getting started
Recently, I’ve been playing the fantastic comedy imsim, Skin Deep by Blendo Games. It’s made in a spinoff of the Doom 3 engine, and has a built-in mod loader on the main menu, so I decided to crack open the game’s existing maps and figure out how to make my own! Read on for the things I found out, and how to get started yourself.
shooting a roll of harman red on my om-10
I recently got hold of a roll of Harman RED; it’s a 35mm redscale film stock. Redscale film is film that is wound backwards in the film canister; that is, it’s wound in a way that you shoot through the layers of the emulsion back-to-front. This results in a large amount of the light entering the camera being absorbed by the red backing layer, resulting in images that are saturated with reds and oranges! You end up with these wonderfully strange and apocalyptic pictures. On top of this, some film scanning machines can get a little confused by this and try to correct the image by massively upping the missing blue levels in the image, which gives you this incredible orange-to-pink-to-blue gradient over the image. Let’s tell a little narrative with these dramatic crimson captures!
useful info
Here’s a link to a really, really well-made video about UI layout engines and how they actually work - specifically, the Clay UI layout engine. Anyone who has tried making their own UI system in a game engine will get a kick out of this, I think! Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by9lQvpvMIc
more photos for your eyes!
It’s been a slow and meandering winter, amidst a backdrop of unfortunate chaos from overseas. Let us instead turn our attention to the interplay of light and chemicals! I’ve got a few tasty snaps I took during December last year. I travelled to Saltburn-by-the-Sea to spend Christmas with my girlfriend’s family, so I wanted to capture some of the various sights and sounds of the seaside town in the off-season. Read on and enjoy the sights!
what i’m thinking about next
You know what rules? Hot chocolate. And with a recent cold snap, that’s exactly what has been keeping warmth in my beslippered toes when I shuffle through to work at 8:00am on the weekdays. My freelance game optimization work has been chugging along nicely, and I’m currently working with a really lovely client based in mainland Europe - so I’ve been keeping an earlier schedule than I usually do this time of year. It’s been nice seeing the frost on the grass outside, as I warm up my brain and body for the day. But, as I’m prone to do, I’ve been planning for the year ahead. Here are my schemes laid bare for all to see:
