

“Nice, then what?” He wiggles his eyebrows.

“Cut it out, that’s not gonna happen, at least not today. I don’t want her to think I only started going out with her is because I wanted to get into her pants.”

“But isn’t that basically why you finally decided to make the shift in your relationship? I mean, you were friends for so long, and you were fine with that, and then you see her in a pair of short shorts in Texas and now you’re obsessed with her.”

“I had just never really looked at her that way. That was the first time I really thought she was sexy. Then I had to go through all of junior year not knowing what to do. I just wanted to grab her and do stuff to her, but still only be friends, but I knew she’d never go for that.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Prom. When I saw her step out in her dress, all dolled up, that was when I knew I wanted her on my arm as my lady. Then she came to Texas again this summer for a few weeks. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I couldn’t do it anymore. So a week before school started I asked her to be my girlfriend, and I’m so glad I did because she’s amazing. She’s my best friend, and I don’t want anyone else to have her.”

The bell rings and the boys get up and leave. Little did they know Maya recorded the whole conversation. She sent it in a text to Riley.

“Let’s see how she deals with this.”

[zak-graphicarts]

Sam Elston: Drawing People & Writing Thoughts

In this post, I’m looking at local artist Sam Elston, his portfolio of work and the importance of drawing from life for inspiration.

Self-portrait. (2018). Taken from https://www.instagram.com/p/BiRoFLGDRK_/?taken-by=samelston_

Based in Essex, artist Sam Elston produces incredibly energetic and expressive illustrations and sketches. His works have an appealing dynamic aesthetic, with loose linework and gestural marks. He’s interested in capturing the everyday - and as such, he’s only got a limited time to sketch that fleeting image before it fades away. This kinetic, rapid approach to drawing can be best seen through a more recent example of his work, Interests are Interesting.

The use of muted, flat greys and greens give the piece a dull aesthetic, something which reflects the ‘everyday’ quite effectively. This is doubly true then riding a public bus, where life seems it’s most banal. The lines look as if they could move at any moment, with scribbled marks creating an inherently exciting and dramatic atmosphere - even when it’s just a bus driver and his pin collection. This plays a part in the successes of the artist’s entire portfolio, I think. He takes moments from everyday life, ones which we tend to overlook, and forget to admire in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, and illustrates these in loose, observational comics.

This same dull, flat theme can be seen in a few of his works, most notably Steel Grey Day - a piece with his signature hand-drawn aesthetic, with clear mark making that creates an effective, lo-fi and naive finish to the work. The hint of colour gives the comic a focus, but blends in well with the dull tones of the rest of the piece. Real life isn’t in greyscale, obviously, and the subtle muted blue gives a life which still feels very monotonous, and weirdly, grey.

Along with these hand-rendered pieces, Sam is able to make subtle commentary on everyday life - writing his thoughts whilst drawing which creates sublime works of visual poetry: his observational comics in particular could be considered the comic equivalent of a haiku, with loose, scribbled images of everyday life accompanied by imaginative and ambiguous thoughts working together to throw the audience into Sam’s shoes.

These observational comics inspired me in particular, and over the Easter break I decided to produce a few more, inspired by the ideas behind the artist’s work. In these pieces, I adopted an aesthetic from one of Sam’s earlier works, Faces, a simple exercise in which he went out and began drawing people in cafes, as reference for another project. These have a confident, bold line quality that I found visually quite interesting - and I think with a Sharpie there’s a spontaneity in your marks - you’ve just got to start drawing, without any planning or sketching first. There’s an honesty in the process that I like, and so decided to adopt it in my own comics.

Faces. (2017). Sam Elston.

Through this, I produced several of these ‘observational comics’, and found it to be quite a fun exercise - most importantly, it made observational drawing interesting and fresh for me as a graphic artist. Normally this is where I’d go into more depth on the artist’s portfolio, but I decided to contact Sam via email and we were able to talk about his work, why he started making observational comics, his influences and a quick review of my own art.

To begin, I asked why Sam started creating observational comics - if it helped with composition or characters. ‘At the start I just wanted to improve my drawing skills to try and find a consistency in the drawings I was doing, so I started drawing a page a day in an A6 Sketchbook - which gave me a size restriction and I suppose started the whole panel thing. I was never very good at making up stuff straight from my head and found it much easier to just pause and draw whatever was in front of me at a set time each day.’

It seems like it wasn’t really a conscious idea to make it a comic - it just happened through the format he was using. This is quite an interesting idea, and none of the artists he goes on to mention follow this panelled structure - suggesting this was his own personal touch.

This regular drawing helped Sam build his confidence and speed with his sketches, who began playing around with the composition of the page. ‘At this time, I would mainly draw things rather than people because I would take longer and people move all the time. At the same time I wouldn't let myself spend more than around 5/10 minutes on each drawing otherwise I’d end up never finishing it.’

Adding a time limit seems to breed creativity - this is something that I’ve begun doing in life drawing classes and my own work, and the challenge forces you to capture a specific subject or person in the quickest way possible. This idea of timing yourself for a drawing is perfectly expressed in the comics I’ve discussed already, thinking about the expressive and scribbled marks in Interests are Interesting especially. 

‘I came across Robert Weaver by accident when I was looking in a 'lots of artists in a book' book and really liked his Reportage work and then found 'Robert Weaver: A Pedestrian View' which is a book that has more of his personal work in. When I saw this stuff, something just made sense and realised that I could add text to what I was drawing and it didn't really need to make complete sense or have a big narrative, it could still be as natural as just sitting down and drawing except now it would be a case of, draw what is in front of you and write down what you're thinking.’

This summarises Elston’s work perfectly - draw what’s infront of you, and write down your thoughts whilst doing so. He’s clearly not taking the aesthetic from Weaver, however - with his examples in A Pedestrian View staying true to a sense of realism, with an acrylic still life aesthetic illustrating anonymous legs in a constant state of motion, manholes and police barricades. There’s splashes of colour to add life to the composition, but his works echo more of a still life painting than an energetic moment in our everyday lives, as Sam’s does. 

Up until this point, Sam had been strictly drawing from life - not writing from it. Seeing Weaver’s works, however, inspired him to stop worrying about a linear narrative and begin writing his own thoughts in addition to his comics, creating a series of works which took the idea of an observational comic in a very traditional place. These examples are rather cinematic and introspective, acting almost as a camera pan around his home town as the naive, wobbly lines illustrate seemingly banal scenes of coffee machines and Chinese takeaways.

‘So I would try and do a full spread per day and write down what I was thinking at the time of drawing. At this point, I had planned to make what I drew in this sketchbook into a zine so started playing with panel size and the flow of it from page to page so that it looked more like a comic than the stuff before but I think it was more along the lines of a visual diary.’

At this point, Elston was avoiding drawing people, due to the fact that they move around and it’s quite an unnerving activity for the first few times you try it. This is a sentiment that I share, but exploring Sam’s work and discussing how to approach observational drawing made me go out and draw people in my sketchbook, using the same loose style.

Discussing his more recent influences, Sam mentioned the work of artist Joost Stokhof - an artist who draws and writes things on an A4 page until he’s filled it, with the compositions hinting at storylines and bigger narrative, drawn from life. Looking at Stokhof’s work, I can see a clear influence on Sam’s more recent work - which abandon the traditional panelled approach to comics and show a more spacious, loose composition. Sam’s keeping with the scratchy and scribbled aesthetic, however, which allows his art to stand apart from the somewhat more refined, linear and minimal line work from Stokhof’s examples.

I think responding to an artist’s visual style can be exciting, but it’s more interesting, to me, at least, when we incorporate an artist’s philosophy and thought process to our own work. This way, we’re able to move past mimicry and a purely superficial line of enquiry and visual analysis and hit more distinctive areas when responding to our research.

An idea that I’ve found to be strictly Sam’s own, however, is the use of a ‘cardboard view finder’ to create the compositions for his comics. This struck me as an original and creative approach to the medium, so I asked why he began using it. “If I’m in a slump, I use the viewfinder to help me find interesting compositions as it can be hard to see them when you can see everything at once, I think a lot of it is about giving yourself restrictions whether that is time, size or focus points.”

An example of one of Sam’s viewfinders

That last part was one of the most important ideas to take away from the conversation, I think. As artists, when we give ourselves restrictions we force ourselves to step out of our comfort zone and be creative in ways we aren’t used to. When I begin designing characters, I’ll be following Sam’s practice and giving myself a time limit on each sketch, keeping the illustrations expressive and loose.

“As for a reason why [I make comics], I think it's to keep me drawing as there is no excuse not to, if all it is is what is in front of you, it can become a very cathartic process if you let it - I think it would be a good thing to start and try and keep a Visual Diary as it gives you space to try stuff out that can help inform your practice and it should definitely help to free you up and grow your confidence and speed with drawing.’

I asked about drawing people - his process, experience and any tips. “Coffee shops are good if you sit in a corner where you can see lots of people (they're normally all too busy talking so you can stare at them easily) or sit at a window then you can draw people outside. To loosen up and warm up at the start draw 10 faces in 10 minutes (they might not turn out any good or they might - who cares because they're warm-ups) get a sketchbook just for warm ups if you don't want to draw straight into your main one. If you think they are going to drastically move or leave half way through you drawing them - take a sneaky picture and use that instead. For practice, draw from pictures but only give yourself a few minutes.’  

Coffee Shop Drawings. (2018). Sam Elston.

This is something that Sam’s put a recent focus on, producing quick studies of people in cafes. Drawing people is something I’ve been working on throughout this project, something which, previously, had always been rather intimidating to me. All the animation tutors I’ve spoken to have stressed the importance and value of drawing people as a great exercise for animators - and so this is something I’ve been trying to keep up with on a regular basis. It’s a good way to develop ideas for characters, but also I’ve found it helps to develop skills in gestural and figure drawing - as I only have a few moments to sketch someone before they walk past.

Finally, I asked Sam to make an overall comment on my work, shown on Instagram.

‘It's really good that you're letting your own personal interests feed into the work your creating (if that makes sense? Like, I can see that you do actually have an interest in film and animation because of the work you're making and the research you're doing.) so I would try and continue to do that and see how you can push that further.’ This was an idea I hadn’t even considered about my work - that it conveys to the audience not only an interesting work, but my own passion for the craft, and subjects I’m exploring. He’s basically saying to continue to explore my own interests in my practical work - and that’s essentially what I’m doing with Exquisite Walks, exploring the potential of a walk cycle in animation in exciting new ways.

‘By the looks of it, you've got pretty good digital skills to be able to put together the animations, videos and digital drawings so keep that going and see how you can combine traditional and digital methods together in the work you make - which I can see you've been starting to do with the Moonlight animation tests. Illustratively, you're getting a good confidence in your line work. I think FMP will be a great time for you to step out of your comfort zone and try and learn something new because you've got a good skill set to work with that will be worth pushing. ‘

A few of my works that Sam is discussing. 

‘Learning something new’ is essentially the mantra for my FMP, as I’m drawing people from observation, learning new animation techniques and I’ll be exploring how to make a stop motion puppet - pushing my 3D skills further than I’ve ever done before. It’s not something that I’m particularly confident with, and is probably one of the biggest ways I could ‘step out of my comfort zone’ with an animation project. It will be a challenge, but that’s how we grow as artists.

A little project of Sam’s that I was particularly inspired by was his ink warm ups, using a brush and ink to produce quick character sketches. This is something that I found really interesting, and wanted to incorporate as a warm up for my own character designs. The challenge comes from the time limit, use of a brush instead of a pencil, and the camera watching your every move - it’s a timelapse so just recording your process forces you to work in Sam’s signature ‘loose’ approach.

There’s no time to think when you’re on camera, and as result, my pieces possess a loose, fluid line and uneven, quick ink aesthetic. These are just warm up sketches, but it’s an exercise which allowed me to get ‘loose’ in a mindset sense additionally to my linework - working in an autonomous, instinctual manner like my compositions with the Abstract Aesthetics workshop. They’re quick sketches, and they obviously have value through these quick approach - but there’s a difference between lose and ‘bad’. It’s a fine line, and I think it’s a line that I’m skirting with a few examples. With the brush size that I was using, I should have focused on heads and faces - the few body illustrations I attempted look very amateur and crude in comparison to my other examples.

This is a process that I’ll continue to use as I progress through my FMP, as it challenges me to abandon my structured predisposition and ‘get loose’ with my drawings. Brush and ink is a medium that I’m yet to feel comfortable with, and results in a distinctive, visually exciting aesthetic and imaginative, aloof designs, not responding to anything other than my own thoughts.

Through this online discussion, and looking at Sam Elston’s portfolio of work and producing my own observational comics, I’ve learnt the value of drawing from life for inspiration. There’s a wealth of ideas to draw from when we respond to things and people around us - an honesty and substance that results when we’re producing our own research. A key idea that we’ve discussed in class is how primary research is essential for a successful, distinctive self-led project, and I will continue to draw from life as I begin to develop character designs from my own observational sketches, and recorded walk cycles.

This also marks the first time I’ve been able to conduct my own primary artist research, contacting Sam and discussing his process first hand. Not only was this to hit the higher grading criteria of the brief, but also to make my research more valuable and useful to me as an artist. I was able to discuss his thought process and get some ideas for my own developments into character design, in a way that moves past simply reading from a website article.

Whats next? Having explored the work of Sam Elston in detail as an artist case study, I’ll be focusing on creating character sketches and developing these into several designs for my animation. With this, and my contextual research into the idea of an Exquisite Corpse and Richard William’s approach to a walk cycle, I’m shifting my focus into producing exciting practical outcomes - creating character designs and learning new animation techniques.

Recently, I was able to attend a street art tour in London exploring some of the world’s most exciting works of graffiti and street art. This was a great experience, and introduced me to a handful of interesting artists that I plan to briefly discuss in an upcoming blog post.

Actions

In my sketchbook, continue to draw people from observation following Sam’s challenges

Create several character designs in response to these drawings, using a time limit to produce a series of designs with a range of materials

Write about the London Street Art Tour, discussing key artists that I found exciting e.g. Nathan Bowen and MCLN.

New References

Weaver, W., 2013. Robert Weaver. Distributed Art Pub Inc.

Self-portrait. (2018). Sam Elston. 

[elidecarteretfutureworks-blog]

DD2000 Assignment 2 Research blog

Introduction

The job role which I would like to go into post Futureworks is a Level Designer role. In order to create my presentation, I had to do a lot of research into different companies I could work at and what the role of a Level Designer actually involves. I also had to look into different studios and key designers who have influenced my decision to become a Level Designer.

Sections to discuss

I had a list of different sections which I wanted to talk about. Due to this, I have ordered this research blog in the same way as the presentation.

Inspirations

There were a number of games which inspired me growing up to become a Level/ Game Designer. Some of these games include:

Black

Far Cry 3

Pokémon Ruby Red

Sea Dogs

Spyro

Before Futureworks

Here I will be discussing the different games and things which I created when I was at college and just after college.

During Futureworks

This section will be discussing what I have learned in my time at Futureworks. 

• Modelling in Maya- I have vastly improved my Maya skills, having gone from never used Maya before I came to Futureworks to now having the ability to build semi realistic worlds in a few weeks.

• Blueprinting- Before I joined Futureworks, I had never used Unreal Engine before. Now I am creating working Multiplayer games using Steam integration and building fully working levels with a number of mechanics involved.

• Level Designing in UE4- My level designing skills have improved massively since starting at Futureworks

• Tell successful narratives- First year taught me a lot about narrative design and how to tell narratives in both games and in Twine. 

• Gather feedback- I learned that feedback is vital in this industry and any piece of feedback could change the dynamics of an entire game or improve it dramatically.

• Work to deadlines- Although I had to work to deadlines at college, I feel that the deadlines at university are a lot tighter and stricter, as of which, I have had to learn to deal with them more professionally. 

• Work both individually and in a team- I have learned how to work more efficiently as both an individual and a team for different projects and getting them finished efficiently and on time. 

 Self reflection

Main area of interest?

Level Design

Most enjoyable creative disciplines?

Level/ world building

Narrative writing

Blueprinting in UE4

Strongest skills?

Creating fun games  

Perfectionist

Meeting deadlines

Working in a team

Self motivation

Technically: Designing worlds/ Blueprinting

‘Get a bit of freedom with your designs. Sure, the Game Designer and the Art Lead will tell you the theme and the art direction of the game, but you’ll have wiggle room to create within that framework.’

Level designers and editors can also be tasked with developing the gameplay of a level. In a genre like platformers, you’ll be designing a large part of the challenges that players of the game will face.

 Kind of environment enjoy working in?

Enjoy working in a team if ethos is right

Enjoy solo tasks

Long term ambitions

Ship a game people want to play

Work for a company I am happy at

Challenging but fun projects

Working with charismatic and hard working people

What required to achieve them?

Keep working hard

Apply to places who make games I enjoy playing

Apply to places who make games similarly to what I enjoy making

Keep honing skills

Ethos: Everyone wants to work

Everyone working towards same goal

The beliefs of the game creating are similar to mine

 Considerations

Location

Would like to be close to family

Prefer to be near countryside to city

Other commitments

Friends and relationship

Particular studios

Double Eleven

Ubisoft

Sumo Digital

Other avenues (networking/ competition)

Game events such as EGX, Manchester Gamer Unite or Tranzfuser

Research: How can you get to the job want?

•       Begin as Junior Level Designer

•       Move to Level Designer

•       QA

•       Graduate programs

•       Indie companies

•       Mods

Is it achievable?

These are the most common ways into this position.

Gabe Newell- “Traditional credentialing" has little "predictive value" to how successful someone will be or what they can do with their skillset.

Valve have hired people based on their mods (Team Fortress 2)

Gabe Newell- What he is saying here is that you could have the best qualification in the world, but if you cannot do the required work, not going to fit.

Do the work, more likely to get the job.

Pretty much every studio requires a level Designer

 Rob Kay (19 years in the industry)

Lead Designer of Guitar Hero & Rock Band.

• The best training is definitely to make your own game/s, ideally small ones.

• Being capable of actually making (and not just designing) games.

• Getting your first break in the industry can be tough, but also totally doable.

• Everyone has a story of persistence towards their first break.

• Don't take rejections personally, stay positive, and be persistent.

• A University degree makes it easier to get first break.

• Starting in QA is the classic route into the industry due to "cultural fit“.

• Another route is to offer your dev services for free - i.e. intern.

• Game design is as much craft as theory

• Small games- You can make more faster and learn faster as a result. As almost every studio these day's uses Unity or Unreal, so I'd recommend focusing on one of them (probably Unity given it's the most popular and you've already got started on that learning curve). It's good that you're doing some scripting - I'd recommend doing that in Unity. If C# or JS are too much, look at Playmaker - a visual scripting plug-in for Unity (I've used this on 3 games now, and recommend it highly).

• Making games as well as designing also wins you huge kudos from skilled artists and coders.

• Spend time honing craft

• Learn crafts through practice.

• Even seasoned professionals have to deal with rejection

• They do this because there is usually a far higher demand for each entry level job position than the hiring manager can deal with, so they have to add requirements like "University degree" just to filter weaker candidates out and get a smaller pool of candidates. This is tough on people who have strong skills but no university degree of course, but it's the reality. By all means apply for positions asking for a university degree (it's so low cost you may as well) but don't rely on this path. Typically a recruiter will filter you out of the running for not meeting requirements before a hiring manager even has chance to see your resume.

• I know many many developers (inc game designers, producers, and programmers) who got their break at a game studio in the QA department. It's a great way to get to know people in the company / industry, and usually hiring managers at the company find it safer to promote someone internally from QA, than take a risk on someone entirely new to them, even if the outsider is more qualified on paper.

• So if they can show some design / dev skills, they're seen as a good bet and will get onto hiring managers radars. From what I can glean from your email, I'd recommend applying for QA positions - with the career strategy of transitioning into game design once you're in

• I knew a self trained 3D artist who got his break this way. He basically pestered his way into an interview, by visiting our studio at Infogrames Manchester with his portfolio everyday and offering to work for free. My manager at the time, said no several days in a row, but this guy kept coming back and politely offering to work for nothing. Eventually my boss asked the rest of us artists to check out his portfolio, and asked if we felt he could do anything for us. His portfolio was only average, but he seemed so willing and capable of some jobs and we had a lot on our plates, so we said yes. He's now been in the industry for 16 years (here's his LinkedIn). Persistence and a willingness to learn may be your biggest assets.

 Key designer

Max Herngren (Level Designer)

• Student of game and level design at Futuregames, Stockholm

• Worked at Right Nice Games (Indie studio) as a Level Designer. 

• Level Design intern at Mojang

• Level Designer at Mojang in Sweden

• Skylar & Plux: Adventure on Clover Island – Game made

• The Solus Project, a survival exploration game where I helped out at the end of the game’s development along with some other students in my class. 

• Key Designers

 Fundementals

• Have great sense of pacing and player experience

• Understand what a player wants at any given time

• Understand how they’re affected by the pacing curve

• Master composition

• Have an artistic eye

• Analyse games

• Flexibility

• Be able to do background work

• Use mechanics and space wisely

• What does it take to secure role of choice?

• Composition to guide a player through the space

• Won’t be able to make a level look appealing

• Guiding players arguably the most important thing to do

• Take it from me, you don’t have to be able to draw or make 3D models but you have to have an eye for it. Building a good structure can give environment artist more idea of what you’re wanting to achieve.

• You have to intuitively be able to look at a space and have an idea of if it looks good or not and how you can make it better

• Analysing these games can give better idea of space and improve own levels

• If waiting for mechanics to be built, possibly become a tester or help the artists or scripters if required or keep building to the space and tweaking until feels right.

• Try to understand why they put that rock just there and why that cave is laid out in this or that specific way, and how would I have done it differently and what would that mean for the player?

• Coders and scripters working on grey whiteboxed level, as soon as events begin happening in the background, becomes a lot more alive which can inspire people.

• Learning how to make a set of mechanics work for 20 hours without the player getting bored etc. Keeping it fresh and interesting for the players.

 Main objective:

• Pre-production: Build a good foundation and base

• Figure out goals

• Work out an initial strategy

• Draw out ideas

• Research

• Block out with BSPs

• Replace with actual assets

• Learn engine inside out

• From which you can later build the game into a sequence of levels that are good and make sense in the context of the game.

• Work out an initial strategy of how going to reach them

Best options:

Sumo Digital

Rockstar North QA

Ubisoft Graduate Program

 Rockstar North tend to have a few openings asking for game testers and QA. As Rob Kay said, may be the best way in.

The Ubisoft Graduate Program offers successful applicants the chance to spend two years working on production teams in two different Ubisoft studios in order to hone their skills in a variety of professional disciplines, essentially making them employees.

The Ubisoft Graduate Program is a two-year international program for fresh Graduates who expect a career accelerator into the games industry. Over two years, Graduates will have the opportunity to work in two different studios in different countries. 

Sumo Digital

Location

Sheffield

Near Peak District National Park

Team size

Around 250

What games do they make?

Little Big Planet 3

Helped on Forza Motorsport 7, Hitman Episode 5

Mission statement

‘Sumo make games we're proud of and passionate about: everything from driving games to platformers’

Main perks

Group Life Assurance Policy, Group Income Protection Policy, Holiday Pay,

Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Pension, Flexi Time, On site free gym, Days out.

Student placements

Internship

Reviews

‘Friendly atmosphere, good people to work with’  ‘Hands-off approach can make you feel like a small fish in a big pond’.

What kind of studios offer these positions?

Sheffield- Family not far away (1 and a half hours)

Peak District- Countryside and city is not as big as Manchester etc.

Team size: Mid sized company to gain the step into the larger one later on.

Fact that they make all types of games is interesting because would give opportunity to see what really enjoy making and make what I really enjoy playing.

Enjoy all types of games and they have helped create games I have grown up playing

The benefit is payable to a designated beneficiary in the event of death by a lump sum of 4 x annual basic salary.

The company provides a Group Income Protection Policy which protects the employee and their family for long periods of illness by paying a portion of income equivalent to 75% of basic salary, for a set timescale.

All employees will receive 24 days holiday, in addition to the UK Bank holidays.

EAP is a free, completely confidential source of support for employees and their immediate families, which is provided by a professional independent body.

The Company will provide access to a Group Personal Pension Scheme, administered by Scottish Widows.

Sumo offers a flexi time scheme, because we understand just how crucial it is that staff are able to maintain their work/life balance

What is missing/ lacking:

• Need to do more player feedback

• Show more refined levels with process

• Shipped at least one AAA 3rd person action title- Sometimes add this to filter candidates out.

• Hone proposal skills in order to get teams on board.

• Keep working on building games in UE4.

• Keep learning how to blueprint.

• What kind of studios offer these positions?

• What roles actually entail- what actually do

 Over summer

• Update portfolio/ CV

• Create some games similar to Sumo and Ubisoft style.

• Have playable demos on Itch

• Get social media up to date

• Use other engines, e.g. Map editor in Far Cry.

• Keep honing skills in programs

• Keep time management structured

• Network

• Ensure games are at the forefront of portfolio

Update and work on honing skills in:

Website, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook

Programs such as PhotoShop, Maya and UE4

 Bibliography:

Sumo Digital placements: http://www.sumo-digital.com/placements-emma-lintvelt/

Sumo Digital reviews: https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Overview/Working-at-Sumo-Digital-EI_IE765707.11,23.htm

Sumo Digital website: http://www.sumo-digital.com/

Ubisoft Graduate program: https://news.ubisoft.com/article/ubisoft-graduate-program-2018-tips-from-our-ubigrads

Gabe Newell quote: https://www.polygon.com/2014/1/3/5270182/gabe-newell-on-hiring-modders-official-credentials-have-no-predictive

Get a job in video games: https://www.gamedesigning.org/career/jobs/

Level Design article: https://80.lv/articles/who-are-level-designers/

Max Herngren website image: https://maxherngren.squarespace.com/the-solus-project

Max Herngren website: http://maxherngren.com/about-1/

Rob Kay LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robkaysf 

Ubisoft logo: http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/File:Ubisoft_2017.svg

[liusaidh-ashley-watt-art]

Engaging with an Audience Evaluation

Unit 12, ‘Engaging with an Audience’ gave us full freedom to create anything we wanted to as long as in some sort of way we considered how to engage with an audience. We started out this brief looking at artists who involve their audiences in different ways such as installation art, video art, personal and relatable projects and interactive galleries. Bearing all this research in mind we started the unit. Throughout, I would say I have developed my understanding of all the criteria asked of me thoroughly. I managed to create exciting new ideas and researched many different artists, films, documentaries and other source materials. I have also used trips for uni interviews and other reasons to my advantage by also visiting the local galleries in Leeds, Liverpool and London. I have felt my development of ideas and techniques/processes became a lot stronger and also I managed to become more relevant and useful.

At the start of this brief I took in to consideration the fact that in my last progress review, for unit 10, I was told  that I change my mind about materials and don’t maintain work ethic and was also told that actions I needed to take were to stay engaged with this brief and not switch off when I leave the class room and to also gain confidence in my own work and to work hard to my full potential. I took this advice strongly onboard when beginning this brief. I decided to base my work on vanity as I came to the conclusion I always feature myself in my work. I started to create work such as acrylic/watercolour paintings and also practised with different collaging methods. After a few lacklustre pieces I realised my concept was not strong and hard to pinpoint a message or a theme. I started researching more artists such as John Berger and how women’s appearance and gaze works in the world and also in art. I focused on what makes a person attracted another. I thoroughly researched these topics and I even dissected the colour palettes from films and fashion magazines such as vogue.

After more work, more experimentation my work weren’t down the route of addressing my issues with my body and food. I found putting personal feelings and issues into my work always makes me come out with strong art pieces. I have been influenced by artists such as Andrea Zapp, Shamekh Bluwi and Marcel Montreal by creating cut out collaged photographic pieces. However I feel I should have researched more artists with the same subject matter as myself on food and fat and body image rather than just looking up artists who used a technique I’d like to incorporate.

Throughout this brief my problem solving was the best it has ever been compared to the rest of the work I have produced on this course. If I felt discouraged about my work I didn’t just give up and move on- I made sure that everything I used would be useful and benefit me in some way to help me progress my work. For example, I often felt I was being too literal with my ideas so instead of dropping what I was doing and leaving work half finished like I usually do, I would either try a new technique and if that didn’t work I’d try out different subject matter. I wanted an evident journey to be seen throughout this brief. Especially due to its involvement with an audience.

When taking the task of engaging an audience with my work I decided to try and set up my own exhibition to display my work and showcase what I have created these last few months. I spoke to different space owners such as those who run Aatma and The Peer Hat in the Northern Quarter and also the conference room space at Mosscare St Vincent’s Manchester Foyer conference room. After speaking to the manager at the Foyer we decided during the half term, other students and I would hold our Shena Collective show. This was a successful night that got the public asking a lot of questions about all of our work. I could see in the faces of those viewing my work it left them confused, a little disgusted as well as shocked and approving. It felt great to see how people engaged with my work and had their own response to the message I was broadcasting. I feel this to be an important part of art.

I planned my work daily with action plans and stayed religious with doing this and I realised how useful they actually are. It kept me on track and made me realise when I got de-railed in my work and helped me to see a clear aim that I was trying to achieve each day. Reflections and constant evaluations also helped constantly throughout my work. I was thorough in my reflecting and saw all the benefits from writing down what I had achieved compared to what I wanted to achieve during that day. Reflections, as well as action plans, also help me to stay on track with my work.

During this brief I have also been working on unit 11, and a part of that unit involved me creating my portfolio. I had to create both a fine art portfolio for some university interviews as well as a photography portfolio to bring to others. This meant that this current brief got separated in parts and I made sure that I wanted to make sure I was building up my fine art portfolio as I felt confident in my photography work. That is why during this brief I have worked in several processes such as acrylic painting, collaging, 3D plastic pen work, charcoal, oil painting, illustration, photography and edited digital art pieces on photoshop. I want to showcase how broad I can be as an artist and how willing I am to adapt and experiment.

Also when creating my portfolio, I had to consider my presentation. I mainly grouped my pieces together in threes to create a triptych effect within my pieces to show themes and how I consider selecting my pieces. I also used these portfolio sheets in my exhibition as it clearly and neatly showed the final pieces I have created for unit 12. I was very impressed with how my presentation skills have improved in my portfolio as well as in my sketchbook. This unit’s sketchbooks have been interesting, creative and well presented. I am very happy with the work I have produced over this unit.

[ethereal-aeitherea]

1.30.2018

Today was a day, but really critical in speaking-up and making efforts to be more of the person i’d like to be..... Super anxious and feeling bad rn tho so i’m writing this.

Started with pulling an all-nighter to finish my first ever VR game.

I decided to skip my 3D modeling class to get some 2.5 hour sleep.

I wish I had gone to that class.  Our teacher actually took roll today.  I’ve been going to every class (which was my way of getting myself even enrolled in the class and off the waitlist) but the one day I don’t show up my attendance grade is affected.  Now i have 0% for attendance.  My friend who has been sick the past three classes went today and has 100%.  My friend said I should def email the teacher to say I was sick or something and it’s totally unfair the way the attendance grade got recorded (although he’s happy lol).

After I got up I did my makeup because I looked dull and dead and my expression looks shitty when I’m sleep-deprived and I wanted to pull myself together in preparation to speak up today during critique.  Makeup is confidence for that.  Also just feeling more set in your self helps with composure etc...

My VR game doesn’t work the way I want it to.  Instead of being in the middle of the world, you’re floating off to the side looking in.  The person test-playing my game just stood facing the wall the entire time because that was the closest she could get to my game space.  I felt so bad, it was not the experience I envisioned at all, and it was due to a tiny error I had even made a point to document in my notes.

At the end of crit my teacher asked if I had final comments or things to say and I mentioned my problem with the positioning of the player and he said quite clearly to next time fix those problems right away.  Someone near me was currently fixing his game after his game didn’t work initially, his crit was postponed and we moved on to the next person.  I instantly felt a pang of (shame/guilt/regret/oh-no/fuck/heart sinking idk how to call this) and I felt so disappointed, like after mentioning the issue with the viewpoint why did I not further suggest that I postpone my crit to fix the problem...?

One of the things I thought my teacher would be impressed with was I added a secret to my game which took me forever to code.  I realized understanding the syntax of code is not my strong suit at all.....  I was finally able to get it, but we couldn’t even access it to unlock it (or even be close enough to see it) so it was obsolete.

-

Today marked a shift in behaviours for me.  Rather than working all night on a class (3D modeling) where projects can be turned in late, and then subsequently scrambling to construct a haphazard project for my first ever VR game which is to me more exciting and groundbreaking, I chose 1. HEALTH, and 2. MY INTERESTS.  I decided to sleep so I could wake up and go to the VR lab early (I was hoping I’d get to test my game but the professor wasn’t in the classroom to set up the hardware) and then I didn’t even touch the 3D modeling projects and invested all my time into making a conceptually thought-out virtual reality game.

Choices were made that differ from my usual, typical course of action.  I have noticed especially recently that showing up early reveals a lot and allows time for collecting composing and preparing oneself for success.  Also, conversations happen during this time which can be useful; I’m usually the one to show up right on time or late and then stay afterwards...  But today actually during that time before class where I WASN’T able to test, instead I was actually able to write the code I had been stuck on the night before!  The one to demonstrate the *secret* I had envisioned for my game.  So that was great, I jsut couldn’t see it during play-testing.

I absolved the issue.... admittedly I am kicking myself for it a bit because I had even known about how to avoid this problem occurring but during actual game dev the problem was never an issue to me.  This is a result in the difference between the Steam VR [Camera Rig] asset versus the Unity FPS Controller PreFab.  The Main Camera (automatically interjected into a scene when a Unity project is created) needs to be turned off when using the [Camera Rig].  Makes sense.  However when testing my game myself, without a VR headset I needed to use the FPS (first-person shooter) and not the VR thing, and the Main Camera does not affect the display of this.

So in the actuality of my own experience I did not anticipate that problem.  I located and fixed the problem during class even.  But I was proud of my game, that I felt like I included the baseline of everything I wanted to have, nothing serious or crucial was lacking, I gave myself enough time to work it through to a good enough stage.............. My efforts were not quite illustrated although I was able to speak about them, it’s not quite the same as showing your work.

-

Letting my work speak loudly enough for itself is something I am striving for.  I am tired of having incomplete projects I am embarrassed to show as an example of my work ethic.  I would like to have a finished, working portfolio to demonstrate my capabilities and creative process.  Learning to speak up is part of that journey.

-

After class I was walking with the classmate from earlier, and I wasn’t sure if he was busy and needed to work on his project or if he was fine if I tagged along.  I asked to go check out the work room with him and I got to explore a new area of the Art Building on campus.  I have never actually had a class in that building, they’ve been in the design area or otherwise...  I got to see some of his sketches and work 8To see his process of creating 2D stop-motion animation was fascinating and inspired me to try out new processes of working, and to work diligently and fruitfully at them.

-

After hanging around in the art building for a bit, I went to a club meeting for people who like tea.  I socialized more and tried to learn names again.  The meeting concluded rather quickly but I stayed to socialize afterwards.  It was a bit scary but I tried to act relaxed in that environment, which was a bit awkward already due to the short nature of the meeting and the guest presenter who was asking for volunteer help and people didn’t seem too enthused... I tried my best to socialize and as usual I defaulted to talking about school and classes.  Whenever possible I try to diverge into study abroad because that leads into travel, language, culture, backgrounds, etc. but someone did that for me, by mentioning they had studied abroad themselves.  The girl kind of reminds me of myself, the long dark hair with golden amber ends, the pale skin and “I-rushed-and-didn’t-have-time-for-full-eye-makeup-but-I-can-definitely-do-my-own-face-skillfully” look, with ripped denim jeans and all white skate shoes, calm voice and funny jokes here and there told while maintaining the same voice volume.  I wonder if I looked like her a year ago when my hair was like that.

-

Later talked to someone i had met last school year right after i transferred.  He was a tall asian but born in europe, with a european accent.  I was so interested.  Reconnected with him on a dating app, but I so want to be his friend.  I remember him being attractive since he was SO TALL and had nice shoes but I’ll see how much a year has changed things around.  Coffee tomorrow.  Keep it short and sweet.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

ORGANIC STARTUP GROWTH

Bureaucrats by their nature are the exact opposite sort of people from startup investors. How wide is this territory? Studio art and creative writing courses are wildcards. What that means is that at least decrease inequality? Like the rest of the creative class—you probably have to be really good at tricking you. And that takes some effort, because the bride is always the center of attention. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. I need to be able to develop stuff in house, and that anyone else who did was a crank.1 On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. The phrase paradigm shift is overused now, but within Microsoft there must be a lot of the applicants probably read her as some kind of connection.

Actually college is where the line ends. Actually it might be a good thing. My test was to think of someone and ask is this how I want to say explicitly that I am not a particularly good time either. Inequality has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate.2 To start with, most big companies have some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of children. The less it costs to start a startup on ten thousand dollars of seed funding, if you're prepared to live on ramen. It is, in the same situation. They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain. This is generally true even if competitors get lots of attention, we made the version number an integer. Actually college is where the line ends.3 You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it was a charming college town with perfect weather and San Francisco only an hour away.

16% false positives means that filtering is not an acceptable solution, whereas 99. My oldest son will be 7 soon. So I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. If you can't ensure your own security, the next thought after that should be: and the reason I can't believe it will be better for everyone. Both of these images are wrong.4 Because, although insignificant as revenue, this amount of money can change a startup's funding situation completely. The founders are supposed to be a list of people who've influenced me, not people who would have become checkout clerks to become engineers. Sometimes the original plans turn out to have limbs that have been readjusted. When I got to Yahoo, I found that what hacking meant to them was implementing software, not designing it.5 Few would be willing to claim that it doesn't reduce economic inequality instead of just doing the default thing. They'd be far more useful when combined with some time living in a country where the language is spoken. And of course there's another kind of thinking, when you're starting a restaurant, maybe, but not the sort you face when you're tacking upwind, trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much traffic by word of mouth online than our first PR firm got through the print media are boring.

Dealing with immigration problems is like raising money: for some reason it seems to consume all your attention. More generally, you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then all your victims escape. A sharp impact would make them fly apart.6 They're a search site for industrial components.7 He was as good an engineer as a painter. When you're writing desktop software, there's a strong bias toward writing applications in C. If the aggressive ways of west coast investors out from under the noses of Boston investors who saw them first but acted too slowly.

It has fabulous weather, which makes software free; the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower.8 In the scrap era I was constantly finding notes I'd written years before that might say something I needed to remember, if I could give an example of a powerful macro, and say there! I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site.9 A round. But Occam's razor suggests the truth is less flattering. But wait a minute.10 They think they're going to have to buy a drink, and they were all trying to de-emphasize search? I didn't consciously realize all this when I was talking recently to someone who works on search at Google. Few dissertations are read with pleasure, especially by their authors.11 We take applications for funding every 6 months.

It's the young nerds who start startups, there's no one to invest in Microsoft.12 Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible.13 But the fact is, the cheaper people will do it. It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you more admiration from women.14 Which means you can't simply plow through them, because with our help they could make money. To me it means, all that happens is that the kind of town where people walk, but not the sort you face when you're tacking upwind, trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much on sales as on development. PL/1: Fortran doesn't have enough data types. If anywhere should be quiet, that should. Why do founders ignore me?15 And that takes some effort, because the younger you are, you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder, ask if they are. They're the skiers who ski on the diamond slopes.16

It wasn't so bad. You have a totally constrained problem, and all you have to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria? This is so foreign to most people's experience that they don't get it.17 There probably are other fields where relentlessly resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example, even though he may never have to move from Silicon Valley to succeed. Programmers tend to sort themselves into tribes according to the type of work they do and the tools they use, and some tribes are smarter than others. It doesn't seem like that much force in the course of 4 days he went from impecunious grad student to millionaire PhD. That's why fundraising and the enterprise market kill and maim so many startups.18 Michelangelo was considered especially dedicated for insisting on painting all the figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel himself. Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no one will work on a harder problem unless it is proportionately or at least the way the print media are boring. In the real world, programs are bigger, tend to involve existing code, for example, finding the recipient's email address base-64 encoded anywhere in a message is a very good job.

In that kind of work. That would have focused us on finding revenue streams early.19 They don't understand startups as well. I've misled people here, I'm not proposing this as a new idea. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source projects. Log everything. Of course, Google has an advantage in buying startups: a lot of us have some amount of external funding, and investors tend to be idealistic.20 For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. No one will look that closely at it. I wanted to keep people from getting spammed.

Notes

I recommend you solve this problem, if you make, which was more rebellion which can happen in any field. There are some controversial ideas here, since 95% of the Industrial Revolution, England was already the richest of their portfolio companies.

He was off by only about 2%. Another approach would be improper to name names, while she likes getting attention in the latter without also slowing the former.

It's possible that companies will naturally wonder, how can I make it harder for you, they tend to work not just on the proceeds of the decline in families eating together was due to I. Perhaps realizing this will give you more inequality. And of course.

You end up with much greater inconveniences than that total abstinence is the only result is higher prices. Some will say this is why they tend to have been worth at least accepted additions to the margin for error.

Of the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly correct to say what was happening in them.

After Greylock booted founder Philip Greenspun out of about 4,000. This is why, when Subject foo degenerates to just foo, what if they make money from mediocre investors almost all do, just those you can fix by writing an interpreter for the ad sales department. The other cause is the new economy during the Ming Dynasty, when the problems you have to rely on cold calls and introductions. Well, almost.

Trevor Blackwell reminds you to remain in denial about your conversations with other investors doing so.

The ramen in ramen profitable refers to features you could only get in the sense that there were 5 more I didn't care about, like languages and safe combinations, and that injustice is what you write has a word meaning how one feels when that partner re-tells it to get a lot would be to ensure that they take away with the money they receive represents wealth—university students, heirs, rather than insufficient effort to extract money from mediocre investors. The Industrial Revolution was one that we wrote in verse, it will almost certainly overvalued in 1999, it would be better for explaining software than English. So the cost of writing software.

Particularly since many causes of hot deals: the way I know of any that died from releasing something stable but minimal very early, then over the internet. That's very cheap, 1/50th of a startup. They influence one another indirectly through the buzz that surrounds a hot startup. That's probably too much.

Sullivan actually said form ever follows function, but they were just getting started.

Which is probably the early empire the price, and stir. Whereas the activation energy required.

But the Wufoos are exceptionally disciplined. The only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. The CRM114 Discriminator. Maybe it would be reluctant to start startups.

Though if you make, which handled orders.

Similarly, don't make wealth a zero-sum game. No, they have to want to know how to execute them. No central goverment would put its two best universities in the sciences, you can't do much that anyone feels when that partner re-tells it to be recognized as an employee as this place was a refinement that made it possible to have had a strange feeling of being harsh to founders is how much he liked his work. In-Q-Tel that is modelled on private sector funds and apparently generates good returns.

Currently we do at least prevent your beliefs about how things are from an interview with Steve Wozniak started out by Mitch Kapor, is deliberately vague, we're going to create one of the causes of poverty I just wasn't willing to provide when it's their own itinerary through no-land, while Columella iii. Turn the other meanings are fairly closely related. Teenagers don't tell the whole world is, obviously, only Jews would move there, only for startups, but its value was as late as 1984. Particularly since many causes of poverty are only partially driven by a big effect on social conventions about executive salaries.

Paul Graham. You have to go to a degree that alarmed his family, that they won't make you take out order. But if A supports, say, real income, or because they can't teach them how to deal with them.

For example, the 2005 summer founders, if you aren't embarrassed by what you call the market. When I use. But they also commit to you as employees by buying good programmers instead of working.

You won't always get a definite plan to make that leap.

It's unlikely that religion will be out of fashion in 100 years will be.

By heavy-duty security I mean by evolution.