Little Bunny Adventures: Little Bomber Man

Okay, continuing on from Little Bunny, here I have Little Bomber Man – he’s a bad guy, and needs to be jumped over/on to get past/defeat him :-)

I have a newer version which gives him a nose/beak (because a friend liked the idea) :-P

I’ll probably upload that at some point.

Download PDF

Little Bunny Adventures: Little Bunny

Okay, so to kick me off into developing games, I’m going to make a game for iOS, Android and WP8 using Unity.

The main reason is because some friends of mine have small children who use their iPads a lot, and have asked me to actually make a game – the only drawback is that I need to use a Mac and an iDevice in order to build and test for iOS (luckily, my friends have them).

So, since this is aimed at small children, what better solution than a fluffy rabbit collecting carrots in a side-scroller quest?

Meet Little Bunny (the name will probably stick) :-P

Not the best in modelling techniques, but the idea is to keep it simple, and that the the main design will be done with textures.

Yes, he has no legs, but that’s stylisation! :-D

Download PDF

Just a Couple of Things

Well I’ll take this time for a quick update.

I’ve got a new job, in which I have to use a rather buggy and unreliable database, so I’m in the process of designing a new one, which I hope to then be able to sell (as I have high hopes for it).

With this job, I ought to be able to live of the wage alone, so I won’t have to use my student loan, which would be nice :-)

Apart from that, the final year of Uni starts in a month’s time :-D

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone

Download PDF

General Post – Six Weeks Left?

Well, just a quick update for the site.

I’m using my phone, so I have no idea how this post will be formatted for the website, hopefully not too bad, but there is no real way to tell.

Okay, enough about that.
Work is slowly taking place on the site. WordPress’s latest feature (Live Preview) makes it easier to check for errors during the design period, as it gives you a preview of what it will actually look like, without the worry of other people seeing it.
There’s a lot going into this site, and I’m still on the small stuff; at least the bigger stuff will just be the once through; even this small design work will be copied over once finished.

I do hope I can get it done soon; I’d like to get some practise in before Uni comes around again.

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone

Download PDF

The Joys of DeviantArt

Okay, so I am in the long process of designing a new layout for this site/blog, whatever.

The only problem is that design is not my strongest of skills, so I’ve been scouring the interwebs for some royalty free images, only to find that I have to pay for the ones I like and the absolutely free ones are just naff (adj. rubbish).  So instead I decided to pop over to deviantART for some inspiration (as I usually do).  However, I found myself liking the images so much, I decided to use them for the site (if only as a placeholder).

To show that I haven’t quite got the skills just yet for design work (and I’m working on them), here is the first attempt at my own styles.
cn_category_draft
featured_bugsfeatured_software
Okay, so they’re not terrible, but they aren’t brilliant.

Either way, by re-doing the images, I’ve actually learnt how to use Clipping Masks, and on my first attempt too; with this, I am well please.

If you cannot see them now, perhaps soon you will…

Download PDF

WordPress MultiSite: Widgets!

Time for my second post on general web site design bugs and issues.

What happened

So I was working on the same site as before, when I noticed that my custom Widget areas were not working.

This, as you could guess, annoyed me.  I spent ages trying to figure it out (coupled with the previous problem), and in the end gave up.

Until this morning when I noticed the error.

The Solution…

Basically it came down to case sensitivity.  Where I had

<?php get_sidebar('Home'); ?>

… I should have had:

<?php get_sidebar('home'); ?>

… as the custom widget file was called sidebar-home.php.

So I corrected all these issues, and now the Widgets work fine :-)

Download PDF

WordPress MultiSite: ‘/[page] Index of’ Issues

Now, this is my first post on an actual website design issue (yay me!).

So I’ve been playing around with WordPress MultiSite (or MultiUser, whichever) and also using my own localhost for testing purposes.  Now, it worked fine on localhost, however once it went on to the World Wide Web, things decided to not work.

So I went to the forums to see what could possibly be wrong and what the solution would be; however no one replied :-(

After about three days of not caring any more, I decided to have a crack at it again and the solutions came straight at me.

Problem: ‘Index of /blog’

So I decided to set this site up with WPMU (it sounds better than WPMS) and use subdomains (localhost doesn’t do subdomains).  So the first order of business was to get that configured correctly.

Luckily, the staff at Centation are brilliant and sorted the stuff out that I couldn’t, and the rest was a piece of cake (I just followed what the guide said… really easy).

Once Wildcard sub-domains was configured correctly, I was able to make new sites on sub-domains, however, I then noticed that whenever I went on to the blog page for the test site, it displayed the Index of /blog.  This wasn’t nice to see.

The Solution

I went back on to Google and did a quick search: “wordpress MU /blog index of” (notice MU, not MS), and the answer was there, waiting for me.

Wildcard Sub-domains

I had in my FileManager (I’m using cPanel) and folder called ‘blog’… so WPMU considered it as a new site (as WPMU sites are in folders in the install directory) and that is why it did not work.

The end result, make sure you don’t have folders with the same name as pages.

Download PDF

Goldmine Career Coach

So, I think I’ve finally finished my latest project; a website called Goldmine Career Coach.

What I did for this project is design the website to my client’s specification, including the layout and the CMS.
A lot of the work done is very much server-side, so isn’t much else to say.  Saying that, there is the SEO, which in all honesty is not too bad to sort out (so long as you start the SEO at the start of a website).

Check it out why don’t you?

Download PDF