Journals

Skals9 years ago2015-07-13 09:19:12 UTC 11 comments
Hi everyone, Skals / Albert here.

A few months ago I made a post about me being in my final year of Uni and apologizing for not having spare time to go on TWHL and such.

Well recently I finished my Uni course - Games Design BSc Honours degree, and I got a first in it, yay! - that's like an A basically. So now I'm a graduate :)

Also I've managed to land a job at TTGames - http://www.ttgames.com/
and I've worked here for almost a month now.

They only make LEGO games atm as they're owned by Warner Brothers, but everyone here is great and I really like the environment I'm working in.
I'm only doing a QA testing job, I test the games, look for bugs etc. so it's not the most amazing job, but I get to work hand-in-hand with all the developers, and it's a stepping stone for something bigger so I love it.

With work and all I still don't have much free time, but I wanted to pop in and thank you guys for putting up with me for the last 6 or so years,
because you guys at TWHL made me passionate about designing games and helped me improve loads and get to this point. Thank you all :)
Skals10 years ago2013-11-09 21:41:23 UTC 10 comments
Hmmmm so, maybe somebody's wondering where I went, probably not, but maybe somebody will read this journal! And that would make me happy, yay!

Since the beginning of this school term, I've been very busy with Uni. Being a second year games design student, I spend 50% of all my time working on games design assignments:
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,and the other 50% partying:
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,going to events:
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and procrastinating (very important):
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,so I've had no time to do things like playing games, or coming to TWHL for that matter. I felt like making a journal to let people know I am in fact not dead. So yeah, how is everyone doing?
Skals11 years ago2013-08-28 18:58:52 UTC 6 comments
Hello TWHL, I'm back from a long vacation in Latvia. What have I been up to? Well the usual stuff.
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(That's me in the rasta hat).
A lot of things happened... Met a lot of relatives, friends, babysit a lot of children, Had a few adventures like nearly crashing in a car, falling out of a boat which then drowned, also broke one of my fingers. Had a great time, but now I'm back. Back to my computer... Just sitting here... At my computer...... Fuck.
Skals11 years ago2013-06-04 21:30:49 UTC 6 comments
I remember when I was 16 I used to take the train to college, it would be fully packed in the morning, I had these crappy pair of earphones; people could hear what I was listening to when sitting around me. I remember one day for some reason I was listening to Natural Born Killaz by Dr Dre & Ice Cube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9-M2tqIX38) some crazy song, and I got the dirties looks from people all around the train car, and I was just sitting there wondering why everyone was staring at me.
Oh god why...
I know one time I walked out of a train station with that song on, and some black dude just turned around and stared at me with an expression like 'is this guy for real' and I just smiled, I only clocked later that he could hear it.
Times be Cray.
Skals12 years ago2012-09-01 03:58:34 UTC 12 comments
I had one messed up day yesterday. I went to this doctor, not sure what the name of is, basically she specialises in the Oral area, so mouth, nose, ears etc.
I went there because I had a sore throat problem, and she said, let's check your ears! So I was like ok!
She showed me that they were blocked with some little camera, I was like ew, and she told me she would clean them......I wouldn't say it was a mistake, but damn was it one of the worst experiences of my life.
For those daring to read; First they sticked some hose thing into each ear, flushin water into it, it felt so nasty... like a storm happening inside my ear. Next, she started sticking something pointy into my ear, it went quite far, when I thought that was far enough, she stuck it two times further. I was clenching myself in that chair like there was no tomorrow. I can't explain the feeling, I've been to the dentist many times, I've had my teeth drilled, pulled, I've had metal bracers. I thought that was bad, but that was nothing compared to this.
Only a bit later did I see what she stuck into my ear, It was some long needle like object, which wasn't straight either, it had constant curves, she might have spun it around a couple times too xD

Then whilst I was still dazed, she proceeded to telling me that the tools they just used weren't sterilized, so she would now have to sterilize my ears. My reaction - wut? She basically put cotton balls drenched in spirit into both ears, my face was burning for 30 minutes.
That was not very nice at all......

BUT! and some of you may be wondering... Did It work? Do I hear better now?

The short answer is YES!
The long answer is: I can actually hear about 25% better now, everything seems very loud for me, but I'm sure that will pass. The thing I am more thrilled about, is that I can now hear a lot more sounds! Sounds that I didn't even know existed.
Apparently my ears were so blocked that I couldn't hear sounds such as clothes rustling, small objects hitting the floor, water is a lot louder now too. I got onto the computer and started using the mouse and suddenly realised; the mouse makes clicking noises!
Lol haven't listened to music yet, should be interesting.
It's like my ears pick up more frequencies now, when when they were limited to a smaller amount before. quite cools.
Skals12 years ago2012-08-26 11:11:23 UTC 24 comments
So, where is everyone going this September?
Anyone going off to Uni's or new schools/colleges? In which case, what are you guys going to be studying?
I'm going to Uni this September to study Games Design, it's basically a 3 year course on level design.
Kinda interests me to find out what everyone else is going to be doing.
Skals12 years ago2012-08-08 10:53:45 UTC 14 comments
So I finally assembled my brand new pc all by myself.
It's awesome! I haven't even played games yet, but everything seems to be so extremely fast. I had an intel core 2 duo before, and now I've got the best quadcore cpu (3770k) :D, it's literally 10x faster.

My specs:

i7 3770k
cooler master 212 evo
asrock extreme4
gtx 560ti
3x 4gb 1300mhz ddr3 ram
asus xonar dg
NZXT Lexa S

Boy, it was quite hard to assemble this thing, I made a few mistakes here and there, I was even such a genius as to screw the dvd rw drive in the wrong way up, so when I finally got it to work it opened up and I was like... wtf?? RAAAAGE!
But it works perfectly, got everything to work, fans, led's, even fan control, everything works nicely :)
Skals12 years ago2012-06-29 18:47:49 UTC 5 comments
Who here likes theme parks? I hate them, but I went to one nevertheless, pretty much the first big theme park I've been to. I was going to try the big crazy rides, but I was shitting brix on the medium ones so I decided not to.

Here's me in Thorpe Park:
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So yeah, had a fun time. Got soaked wet on the water rides. What kind of experiences have you guys had?
Skals12 years ago2012-04-16 15:15:10 UTC 16 comments
Today was the most intense day I've had in years. I had a university interview at De Monfort, for pretty much the best games art course in England. It was all way too serious and scary, I showed the man my portfolio showing the best of my Photoshop & Illustrator work, 3DS Max Work (Models, Bipeds, Particle Effects), Flash Animations (Including y'all comments :D), Unreal Editor 2&3 work, and my counter-strike levels :D (With a screenshot of Daubsters review for the latest competition), Also had to show him plenty of life drawings and other sketches. He was flicking through my screenshots so quickly I was talking almost as fast as the Japanese lady who showed me around the campus (She was talking extremely fast). But no, I was smiling all the way, not mufflin me words, it went quite well I think. They were nodding and seemed like they liked my work.
A friend of mine from my course had the same interview a few days ago, he wasn't accepted and they declined him straight away. For me they said they'll get in contact with me within a week, so at least I know I have a chance to get into the course! In total over 500 people applied for the course, probably only a 100 got to the interview processes, there are only 40 places, It's very very serious. Wish me luck guys!
Skals12 years ago2012-01-25 16:59:55 UTC 7 comments
Hello twhl, I recently made an animation for one of my college units, and I need some form of audience feedback/response on it. I uploaded it to youtube so you guys can check it out, please drop me a constructive comment on the youtube page or here telling me what you taught of it, don't expect anything amazing. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2mWugh25wc&feature=youtu.be

Like I said I want an audience response and that's all, I will not be making any changes to it, because it's already finished and now I'm on a different task which requires me to ask people what they taught of it and then evaluate their responses.
Skals12 years ago2011-12-26 13:30:27 UTC 11 comments
I love the presents I got this Christmas! I got a pair of boxing gloves, kicking pads, and a pair of new running shoes!
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This is me putting my boxing gloves on.

Now I'm all geared up to win that gold medal in kickboxing competition I've been training for.

On a side note, I gave my sister quite a bit of sweets for Christmas, then the next day I took her down to the park and made her do hardcore exercise for two hours till she couldn't stand anymore, made her work off the fat I made her accumulate :D

Edit: My Christmas tree is more like a christmas shrub. Who likes my shrubereh?
Skals12 years ago2011-10-29 15:35:33 UTC 2 comments
This week is a fun week! Today I went to the MCM Expo in London, great fun, a lot of nice costumes (except a fat mermaid that will hunt my dreams forever). Yesterday I went "mountain boarding" with my friends, it's like skateboarding but down a mountain, the board is bigger and has big wheels. I nearly broke my arm at that, My arm will be ok but i can still barely move it. Tomorrow I will have to go to another party as well! Cool week!
Skals13 years ago2011-09-23 19:20:07 UTC 7 comments
I was at the Euro-gamer expo today, I got to play Skyrim, Mw3, Battlefield 3, Star wars old republic, Final Fantasy XIII-2, CS:GO, Rage, Ninja Gaiden 3 and Mass effect 3.

It was great fun, got a lot of free stuff too.
(Incoming game-play spoilers on those games, no story spoilers though.)

I think the best game there was Skyrim, Trust me when I say it lives up to expectation. Mw3 was surprisingly fun to play with my friend, CS:GO was like CSS basically but with new stuff, I played it on PS3 for a short time so I can't say much about it, same formula really.

One game I was surprised with was Rage, it was actually really cool. Ninja Gaiden was hard as always. FF XIII-2 was basically like a 2x better FF XIII, everything about it was just better, no slow cinematic waiting as paradigms switch "yay!".

Battle field 3 was meh, Star wars old republic I played for like 20 mins in a big PvP match, we didn't get to choose our classes though so I didn't enjoy it that much, well that and the fact that my team got raped. Who knew I should have went with the Jedai nerds not the Sith ppl D: . Mass Effect 3 looked exactly the same as Mass Effect 2. The level I played looked really repetitive which disappointed me, combat was exactly the same as Mass effect 2.

What else can I say? Well, MW3 has dogs strapped with suicide bombs that explode when the dogs die. Yeah...
Skals13 years ago2011-08-24 15:13:38 UTC 6 comments
DeusEx:HR looks like a piece of art, it's incredibly beautiful!
Have you guys seen the review of it on IGN?
http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/118/1189591p1.html

I will probably get this game.
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P.S.: COME AT ME BRO!
Skals13 years ago2011-08-10 05:05:07 UTC 20 comments
17 today, yay I guess?