Posted on 3rd January, 2009:

eah, go on then, Happy New Year. If you're reading this in July, never mind. So, it's been a shameful thirteen months since my last post. I'm telling you, it's all the fault of videogames. Whereas I used to spend my spare time working diligently on new features and artwork for this site, I'm now much more likely to waste those hours jabbing at buttons to make little men fight each other on a screen. What a blight on productivity. I suppose at least I can pass it off as "research". I managed to peel myself off the sofa long enough to deliver these updates...

egarding computer games, now that I work in the industry, my "to do" checklist for the day goes
something like this:

[ ] Studiously avoid making eye contact with my fellow human beings
[ ] Eat my own body weight in Doritos
[ ] Contemplate growing some ridiculous configuration of facial hair; decide that it's definitely a good idea
[ ] Pick a fight on the Internet

Once all these important matters are taken care of, occasionally, very occasionally, I get to make characters for computer games. And occasionally, very occasionally, these games actually come out. The gory details.

y Links page of recommended stuff has been revised for the first time since the Mesozoic Era. Of course, all kinds of cataclysmic world-changing events have taken place since then, so I've made a few changes to reflect this. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: Super Sculpey is out, Super Mario is in. Have a look.

n a rare instance of me keeping my word, I did put together a Facebook album of the good / bad / indifferent* old days working in special effects. I wrote lengthy captions for a lot of the pictures too, so it's almost like the rotten zombie corpse of the Behind The Scenes feature crawling out of the grave for one last bow. Here's the link to the album. Facebook is useful and all, but I don't understand why some people on there feel the need to publicly record their every waking moment, no matter how mundane. In my case, that would result in far too many pictures of me sitting in my pants playing, yes, videogames. And nobody wants to see that.

*delete as appropriate, depending on mood

ague news time: 2009 will mark the third year that I've been on the character art team for Frontier Developments' The Outsider. What can I tell you about that game without getting into trouble? It's... in production. Seriously, that's it. I suppose they won't mind me saying that it's my favourite project I've ever worked on in terms of the breadth and variety of stuff I've been able to make for it, and that there's plenty of interesting things to show when the time is right. So please look forward to it, as the Japanese would say. Er, in Japanese.

Posted on 23rd November, 2007:

arruthers, this website hasn’t seen any kind of meaningful update in over two years now! What’ve you been doing, sleeping?”

Well… for a third of the time, yes. The other two thirds has been spent working on… secret things. By this I mean things pertaining to the creation of characters for videogames, not covert ops behind enemy lines or anything. Although if you want to think that, I don’t mind.

To give you some idea, I worked on one games project with such high levels of confidentiality that I’m forbidden to even mention the title. If I say its name five times in front of a mirror, lawyers from LucasArts appear behind me and drag me off to prison.

It’ll all come out in dribs and drabs over time. For example, one of my characters got her first public airing via a recruitment ad in the November 2007 issue of Edge magazine. Which means she isn’t secret any more, which means she can feature in the gallery. Take a look.

finally got around to signing up for that Facebook thing that all the kids are excited about. I may start putting photos from the old special effects days on the album section of my profile. That's if it isn't just a passing fad and my limited attention span doesn't get drawn to something newer and shinier. (I didn’t bother with MySpace, partly because the average page there has a tendency to look like a GeoCities site made by a thirteen-year-old in 1998. I can manage that kind of thing perfectly well right here.)

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