Earlier in the year, a man named Patrick Vuleta contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in doing some illustration work for him. Patrick runs the specialist law firm website copywriting service Silvered Copy, and wanted a way to distinguish his articles and essays from the masses of the internet.

Naturally, I was only too happy to oblige. I worked with Patrick to develop a style for the illustrations that matched both the aesthetics of his site design and the romantic period imagery that he wished to evoke. The end results are a series of header illustrations that you can find scattered across the length and breadth of his most excellent website.

If you’re after somebody to shake up your stale legal website, look no further than Silvered Copy. He will literally cut your competition’s face off. I’m not even joking.

It’s a metaphor, you see.

That was sarcasm, ladies and gents, that title right there. As of the time of this writing it’s been about two and a half weeks since I touched last month’s project: the project that I actually gave myself six weeks to do instead of four. “Maybe he stopped because he finished early.” you’re thinking to yourself. “Maybe he’s just really amazing at keeping deadlines, and promises to himself to be more disciplined!”

Bad news for the people in that camp, I’m afraid. But thanks for believing in me.

Get to the point

No, the truth is I’m just a) busy and b) lazy, which is a deadly combination that unfortunately leaves me in the position of having to be pissed off at myself. I won’t lie, I have done some work – it’s not a total waste. In the three or so weeks where I did put in half an hour or more per day, I was able to set up my development server and code up a working system that pulls both class and race data from XML files, rolls dice according to D&D standards, and then builds a rough skeleton of a character from there. Not a literal skeleton of course, that’s a creature template and I haven’t got around to writing the XML structure for those yet. Ba-zing.

That’s a D&D joke, ladies and gentlemen. Take a moment to laugh.

The real question is: “Tim, is this project at a point where you think it’s a valid proof of concept?” And the answer is “Yes, I think”. If nothing else it has helped me align my thoughts about how I’d proceed with the rest of the project and what form I think that should take. Unfortunately now I have to decide whether to pursue development seriously – which would require more than 30 minutes a day – or leave it and move onto another project.

What’s next?

Good question. This month I’d intended to get the web-server box I was gifted by the good people at Vital Metals (as in “if you don’t take this, it’s going in the bin”) up and running, and yet with the wedding looming only two short months away and so many details remaining unfinalised, it’s incredibly tempting to shelve Operation: One Month, One Project until July.

Realistically the wedding has to take priority, and the more time I spend working on making sure all the details are ironed out now, the less stress-filled and terrifying the actual date will be, and it’ll give Jess and I time to, you know, relax and get married. In the face of that it’s hard to justify spending 30 minutes a day resurrecting a clunky old web server for the express purpose of… well, it doesn’t really have a purpose. I guess it could run Minecraft?

Not to mention spending the money on the components needed to bring it back to life (we’re talking a diamond worth at least 10,000 gold pieces!). That’s another D&D joke, right there.

I googled “laziness” and this sweet, fat dog came up. I think it speaks for itself, quite frankly.

I have a to-do list as long as my arm. That’s not even an exaggeration, or something that’s only true if you meet certain conditions, such as writing it in size 72-point font – there are just so many things that I’ve always meant to set aside time to work on, and then just… well, never done. They build up, and I salve my conscience by writing them down, tucking them into bed with a soothing “one day, sweet thing”, and then gently forgetting they ever existed. It’s a ridiculous process, and frankly I’m a bit sick of it.

So this year I decided to make a change. I started a one month, one project plan – each month, a new project, worked on for a minimum one hour per day. At the end of the month it’s tools down: evaluate, decide how much (if any) of it is useful, document the process, and move on. It follows in the footsteps of The Cult of Done, a slightly pretentious but ultimately well-meaning set of guidelines which appeal exactly to the core concept of my plan: get shit done.

Of course as you may have noticed, it’s the middle of March. Where are your first two projects then, Tim? You’re right: I started, got distracted, and promptly failed. This whole entire website was originally intended to be January’s project in and of itself, and here I am finally kicking it off in the middle of fucking March, a sluggish testament to my own ineptitude. But it matters not: One Month, One Project is finally underway, and I’m excited to see where it leads.

So let’s review the first project: this website. I took a WordPress theme that I found appealing, and edited the shit out of it until it met my specific needs. It now serves as exactly what I needed and what my older, limited portfolio could never achieve: a dynamic, flexible repository of online content, that the user can pull from as and when they require. It’s got a blog section, as well as areas for general projects sorted by category. It’s elegant, it’s functional, and displays what I want in a quick, highly-visual format. I like it.

It’s not all candy-canes and gravy. I could have made my own website from scratch rather than modifying an existing template, and the fact that I piggybacked on someone else’s work rather than doing my own eats away at me like a tiny self-loathing cancer. It shouldn’t of course, I’ve made so many WordPress templates in my time that I don’t need to prove myself to anybody, least of all myself. But it does. And that aside, it took me two and a half months when it was supposed to take one. Still, it’s done now, and I’ll continue to add to it in the future as more projects are created and completed, both projects that are commissioned by others, and those that spawn from my own to-do list.

The next project – which I’ll be starting tomorrow, and will run until the end of April due to my own terrible laziness in getting this one going – is to create a web-based D&D character builder which doesn’t totally suck, with an eye to porting it to iOS. The builder will be XML-based, so adding custom content will be as easy as learning the simple formula, writing your own XML file, and putting into the right place. It’ll be flavour-heavy, rules-light, and all published under the 3.5 OGL for maximum compatibility with Pathfinder. That’s the plan, anyway.

Stay tuned, internet. Excrement is about to get empirical.

Interzone Futebol was a soccer (or “football”, or “futebol”) MMO, being designed and developed by Interzone Entertainment. I joined their Perth Studio as a Web Designer, and spent six months working closely with other people including the delightful Chris McCormick and Simon Wittber to develop the online presence of the MMO. My duties as a Web Designer mostly involved front-end work, designing the appearance of the various blogs, sites, forums and social networking areas. You can see examples of those by clicking here and here.

Stadium artwork by the marvellously talented Simon Boxer

After six months or so I was moved into the World Design team, the position I originally applied for at Interzone, before making it in as a Web Designer. I worked with the fantastic Lindsay Fleay, the man behind the LEGO animated short The Magic Portal and real-time strategy nut, who served as my sensei, overlord and general master of World Building. Joining us was the effervescent Ellen Jurik, Content Producer and walking catalogue of hair styles. Our job was to build, sculpt, renovate, test, scrap and rebuild the world, as well as come up with ideas on how to innovate it and make it a fun place to be.

View of the Ipanema beach, one of the environments I helped create

We worked closely with both the art and design teams to ensure that our world was vibrant, mechanically sound, and full of interesting things to see and do. To this day I’m exceptionally proud of our efforts, including the massive overhaul we undertook close to the end of the Interzone Futebol project which involved a complete rethink of the game space.

Mike Turner, Vice President of Interzone, visiting the offices at night to order unpaid staff off the premises

Unfortunately in 2009 I had to leave Interzone, as the company had run out of money and I needed to do such frivolous things as pay rent, buy groceries and generally avoid dying. I remained hopeful at the time that – eventually – the company’s fortunes would turn for the good and I would be repaid the nearly $10,000 owed to me. Instead, the company continued limping along for a while as Marty Brickey, the CEO, tried and failed to get the company’s funding secure, all the while insisting that Interzone staff should continue to work without pay – many of whom did, driven by a belief in the game, and in the Perth game development industry.

This situation could not last and eventually the company imploded, ending up with Marty Brickey sending his Vice President Mike Turner to Perth, where he would go on to change the locks on the offices in the dead of night, and call the police to have protesting unpaid Interzone staff barred from the premises. Meanwhile, he and a hired engineer set to work dismantling the servers, backing the data up off-site, and moving the game to the USA to “finish development”, leaving behind millions of dollars in unpaid wages, taxes, and superannuation. I personally was threatened with legal action by Marty Brickey for “slander” and “tortious (sic) interference” if I dared to make any public comments about how Interzone owed me thousands and thousands of dollars for my hard work. Needless to say, I disregarded these threats entirely.

You can read the whole sad story here on Interzowned, the website set up by Interzone “survivors” who, having almost given up hope of ever seeing their money, at least want to inform the world of what happened. The Interzone Futebol game that we all worked so hard on is now being re-branded as “Online Soccer Champions”, and was supposed to be released six months ago. When it will actually be released is anybody’s guess, and when myself and the hundreds of fellow Interzone employees like me will see the wages and superannuation we are owed is another matter entirely.

Crystal Wars was the final games project for my Bachelor of Science (Games Technology) at Murdoch University. It was completed in 2006 over a period of 12 months by myself and three others: John Chillemi, Jeremy Dixon and Felix Wai. Under the banner of “My First Gorilla Studios”, we created a game that (we hoped) was capable of revolutionising the strategy game genre.

The icons I designed for the Crystal Wars user interface

My responsibilities on the Crystal Wars project were mostly in the fields of design and art. I designed a lot of the units, mechanics and world background story for the game, handling nearly all of the concept art, and a large portion of the modelling and texturing. Alongside this I contributed to GUI design, general art direction and unit ability scripting.

I created, modelled and textured a number of in-game assets

Crystal Wars was not ever finished but was a great success for all of us, winning us the Honeywell Industrial IT Prize for the year, as well as netting the Top Project award based on Murdoch staff votes. The final product was solid enough to run a live demonstration at our final project presentation, something which we remain very proud of. To this day it is still held up to other Games Technology students at Murdoch University as an example of a polished, well-made games project.

A selection of my concept art for the project

I still believe the mechanics underpinning Crystal Wars are solid, and think that if it were tackled by a large team with the right tools then it has the makings of an excellent game. If you’d like to learn more about it, please feel free to download the hi-resolution PDF manual (78 MB).

A number of my ex-colleagues from Interzone Studios decided that current game review sites just weren’t cutting it, and weren’t serving it up the way it matters: to a bunch of hairy layabouts sitting on a couch. Being hairy layabouts themselves, they decided to do something about the only way they knew how: make their own games review site. Enter Teh Learning Curve.

As well as making the logo for the site – a red couch, to match the red couch that all the games are played on, and a space invader for that retro charm – I also appeared in the episode where they reviewed Braid. I am the attractive ponytailed man on the right hand side.

If you find yourself overcome by my handsome appearance, flowers, chocolates and proposals of marriage should be directed to my fiancee Jess, who will deal with them in the appropriate manner.

Dan Eichling, a good friend and ex-colleague of mine from my time at Interzone Games, created a not-for-profit organisation in the United States dedicated to helping gamers get together, socialise, and have fun. The end result is the Social Competitive Gaming Network, and I’m only too proud to say that I helped to create their brand.

The dice symbol is particularly important, with the three showing faces demonstrating an aspect of the organisation’s purpose: a numbered face for the competition, a chat-bubble face for the social aspect, and a space-invader to symbolise games of all kinds. The limited colours help create an emphasis on the social nature of the hobby, which both Dan and I believe is sorely understated in the gaming community.

Located ten minutes from Mandurah and an hour south of Perth, the Peel Zoo offers a number of unique animal attractions. I was asked to design their logo, around their mascot owl. The final result is a cute, instantly identifiable silhouette with a unique, muted palette that reflects the bush that is their home.

Well-known Western Australian gardening figure, and my father, John Colwill likes to spend time educating people about plants and their proper care. To that end he developed his own newsletter, sent out free of charge to business and publications – and he asked me to design a logo for it.

The logo reflects the colours of the Australian bush, as well as the distinctive shape of Australian leaves. You can see it in action (and download free Western Australian gardening advice) at his website, here.

As part of my work on Interzone Futebol, I spent some time with the user interface team developing icons for the game. These icons were developed in Adobe Illustrator in vector format, so that they could be scaled for use at any size without loss of quality.

These icons represented the achievements available in each football match, as well as medals awarded to players for completion of the training scenarios.

As well as this, I also developed icons for our own internal wiki, so that we could easily see the status of features and who maintained responsibility for their progress.