What is this about secret moon bases now? It's another challenge entry for this year's U3DA Holiday challenge. Other entries from previous years include a Dragon Santa and scary Skeleton Santa.

Made in trueSpace and BlenderForArtists. It seems that the logo I mashed together for the challenge is the highlight of the image from what I've heard from people who viewed the image.
I think the biggest inspiration for this project was oddly enough the movie Iron Sky, which was about Nazis on the moon. I feel like you can sort of see that in this original test render that I did:

All this work in Blender has mainly been for Hyperventila though, starting with a beauty render of the GCP Patrol Car and with the last render being the Inter-Corp "Tracker":

Hyperventila has seen many updates in the last months, most of which can be found on the Hyperventila Discord.

Now off to Christmas in Italy. Until next time!

For this months United 3D Artists forum modeling challenge, I present China's secret weapon: The Red Mist jet aircraft.

It's a silly concept of course but that's what you get when I get to come up with the theme for a modeling contest.

It was a fun model to work on but maybe, with working on Hyperventila and all that maybe I should have gone a bit more easy on work this weekend.

This week has mainly been getting the Shipyard in Hyperventila to work. I finished the interior model last week.

The other big pain in the butt was the video production aspect being producing the latest two Hyperventila Showcases. Windows no longer comes with its own video editor so I had to download one from the internet, I ended up using Shotcut which while OK for my needs (it renders fast and the quality is quite good as far as I can tell).

Here you can see the shipyard in action:

I still want to produce better video content, and to be honest, coming from doing my old YouTube let's plays, I thought it would be a lot easier but I don't think I've quite gotten used to the limitations I currently have to deal with.
My old powerhouse of a computer is out of reach and I don't even have an external monitor to extend my small 13" laptop display. On top of that both my gaming mice are dying with both of them being almost unable to left-click any more (thank you trueSpace for wearing out my left-clicks).

It's not all bad though. This little HP Spectre x360 that I'm now doing all my work on is still really powerful for a PC of its size. I still suspect it has some cooling issues that it had from the start but at least it keeps my legs warm.

That's it for this blog.

As always, have a nice day!

Introducing one of the larger structures in the game, the shipyard. This is where you will be able to repair, upgrade and purchase new ships.

Hyperventila has come quite a bit further since last I posted an update on here. Having launched a Patreon, Discord Server and Twitter account I can now say that Hyperventila is really out there.

Other recent updates include a ship builder/level editor and proper dialogue and questing.

That's it for this quick update.

See you in the next blog or possibly on one of the social medias!

Still the game is this ever evolving  program turning around the axis of an idea in my head. There really hasn't been as much progress as I would have liked in the past month. Technical setbacks plagued my infantile programming and as of late another big change has been consuming a lot of my time; namely, an entire redesign of the artstyle and feel of the game.

It has been a long time coming, I've been toying with various styles for months but now my mind is more or less made up. The original artstyle, not unlike that of the game FTL: Faster Than Light, was just that; based on two ship designs I had laying around from a mod I made for FTL.  Well no more, while the 2D style was far more time efficient than making 3D models the style of old science fiction movies just suits this project so much more and I am a lot more confortable doing designs in 3D than in 2D.

Of course the top down mechanics of the game remain. This visual change isn't going suddenly make the game in full 3D, no matter how much I'd like that.
No, the extent of the change doesn't go that far unfortunately.
Additional new features include some space scavenging for items that can be found floating around in space as well as the occasional lost escape pod.

That's the latest of updates on the game development of HyperVentila: The Game.

Until Next Time!

Hello again, blog. Yes, Edinburgh is still there but I'm not. Following Ilaria to her new job, I've found myself down there in southern England again, in London town.

It is here that I will be spending the next year or so. We've got a place in the Surrey Quays area that while kind of breaking left and right still is nice and cosy and it's not too noisy despite the air traffic in London looking something like out of The Jetsons.

As for the game... it's coming along. I have mainly been working on getting the ship and station interiors to work but I've got a new ship design to reveal and a fully interactive tactical map for all your scanning, navigation and missile launching needs.

 Check out the brand new website at HyperVentila.com.

That's it for this blog. I wonder what I'll write in the next one...

...well that I forgot anyway. Like this blog! Yes it has been a year since my last post about squirrels. But the resillience and absoluteness of this blog shall remain resolute and keep going for a while longer. Well another four years at least since I apparently bought quite a considerable domain extension a few years ago.

A lot has happened in this year. After Oxford I spent some time in London finally ending up in Edinburgh and the summer I spent mainly in Edinburgh and various places in Italy.

Still rather unsure of what to do and where to go next, with no work and no stable future in sight, I decided to start a game project. This brings us back to the title of this blog post where Mikomwood finally gets a worthy future counterpart; HyperVentila.
Many years in the making ( in my head ) this mad science fantasy spinnoff from Mikomwood has been a bit of a mystery of how to make. While Mikomwood was to me what the Discworld was to Terry Pratchett, HyperVentila would of course seem like another jump to mad comic novelist and radio-play writer Douglass Adams and his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Not this time! I wanted HyperVentila to be something else.
A universe of exploration, making your own madness and interactivity. So a game of course!

What have I got to show so far? some screenshots! and a silly Android port on my phone...

Some things have been a challenge in designing this game so far but I've learnt a lot.

I also recently designed a website for my dear Ilaria: www.ilariagiacon.com Check it out!

That's it for this blog. Until next time.

Forgot about this bloody thing for several months. What have I been doing? I went to Greece, printed some 3D models and... ? These pictures should sum it up pretty well.

Decided to call the C3 Cosmitron Transport Craft finished as I wasn't working on it any further anyway.

C3 Cosmitron Transport Craft  'Duron Five'
C3-CTC-8866-H

Class = 3
Serial number = 8866
Classification = Heavy

Crew = 8
Seats = 56
Escape Pods / Seats / Seats Total = 8 / 8 / 64

Decks = 8 + one airlock
Engines = GammaCycle MK2s (serial: 545-2-GC) x4
Main Fuel Tanks: 4
Secondary Fuel Tanks: 2

Communication = Commucon 5s x2

In other news, a friend of mine gifted my a Steam copy of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor through the somewhat dubious site G2A.com.

I must admit I wasn't all that interested in the game after watching a playthrough of the game's story mode back when it came out. Still, my copy came with all the DLC and expansions so I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and went ahead and installed the game (all 40 gigabytes of it).

Story wise the game isn't much to speak of. Just your typical revenge story with constant hints to the much broader story in the Lord of the Rings series.
The gameplay is relatively simple, often compared to that of the Assassins Creed series with a free-flowing combat system similar to that of the Batman Arkham series. However, I have to give the game credit for the amount of different ways you can kill Orcs, if you like killing Orcs and Uruks then this is the game for you.
There is the stealthy way of stabbing them in the back, this is always fun. The stealth mechanics also make it pretty easy to mess with the AI. As long as you crouch and stay more or less out of their field of view, you can take down entire groups of Orcs without them even noticing.
Personally I sometimes just like to casually walk into an enemy camp and watch them act all surprised as if the game expected me to only use stealth then have them shout a couple of voice lines about how they "found" me.

One thing the game is praised for is the so-called Nemesis System. The idea is that if/when you die the Uruk that killed you gains additional skills and a higher rank. I personally haven't seen this system in action much outside of the story missions, maybe I just haven't died enough yet.

That's about all I've got to say about Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor really. It's alright for what it is.

That's it for this blog. Have a nice day!

Here is a work in progress shot of my latest spacecraft. I haven't worked on it as much as I should have in the last couple of days but it is nearing completion.

In other news, Rainbow Six: Siege has found another way to disappoint me and this time I'm guessing for good.
By making the recently released "free" Black Ice operators many times more expensive than any of the other operators, Ubisoft has shown its true colours of continuing to funnel people towards their in-game store. As with most modern in-game stores, they are optional however this does not mean that there is any reason for them to exist other than to give Ubisoft another form of income on top of the full-price game, expensive season pass and what not else.

I am highly disappointed by this. I was really hoping that Ubisoft wasn't going to screw with this game and its business model after release but I guess that was just to much to hope for.

The indie game development scene has provided me with some hope that not all is lost for video games by providing me with the newly released game Firewatch.
Firewatch is a single-player first-person mystery set in the Wyoming wilderness where you climb radio towers, unlock weapon skins and... oh wait, it's none of that. What it is however is... very hard to put into words without spoiling the game.

You are a fire-watch-man (is that what you call it?). Your job is to look out for fires from your tower.  The basic gameplay is this; you climb up or down cliffs, explore the wilderness and talk to someone on the radio. The environments are quite pretty but where this game really shines is the dialogue between you and your supervisor. This is not a walking simulator, this is (if anything) a talking simulator.
Now I'm not going to spoil the plot so let's leave it at this and just say that the game made me happy and made me sad. All that good stuff that comes from good writing and good voice actors.

It's games like this that remind me why video games are a medium worth exploring and not all shooty-shooty-bang-bang. While those games can be fun to, it's games like Firewatch that I will remember many years later whereas the frustration that comes from dealing with Ubisofts triple-A bullshit is something I hope I will soon forget.

That is all folks, have a nice day!

New spaceship. Not much else to say.