Ha, I thought the title might catch your eye ;)

I’ve been a tad quiet recently as I’ve been somewhat overwhelmed with work, but needless to say, at the end of the day on Friday, I’ve made some time to show off some new Super Turbo Action Pig artwork!

This is the final artwork for two of Super Turbo Action Pig’s main poses in the game, free falling and thrusting!  As you can see, he is deep in concentration while his thruster is blasting, so you can only imagine what he is having to do be concentrating this hard!

We’ve been hard at work recently trying to find ways of optimizing the frame rate (as we wanted, and have managed, a full 60fps on the 3GS and a steady 45-50 on the 3G), well, I say we, its involved little on my part and a bucket load of time on Chris’s.  Well done Chris, your a coding trooper!

Ok, well, I hope you enjoyed this tiny update and hopefully the next one will be announcing that its ready for submission :)

Enjoy.

Mike.

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, say hello to The Joystick Generals!  After many months of tweeting and babbling about my new venture into the world of video games, it is my pleasure, along with Chris Wilson from Abitofcode, to welcome you to our new company, The Joystick Generals!

Yes the name is rather mad, somewhat retro and just a little bit camp…We love it ;)

It’s been a lifelong dream of both Chris’s and mine, to own and run a small games company, and now after many years we’ve gone and done it!  It’s all thanks to the wonder that is the iPhone!  This magnificent little platform has become the perfect springboard for aspiring games makers like ourselves to step forward and make a mark.   We’re both passionate about retro 2D gaming and knew that if ever we ventured into this market, that we would be going old school, so you’re not going to see any overly deep, 3D, insanely complex, modern games from us, oh no, just good old, 2D pick up and play, gaming goodness!

So you can expect to see a high level of polish in our games due to my obsessive creative eye, coupled with some rather spiffing and solid coding from Mr.Wilson.  In our fields combined, we have over 25 years experience!  Nice.

Our first game is comically entitled Super Turbo Action Pig!  Yes its mental, just like the name of the company…just how we like it :)  So as you’ll see from the teaser image above (and the link to the holding page) the game is based around the escapades of our rather dashing pig.  He’s no ordinary pig though, oh no, he is Super Turbo Action Pig, a pig that laughs in the face of the old saying ‘pigs might fly’ and screams ‘check out my thrusters baby! ’.  We’re not going to give too much away regarding the aim of the game (as some cheeky blighter will most likely steal it and make a nasty version before we push live ;), as we are going to release more info leading up to the launch.  But what we will say is, it’s going to be a great game!  And yes, it’s going sit in the $0.99/£0.59p bracket.  Bargain!

We’re going to get our official Twittering up to speed to, so you can follow us at www.twitter.com/joystickgeneral

(And if you haven’t already, you can pick up my personal twittering at www.twitter.com/michaelheald and Chris’s at www.twitter.com/abitofcode)

More updates coming soon!

Mike.

Hey everyone, I know I’ve been babbling on a lot recently about my under the radar activity with some new games (as well as my own little games company, official announcement on that next week), well I just wanted to announce an exciting new collaboration I’m involved with, with the guys over at Thunder Game Works.  T.G.W. are a new and VERY exciting iPhone developer whose sole goal is to create seriously awesome games, were not talking fly by night iPhone cheap thrills here, were talking quality, on every level!

Well, I was lucky enough to be chosen as their artist for their first title Trenches, so for the past couple of months I’ve been a busy fella, illustrating, designing and animating like an over excited crazed maniac, and I can only say that this is going to be something bloody fantastic! I am sooooo proud to be involved in this and I can honestly say that there is nothing like this out there right now!

There are a number of breathtaking unlockables in this game too, some of which are LITERALLY bigger than most $0.99 games! It’s nothing short of epic!

So, watch this space, there will be much more to come very soon!

Mike.

Welcome to Fully Illustrated V3.0! It’s been a long time coming, but finally version 3.0 is now live and kicking! As with most creative agencies, it’s your own site that gets done last, due to the fact that you are pouring all your creative juices into your paid work, so the company site always gets dropped on the back-burner.

Well, this time Fully Illustrated is back with a bang! This lovely new shiny site comes with a whole host of new features, all of which I’ll list below:

• The FI-Blog – Yey, finally I catch up with something that people have been doing for years. Its tooled up with all the usual bits too, so there is an RSS feed over there on the right, so for those of you who like to keep up with my latest releases, it’s now a bucket load easier than just checking back all the time (yes, I’ve finally listened to all the requests, so thanks for asking :)

• Branding section – Again, this an answer to the maaaaany questions I receive asking ‘do you also do branding?’, to which I have to mail back a long winded reply explaining that I do, but I just don’t have a section on the site about it. So now it’s here for all to see. I hope you like it.

• Dedicated iPhone site – Yep, there is now a dedicated iPhone site too! As a lot of the work I do these days is iPhone related, I wanted to have a nice welcome screen dedicated to my favourite mobile device. Take a peek at the piccies below if you don’t have an iPhone.

• Evolved look and feel – After playing around with lots of ideas, most of which were simply overkill, I realised that what I really needed to do was evolve Fully Illustrated, not put it through a full on revolution. So I dropped the full flash concepts pretty early on and finally settled on this new design, I hope it’s to your liking. The main goal has been to expose more content, to show off some of the work that you may not have seen before and keep the site feeling fresh, so as you move around the site, you’ll see little promotional areas for other random pieces of work from other sections.

• Epic About section – Again this is something of a response to the many emails I’ve received asking me for more info about my interests, inspiration, background etc, so I decided to create a much more in-depth about section. In here you can read all sorts of information, including…

1. Overview – A run down about all the main info you need to know
2. Services – A detailed page of information about each service available
3. Awards – A page dedicated to all the individual projects that have won awards
4. Background – Covering my personal career history
5. Inspiration – A page dedicated to all things that give me my inspiration
6. The Monster Games Collection – Yep, a page dedicated to my MONSTER games collection.  I’ve mentioned this to sooo many of my games clients that I just had to feature it on the new site.  Over 30 consoles and hundreds of games…not forgetting my arcade machine!
7. Press & Publications – A feature of all the books and magazines that Fully Illustrated has been featured in.

• Twitter feed – Yep, I tweet, but not many people know about it as I’ve never advertised the fact. But if my ramblings seem of any interest to you, you are more than welcome to follow me.

• Top of Page – Yep, another point raised by so many people ‘Please add a button to let me get back to the top of the page’ so that now, when you reach the bottom of any portfolio entry, you no longer have to aimlessly scroll up, you simply need to click the ‘top of page’ button :)

• Celebratory Art - To celebrate this new launch I decided to indulge myself in a few days personal work, to create a collection of 3 (as this is version 3, see the link ;) new digital art pieces.  These were intended to capture the main theoretical elements of creating a new site, starting with ‘Matter’, the stage of envisioning an idea, or collection of random ideas. ‘Destruction’ the sometimes harsh process of removing the old ready for the new (kinda like the theory of fire and earth, fire aggressively destroys, but in turn creates rich nutrients to fertilise the land for new growth) and then finally ‘Conception’ the point where the ideas spark into creation.  Wow, that was all rather over the top wasn’t it…yeah ok, ok, I just wanted to create three shiny new images :)  Anyway, here’s a link to the images, so feel free to take a look and I hope you like them.

• More to come! – There are other sections coming too, which will include a shop (for a rather cool range to t-shirts I’m brewing up), a downloads section and a whole host of other things. I just didn’t want to wait any longer on the release, so those will be phased in over the coming months.

So in a nutshell there has been a lot added to this new site, so I hope you all enjoy the new additions and feel free to send in your thoughts and opinions, they are all welcome and always appreciated.

So without further ado, say hello to Fully Illustrated v3.0! I hope you enjoy your visit.

Thanks.

Mike.