Crikey, I really have been way too busy recently to do any work on “private” stuff for my gallery, but yesterday I put together a mel script for browsing materials “outliner” style, rather then the cludgy hypershade swatch nonsense. Hypershade is great for graphing and building new materials, but less so for browsing scene materials and assigning etc.

Version 1.02 atm, and it will be polished as soon as I find more time

Download here;

http://www.ricoholmes.com/OtherStuff/Downloads/RHMaterialBrowser.mel

Having worked in the Computer Games industry for almost 20 years, I’ve had experience working in almost every aspect of the business. Starting in 1997 I worked for Electrocoin: a London based company specialized in converting arcade machine games into home computer games. Frustrated by the commute and working for another company, I left Electrocoin and immediately fell into the role of designing and developing games directly and dealing with publishers first hand.

Having experience of working as a contractor, as well as in-house staff and high management positions, I’ve a very realistic perception of what it takes to get a project to completion. In 20 years of development, I’m very proud of having only one single project being “canned” along the way – an almost unheard of scenario in the games industry.

As a contractor, you can’t afford to waste time. If a contract fails to mature- it’s money lost. Pursuing the wrong avenue in a design; results in money lost. It’s all about making sure your time is being spent wisely; making sure that every aspect of your work can ultimately be used. Nobody likes to take chances. 10% longer proper planning can save you losing 100% of your work.

It’s my attitude that has seen me manage studio art departments with great success, and earned me a great deal of respect for that role in the process. In my current role at CustomRed Software it’s also enabled me to generate work with new clients with relative ease. Outsourcing can be a troublesome arena for many larger companies to venture into, and faith in their outsourcing partners is vital. A spotless industry reputation has enabled me to build on my faith, and my communication skills have ensured ongoing work from those clients.

A brief summary of previous roles and projects:

Full Contact 1990

All game design and artwork

Formats: Amiga

Very happy with our first game, we approached a public domain publishing house and discussed the possibility of setting up a new video games publishing company. While developing games and selling them outright was profitable, it was still a high risk area to be in. Working directly with an independent new publisher would secure royalties, and a steady relationship with the publisher. To this end, Full Contact was developed with low finance from the publisher with the promise of high royalties. They paid of wonderfully, and the publisher: Team17 Software ltd was born.

Again for the game, I produced all the artwork. The included the hugely acclaimed opening sequence of the game; a full screen animated and looping animation of a character. Silhouetted against a sunset in “HalfBrite” mode, it again used technology not utilized in the graphics chipset before. It was also one of the first ever examples of rotoscoping on a home machine. This was long before full screen animation or codecs were invented.

Alien Breed 1991

All game design and artwork

Formats: Amiga, PC

On the heals of Full Contact being a huge success, Team17 Software was already set to be a major Publisher of the 1990′s. This gave us the opportunity to develop a project that had been close to my heart for years. “My Baby” was to be Team17′s most successful game for a full half a decade. It was also to hold the title (to this day!) of being the title to stay at number one in the charts the longest (for over a year!).

Again I created all the artwork, and all the design of the game. Having the luxury of final call on all artwork allowed us to introduce a very specific style into the project, and helped the game to win a huge fan base.

It’s also a touch of nostalgia for me to look back on how things have changed since then ! Lovely stuff.

..

lkjhlkjhl

It’s been something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, though I was hampered recently due to a debacle with DomainPeople.com.I was very much in danger of losing my domain name registration, as they emailed me to say my registration was due for expiry, but then subsequently refused to acknowledge the email adress as viable (not the same as the one they had on record).

Having moved country twice, and house 4 times since I first registered (in 2002!) The chances of me having the same ISP, let alone ISP based email address was small to NONE.  Silly buggers. They then asked me to post Photo ID, which is utterly ridiculous, as I could have posted one of my brother or, frankly, anyone.  There’s NO way they would be able to tell whether that was me or not if I wasn’t physically stood in front of them.

VERY long story short (2 months of chasing). I finally got my domain registered again with them a couple of days short of the expiry.  I have since transferred everything to my other provider and registrar YOUR-SITE.com.  Your-Site have always been fantastic, and incredibly service minded.

Happy Rico now!

While TimeDock has been a huge success (number one in so many countries when released) I decided to release it as free when its sales curve had dropped right off and a few months had gone by.  For the last half a year it was on the AppStore for free, but with Apple requiring a membership fee to keep it listed on the store I decided to let it rest. There are (since then) vast amounts of clock Apps being released, so it’s now a “collectors item” for those that purchased it.

While it’s still listed on the Appstore, it’s actually no longer available for download, but it will remain available forever for those that have it now.  The website is still maintained for now (mainly because I like it ! )