• One should determine task/ challenge based upon the worth of the prize(s) up for grabs.
• There are generally two distinct themes of task/ challenge: publicity/ PR orientated or community orientated.

From a business standpoint it would make sense to capitalise on the publicity/ PR theme when the prize(s) involved will be desired by a large amount of members. As it will prompt a good proportion of the board it will mean greater publicity. Two examples would be to ‘like’ the Facebook page or to hash tag the site on Twitter.

More participants = more likes/ tweets/ whatever = more publicity = encourage more members/ contributors to the website.

The problem with this type of task is that it’s very impersonal and uninspiring. It’s not fun; people are just clicking a button or typing a message to people on their friends list. Creativity is generally not encouraged nor is friendly/ communal competitiveness spurred. The competition then becomes somewhat of a raffle: everyone is on even ground and the names are picked randomly. Granted it’s then as fair as you could hope for, but it’s then boring and without any opportunity to display any sort of extraordinary desire for the prize (“this guy clearly wants it badly/ passionately: his entry proves it, let’s give it to him”).

Competitions based on creativity/ the community are generally fun to take part in. If the admins were to somehow publicise the entries on the front page of the website (not forum) they might be able to draw in new members and improve the creative output for future competitions. These allow members to show off their talents and maybe produce some crayzay banter that’s a pleasure to observe/ read. Creative tasks also require more effort, and so people who want the prize(s) most might in fact end up winning as the desire can be visibly obvious within text/ an image (the task).

The problem with this type of task is that people who aren’t so talented with a particular piece of software (Photoshop, for example) could easily be intimidated/ put off by others who can simply produce a better looking entry. But some people are much better at written prose, or making jokes, or knowledgeable of a particular subject related to the task, so there will always be someone with an advantage. That’s life. In-jokes are generally funnier than regular pop-culture ones, so people who have been active for a long time might have a lot more material to work with. The person(s) determining the winner should maybe treat these with a pinch of salt.

A successful/ fulfilling competition should include both of the above types of task. It’ll be good for both the website as a brand and it’ll encourage creative output/ competition from active members. Personally, I believe this to be a good formula to work by:

• If prize is worth more than x amount (in monetary value/rarity) or is an item that will attract a large proportion of the board, assign a community/ creativity based task as the primary focus of the voting/ winning criteria. As a secondary task, request some sort of publicity/ PR from us such as a Facebook like or Twitter hashtag.
• If prize is worth less than x amount (in monetary value/rarity) or is an item that is probably quite niche/ unpopular, assign a publicity/ PR orientated task as the primary focus of the voting/ winning criteria. As a secondary task, set a small creative/ community based task to encourage participation from people otherwise not interested.

Sought after = people willing to put more effort into their entries. Not sought after = probably a low effort output by members either because there’s no competition or because the item isn’t very appealing.  Choose the type of competition accordingly.

I do, however, still play on friend’s multi-player servers occasionally, in which I muck about with the creative mode making cool shit.  This time I’ve decided to share a particular creation of mine here on the blog.  It began with a simple imprint of a creeper face on the side of mountain, and developed into an underground ‘base’.  Take a look:

Each of those walkways give access to two rooms of the same size; both of which for one player.  Maybe a storage room and a crafting room?  I don’t care, creative mode is just making shit that looks cool, not stuff for functional use!  A total of five walkways means five people can inhabit this ‘base’.  you can find more screenshots of it (among other creations) on my Minecraft Photobucket album.

This sort of post might become a somewhat regular occurance here on the blog, as I’ve made a quite a few structures like this in minecraft over the past year on several of friend’s servers.  Although the single player now bores me, I still really enjoy the social/communal effort that the multiplayer offers, so I’ll still be active on the game and making stuff from time to time.

Tagged: Base, Creeper, Minecraft Building ]]> http://andrewjevans.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/minecraft-creeper-face-base/feed/ 0 Evo Creeperbase_01 Creeper_entrance entrance Creeperbase_02 Creeperbase_03 http://andrewjevans.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/my-introduction-to-time-lapse-photography/ http://andrewjevans.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/my-introduction-to-time-lapse-photography/#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:26:34 +0000 Andrew Evans http://andrewjevans.wordpress.com/?p=507 ]]> Lately I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries and youtube videos that make use of time-lapse photography or slow motion, and have been fascinated by the effect it can produce and change in the environment it can so quickly display.  I’ve been meaning to dabble in time-lapse for a while now, and seeing what can be produced this way spurred me on to finally give it a go.

It was the week of the 24/09, and I happened to be still up at six in the morning.  So I decided I should do something to make the ruined next day somewhat worthwhile, as well as to get back into making animations for my youtube channel.  I set up my ‘Microsoft LifeCam’ out of my flat window guerilla-style as seen in the photographs below, and began capturing frames on to my spare harddrive every thirty seconds:

Despite the program (Stop Motion Pro) giving me an incredibly hard time on most occasions (crashing, error messages and such) the twelve-hour capture went without fault.  Would have been incredibly frustrating if it stopped working whilst I was busy elsewhere.  After rendering the final piece and reading comments left by viewers, I made a list of things I should bear in mind for future attempts:

• Edge of window is in shot prevents the illusion of being suspended in the air and doesn’t allow for optimum scope.
• No one wants to see a miserable street in a time-lapse video; something much more interesting would be preferable.
• Something in shot must change significantly throughout the capture, such as clouds or the sun (actual sun in shot), lights make for a good rapid-fire change in visuals, such as building lights of rooms turning off as it changes from day to night – or car lights on the motorway.

So here it is: more information can be found in the description box, and (as always) make sure you’re watching in HD!

I’d like to travel to the Lake District or somewhere around Wales to find some really secluded spots to capture a sun rise/set with a proper (DSLR) camera.  a really high quality capture of nature in a windy or sun-blazed environment would look stunning.  I’m rearing to make use of my newly found collection of jazz hop to accompany such a thing.

Behind me is what used to be a 80×90″ wall of plain blue textured wallpaper.  What it’s becoming is a something not too dislike a 80×90″ wall of blue textured wallpaper with a lot of 4×4″ pieces of card stuck on to it; all having had pencil drawn on to them resembling someone else’s work of creativity.  Ironically it now becomes creative artwork of my own.  Not too shabby, eh?  The above photo is the original attempt at this style of… decorating, which is on the wall above my shelves on top of where my monitor is.  Those squares are a different size, so I’ve had to keep the two separate otherwise they wont correlate properly.

With the above measurement as the rough estimate of the overall size of the wall, the power of science has found that it’ll probably fit around 400 individual squares on to it, not taking into consideration the posters that are/ will be placed among them.  I simply load an image from Google into Photoshop and zoom in to a respectable degree and copy that shit on to a square.  Breaking one up into more than a single piece requires some ultra-skilled artistry known as placing the paper up against the monitor and lightly marking the lines that must join up on to the next square.  I can take a lot more credit when it comes to the shading/ colouring, though, so it’s all good.  Maybe?

The theme is videogames and film/ television productions that I particularly enjoy.  Maybe I’ll do one of those ‘name as many as you recognise’ challenges at the end of it all.  Adding in a few posters breaks up the colour and structure (and helps me along with the end-result!) which stops it becoming a mass of grey.  The far right lower 2×2 drawing is of El Borbah, by the way:  Charles Burns’ creation featured in his graphic novel by the same name.  I’d recommend any fan of the surreal to give it a read.

A clearer view of how the individual squares look together can be seen below; unfortunately I didn’t really put much effort into planning the overall positioning of this piece as a whole, so in regards to the squares it’s a bit off-centre.  I’ll be filling in those 3 or 4 mainly-white pieces with SC2 related stuff no doubt.

This will be something I’ll update from time-to-time: when the wall looks significantly different I’ll whack some more photos up right up until the point of completion.

The United States Senate is in the process of considering bill S.978, a bill “To amend the criminal penalty provision for criminal infringement of a copyright,” or as you might know it, the Anti-Streaming Bill. There’s been some discussion about what it really means and how it would affect stuff we care about, so I’d like to clear everything up. To be blunt, if passed it would pretty significantly reconfigure American copyright law in ways that could honestly really hurt internet culture in general and our video game communities specifically.

 So what does it do? Its stated purpose is to attack the online streaming of copyrighted works, specifically films and live television. It tries to do this by criminalizing some electronically transmitted (read: internet) public performances of copyrighted works.

Source

Read the Bill

This video by David “X” explains the bill in an articulate and passionate way without interjecting any misinformation:

Not to come across as a fear-monger or a sensationalist; the bill is in it’s earliest stages of development, but the general idea of what it aims to do is just one step further in the wrong direction in regards to America and internet freedom. It will probably be turned down or heavily revised after the amount of attention it’s getting across the internet, but the fact it’s been proposed in the first place is depressing.

Though I’m not living in the USA, this bill would still have a great impact on the types of video I could watch in my spare time.  After all, the internet is a world-wide network without many noticeable boundaries between the vast number of countries that share in its use.

Petition/ voice your opinion

You might notice the final image has several missing details that the previous screenshot had present; this is because, even though I advanced the textures and lighting, I deviated from the reference simply for personal aesthetic preference and got rid of some things I didn’t like the look of so much.  It took a total of 13 days of on-and-off work; here ya go:

Click to view it as the original size, or go here to browse through the individual images within my Photobucket mapping album.

I used Stop Motion Pro v4 with a Logitech E3500 webcam to shoot the frames and produce the raw animation, refined the film in Sony Vegas 8.0 and then uploaded to my Youtube channel.  Further information can be found in the video descriptions.  If you recognise the music tracks I’ve used without looking, massive love to you.

Revenant Rack is a Left 4 Dead map that I created over the course of around 2 months, slowly chipping away at recreating my house inside the L4D universe. I included “an experimental map” in the description as it quite literally is my house floating in the void, and I began the production without much direction purpose-wise.

Weapons, ammunition and health supplies are all scattered around the building in strategic places – some will make you come out of any camping spots you might discover. There are also some positions such as the roof and outside the grounds (in the void/skybox area) that will noticeably have an effect on the difficulty; play it how you like – properly or not! :P

The ‘activator’ or trigger for the survival game to begin is in the garage – on the floor to the left you’ll see a radio transmitter.

I published this survival map on the 6th February this year, after two months of on-and-off production.  This map was made during my learning stages of L4D Authoring Tools (provided by Valve after buying the game) after deciding to have a break from making deathmatch maps  with Source SDK.  There’s pretty much no difference between the programs regarding their function and layout, but there were a couple of elements to the designing of levels that was much more important to nail.  Things like lighting and weapon entities, etc.

If you have L4D, give it a go! :)

How To Install

• Download the .rar by clicking the image at the top of this post
• Extract the files into the ‘addons’ folder within /steamapps/Left 4 Dead/

I’ve noticed a lack of tutorials on how to do this (they’re either pathetically vague or terribly explained) so I made sure to document my progress when I first modified my Color so I could provide a comprehensive guide afterwards.  Hopefully I have provided sufficient information throughout to explain the incredibly easy procedure that it is.  If you have the DMG model (original) or even the Pocket version, most of the steps will still apply, however due to the differing appearances of the circuit board and such you might feel a tad lost.  I might do a mini-post sometime in the future that shows the differences between the three models.

What You Will Need:

1. Small flat-headed screwdriver – I used a 1.8 mm size, but I’ve read elsewhere that a 2 mm also does the trick
2. As for paint, the Krylon Fusion range has been a recommended quite highly, however I used standard acrylic Humbrol model paint.
3. Anti-static bag for the circuit board (to be on the safe side)
4. A regular plastic bag to keep other items in (screws, rubber pads, d-pad, buttons etc)
5. Masking tape or duct tape – either will do just fine if you’d like some sort of stencil effect

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Stage 1 – Dismantling The Game Boy

You’ll have already noticed that the Game Boy is screwed together with tri-forked screws.  These are ‘security’ screws that Nintendo use to deter people from opening their products up to fiddle around.  Well, you certainly don’t need to invest in some speciality screwdrivers: a small flat-headed screwdriver will do the job just fine.  I used  a 1.8 mm flat head and stuck it between two of the three forks – pressed down really hard – and evenly unscrewed all four of them.  There are a further two screws inside the battery compartment.  Once they’re done, you can go ahead and take the rear section of the GB off.  You’ll then see the following:

To the right of the above picture you can see the rear section.  Two things need to be done before it’s ready to be painted:

• Unscrew the metal plate – these screws are regular philips ones (four-forked).
• Using something thin but sturdy, poke out the battery connector from the small compartment.  On the above image, the left-most red circle shows the hole that’s big enough to poke something through to do this.  This might take a while, but you definitely need to remove it: you do NOT want paint on the connectors.

NOTE: MAKE SURE TO PLACE ALL SCREWS AND OTHER SMALL ITEMS INTO A PLASTIC BAG – DON’T LOOSE YOUR SHIT

Regarding the front part of the GB, the first step is to unscrew the three remaining philips screws circled below:

Before you finally separate the circuit board from the front section of the GB, be sure to disconnect that orange strip at the top.  To do so, simply use your fingernail to slide the two brown latches back as far as they’ll go, and then gently pull out the strip.  Shown below:

You may now completely remove the circuit board, placing it into an anti-static bag if you so wish.  You’ll be presented with the d-pad, buttons, on/off switch and the start and select buttons.  Don’t forget the small black plastic square that acts as the cover to the infra-red light (can be seen at the bottom-left of the above photo).  Take all of this stuff out and place into a separate bag along with the screws.  The two plastic halves of the Game Boy are ready for the next stage.

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Stage 2 – Preparing Your Game Boy For Painting

An annoying fact is that the screen cannot be disconnected from the front half of the GB.  This is where the masking or duct tape comes in.  Cut small strips of it and stick it carefully around the screen; making sure to not only cover all of the surface area, but also to prevent the tape from going on to the area that you want painted – the actual Game Boy’s plastic.  Below is a photo of how I did it; notice the stupid amount of tape used and the careful following of the line around the edges of the screen.

You also want to do the same – though this does not require as much attention to detail – to the spongy square directly behind the screen.  Make sure to also cover that orange strip as much as possible, as you DO NOT want to get paint on the part that goes inside the connector.  Observe:

Stage complete!  Both parts of the Game Boy should now be void of anything that can possibly be removed: the rest covered up as instructed.  Next stage.

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Stage 3 – Painting The Game Boy!

This part requires no formal guidelines, really.  I only used acrylic sprays for my parts, and it took an hour or so to do it properly – not allowing the paint to run by applying brief sprays every 15 minutes or so until it was completely painted (spray painting 101).  To begin with, I painted the whole thing matte white:

Mid-way I placed the buttons back in for fun to see what it would look like:

I decided that I wanted something more than just plain ol’ white.  One thing to note about the colour white is that any small amount of dirt or coloured marks stand out like a sore thumb.  When I applied masking tape in the following section, I noticed the difference once I had taken it off – there was a clear line already contrasting the clean vs dirty sides.  It looks really nice, but that’s a negative aspect you mightn’t want to deal with.  Now then: I put masking tape firmly around the whole of the two parts and made sure there were no gaps (hah) or unsealed areas, and sprayed the exposed area with matte black:

And what I was left with – after an hour or so to make sure it was completely dry – was this:

Somehow the paint seeped through the masking tape.  Oops.  So I re-applied the tape on the opposite side (covering the black) and sprayed the offending black with white.  As you can see, it sorted it out and finished the painting process as far as I was concerned:

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Stage 4 – Putting It Back Together

This is pretty simple; just go back over the above instructions in reverse order and bear the following points in mind:

• The screws vary in size: biggest ones are used for the outside screws (visible from the back of the Game Boy case) and the ones that go into the two slots within the battery compartment.  The other, smaller screws, go directly into the circuit board illustrated in the previous image of the three red-ringed screws in Stage 1.
• Push the small battery connector back into the slot so that the spring is closest to the top of the GB.
• Put the orange strip back into the little slot and make sure it’s firmly in place before gently closing up the latches with your fingernail.

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Final Note: I’ve noticed this post gets viewed at least five or six times every single day, so how about you send me a photo of your finished game boys via the comments or PM and I’ll feature them in a blog post!

• The summary should not exceed 200 words.
• The game must be a “psychological action thriller” like Alan Wake (the prize was a LE of the game).
• For the sake of humour, any characters must be Thunderbolt writers.

Just to be clear, I chose Fraser McMillan as my protagonist, and took the term ‘psychological’ literally and based the game within his mind.  Here’s the entry:

Fraser is alive. What about his body, lying inside that coffin? Doesn’t matter – Fraser is alive. Many people believe life ceases after one’s body has been sentenced to the earth, others hope for a journey of transcendence into the blissful afterlife of ‘heaven’. Unfortunately neither proved true for Fraser; he awakened in a state of what some might call purgatory. Here, deep within the recesses of his immortal psyche, he sits. He may relive his entire life in a millisecond, or slow down each day as though it were a century. Realising where one went wrong does not bode well for an eternal being to have on the mind, however.

Fraser is changing history. His new, fantasy life he dreams of unknowingly alters the course of time itself and warps it as though he were a God. History does not like this. It has sent its Guardians of Time to stop Fraser once and for all.

In this game you play as the murderer of History as we know it, Fraser, and must delve deep into your deranged psyche to distort Time so much as to eradicate the fascist dictator of History that is God for your own beautiful pleasure.

Terry Pratchett’s trademark anthropomorphism within his Discworld books played influence in the idea that ‘history’, ‘time’ and ‘god’ in this game were actual conscious beings.  The following is an elaboration and continuation of the narrative in a more formal manner – enjoy:

As our poor Fraser’s mental health (indeed, he no longer has a physical form) has naturally deteriorated from endless purgatorial repeating of his life – each and every point at which he made even the slightest mistake made blindingly clear – his anguish amounts so much as to somehow bring him up a notch in the metaphysical food chain: he is able to manipulate his nightmare and change those mistakes he made into a perfect stream of successes.

This new found power is actually changing history in the real world, however.  Much like you see in sci-fi films, the present is instantly rewritten to suit whatever past has been newly created, and no-one is any the wiser.  God, who is in charge of History and in turn Time, sees this as blasphemy of the highest order and uses Fraser’s method of time manipulation against him.  Fraser, not wanting to lose his new-found power and unaware (and so warped that he certainly wouldn’t care if he did) that he was altering reality into a sadistic and apocalyptic Earth, sees God as pure evil after his attempt to end his existence.

Obsessed with self-righteousness and metaphysical power, he sets on destroying God by warping Time (and in turn History) so much as to undo the very fabric of the universe.  Fraser is an arrogant, ignorant child of Time manipulation, however, and has to learn a few lessons before he can take on the big boys…

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Some thought-provoking questions I wanna throw out there are:

• What life did Fraser live before he died – what did he do, and would it explain why he’s in purgatory?
• Could the acronym of FRASER mean he’s some kind of machine?  Is this all some kind of global conspiracy against God – the final act of man to triumph over the ultimate power?
• Where does Satan come into this?  What side would he take, if any, and how would Fraser be affected by that decision?

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I’d definitely envision this game in the Third Person category; not only would it suit the purgatorial setting of his life on constant show at a distance, but would allow the narrative to be developed in a much more dramatic way by showing changes to the protagonist’s appearance.

Some random thoughts
The game could begin slap bang in the middle of a particularly agonising point of his life, unknown to the viewer that he is actually dead and is viewing the event purely via metaphysical means.  Maybe his death is kept a secret for the whole game, and the crazy time warping and battle with God is made to seem like it were taking place in reality?.  Maybe inside his head is actually reality, and he has simply escaped the tyrannical reign of God by somehow defeating the dream-world that would be considered by the unsuspecting human to be the REAL reality.  If you’re confused, I apologise.