Hello everyone,
I hope you all remember me. I haven't been properly active for a couple of years, but in the day I was known for Sonic and Pokemon spriting. I'm sure most of the people on my watchers list are now inactive, but to the ones who are still sticking around,
it's good to be back. So while I'm still fairly active on DevArt, I'll give you a little rundown on my life, what I do and what I intend on doing in the future. For those who know me already, this is a little insight into my life. For those who don't, welcome to my life.
So for starters, I'm Mark. I'm 21 and I'm from South Yorkshire in England. I like myself some games, TV, music and films.
At the time of writing this, I am studying Interactive Media With Animation at Sheffield Hallam University, which involves a lot of different computing and media techniques being used in some pretty cool ways. In the last 2 years I have worked in packages including 3D Studio Max, Flash, After Effects and more. As such, I have a fairly decent knowledge of 3D Modelling and a wide, albeit thin, set of skills. In my Uni assignmentes I have already made nice projects like tower defence games and 3D walkthroughs of villages and libraries, and this year I am looking at a fitness and education game, an innovative co-op puzzle game for the PS3 and an Augmented Reality app for kids. Exciting stuff.
So you can assume that these projects are the reason for my break. Well you'd be right mostly. Truth is when I left DA, I was going through some personal stuff in relation to dropping out of a previous Uni course and having fallen victim to a pretty horrendous dose of cyber-bullying, which meant I wasn't in the mindset to sit at my computer for hours (and make sprites). Nowadays I'm a lot older and a lot less phased by things like the stuff I experienced, but when you're sat on your lonesome every day because you don't have anything to do and nobody will talk to you, it does get to you. I turned a lot of my attention towards Halo's "Forge" map editor and made a name for myself on the site Forgehub, which is now HaloEvolved I believe. Once I started back at uni again, the spriting just never clicked back into my life. It also didn't help that the RP group I knew online had disbanded, mostly due to most of our RPs stopping dead because I was never on the PC.
So what do you have to thank for my return?
Pokemon X and Y. These games were so good that they made me remember the good old days of spriting trainers and making my fake "Shaura" league. That spurred the recent Shaura League Deviation, but after that I hit another problem - my new monitor wasn't set up properly and therefore doing sprites was near impossible.
Then last week I figured out how to fix my monitor issue, and here we are!
Nowadays I'm a far different person to who I was when I was here before. I'm in a happy relationship with a kickass girl, my uni has taken me in directions I never thought possible, and everything has just sparked my creativity in ways I couldn't have imagined. Whether it's planning for a free-roaming Pokemon-esque flash game, or designing islands for our PS3 game, I like to dream big. This is the primary reason I started rebooting my characters. I am a more level-headed and more mature person, and I want to put that into my work, and I promise you that's what you'll get from here on out.
Until I drop back off the grid for like 2 months in a few weeks to focus on my dissertation.
Katanga Out.