Christmas has been pretty good. I got a 40GB iPod. But I (rather unbelievably) gave it up today. The guy at John Lewis couldn't believe it and sold it while I was still waiting for the money back! They are pretty rare at the moment. I'm holding out for a video jukebox instead. Apparantly the video iPod is to be released in January, so I'll probably get that one, if not the RCA / Thomson offering.

I've been fiddling with Photoshop CS today and yesterday, with some simple, but nice results. I'll try and add some to the CreateUK portfolio during the next update. I might use some of them as inspiration for some webpages. Less stressed with my workload now. Only have the Advanced Scripting to do, which is pretty much in a submittable state already. I'm just gonna add more and more little bits, like health bars, sounds, win / lose images (which is why I was in Photoshop just now, but didn't actually do any now I think about it...) etc.
The presentation yesterday was so-so. I think I got most of it across, missing out much less of what I wanted to say than last time. Our lecturer for that module is my final project supervisor who I saw this morning and he basically said it was ok but the art was crap, which of course I knew. We also couldn't show the games since there is no Flash Player installed in the room we presented in. That could be a bit of a blessing however. For some reason, the mobile version of the game did open. Maybe Flash Lite is super compatible...? Anyway, its down to the essays now, and I'm pretty happy with mine, so I should be fine. I can see that first slipping away though...

Slight problem with the whole mobile game thing. Macromedia, in their infinite wisdom, provide a template to produce content for the Nokia 3650 as well as other devices, but there is no player available for some of them. Only PDA's that can handle Flash 5 and i-mode phones which work with Flash Lite have players so far. This is a pain since the presentation is on Monday. Macromedia have shown off demos of Flash working on the 3650 already though, most recently showing of FlashCast, a new way of getting news on your sometimes-connected-devices. It looks good, but doesn't help me right now. And most of the other stuff we were gonna show hasn't been completed either. So... how exactly are we going to divvy up these marks?

Hooray! I have made my first mobile phone game! Bit of a cheat being in Flash Lite rather than Java, but still, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do, so I'm happy. I might make a tutorial on how to do it later, as much for my own use as anyone else's. But first, I need to nab a Nokia 3650 to test the game on real hardware.

I've written an essay on the state of online console gaming which you can check out here at the PocketMoneyMedia website, part of the Entertainment Systems module. The final section is only relevant to the project we are developing and not so important in the real world, but would make a good idea as the basis of a real world project... if that makes sense. The link may be dead within a month since the hand-in date is Monday for the whole project, but I'll try and put up all the papers I have written at Uni during the next CreateUK update, whenever that occurs, (I never added what I am doing to the 'In Progress' section for this term and there needs to be more emphasis on the final project site too, so that gives you an indication of how long it has been and that it may be a while.)

Yo. Got absolutely NOTHING done yesterday due to a hangover, which is really useful when you are trying to get work done for deadlines! Actually, I managed to properly network my PC, laptop and broadband connection, where it was a bit ropey before. Had to do it in order to properly test my Advanced Scripting game. And surf the net from the sofa yesterday ;-) Made up for it well today though, getting a fair bit done. Things should come together nicely... I hope.

Time is getting tight now for some of the work. But, I have got a working ROM image for the GBA. It is only simple, (just moving a sprite around the screen with the joypad infront of a bitmap background in mode 4) but by getting that down, I think I can get some simple demo's done for the project.
First things that need to be finished, however, are the Entertainment Systems website (and possbly a mobile game,) and the Advanced Scripting helicopter game. The Culture Industry CD-ROM should also be pretty much done before Christmas and the Programming for Entertainment Systems DirectX game needs to be done over the break.
Busy, busy, busy.