Stanley Lindsey - Level Designer and Environment Artist

My overdraft has disappeared. Not even the bank employees can understand why my overdraft was randomly removed, basically rendering it useless as I can't withdraw anything whilst in my overdraft.

Point is that as my account is a Student Account (yay university!) it shouldn't happen, even the branch manager couldn't fathom why it had happened. Even worse is they cannot simply reinstate it and instead must appeal.

Worse still is that because I am a student I do not meet the appeal criteria, which includes owning a mortgage or having more than £500 as a minimum deposited in my bank account each month. So instead they are taking a few working days to reinstate my overdraft on a temporary basis - my overdraft will decrease by £55 each month until it hits 0 and are appealing anyway.

Spent two hours in the branch and they even had to phone up the inside services line and not even they knew. That being said, apparently they couldn't even view student accounts properly and are hoping its an error.

Better fix as soon as I am supposed to be running an E-Bay shop soon but if I cannot use my bank account I cannot pay the seller fees, even if they are tiny. Oh yeah, and University, that big barrel of debt.

And if you didn't think that was enough, somebody somehow charged money to my bank account for some auto-fighting bots for the mind-suck that is the in-browser game Runescape.

Till next time, when things will hopefully be running smoothly....

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Well its been a busy couple of weeks. For my birthday Rachael took me to the Isle of Wight for five days, which was a brilliant relaxing get away. As another present she coincidently passed her driving test the day before my Birthday, once she gets hold of a car she'll be able to travel to me in Southampton much easier.

Other presents include getting a Wacom Intuos 4 A4 as a part-birthday, part-inheritance present from my Grandma. That will be incredibly useful at University as I hopefully improve in 2D skill and will last a very long time. I'd never be able to afford a decent graphics tablet during the Uni years by myself, which makes it even more valuable to me - I'd better look after it.

Lastly my father bought me a copy of Master Unreal Technology, a level design book for the popular Unreal Engine. One thing I have on my to-do list is to start developing levels for said engine as it is widely used and will increase my sellable skillset. After I've knocked out some decent projects for Source that is.


I also received the long waited confirmation letters from Solent University, both on the course and housing fronts. I'll be moving up there on the 19th of September and have my course induction on the 21st. The most important bit of information is that I have an en-suite, meaning I know for certain I've got my own shitter! All I've to do now is figure out what to take and how to get it there, as well as finish up some important projects.

So now my priority is to catch up with my workload, including starting work on the second website gig I have and doing some more writing for The Thoughtshake, which I have neglected in the last few weeks. As well as those I need to continue some of the work on my Team Fortress 2 map entitled Silo - there will be more information about that in the coming weeks, once it hits a presentable level.

Till next time...

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Its my Birthday in just over a weeks time so I thought I'd post up my Amazon Wish List in case any of you lovely fellows wanted to send me a present any time soon.

Most of the stuff on there are cheap books about game dev so it would be incredibly useful.

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Something I wrote for Thoughtshake and thought I'd share here.



Games these days are always being developed to be accessible; for the biggest target audience, to ease frustration and ease the learning curve. Popcap have always been one to aim for accessibility in their genuinely simple and fun games, take the smash hits Peggle or Plants vs Zombies of examples of how simple and focused a game can be. Mainstream games are constantly going down the similar route of easing people into the game, some overly so, especially on recent focus on the console formats.

All this is well and good, I for one enjoy a good game of Team Fortress 2 as much as the next crazed gamer but some of my real long time favourite games have an almost vertical learning curve, becoming almost inaccessible.

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Wednesday was a completely fantastic day, the best for quite a while. Myself and Sneddon arrived at the Expo in Brighton at about 2:45PM and met most of the guys on the games course at Solent University who were good to meet and talk to about the course. I got to meet a couple who graduated a couple of years ago and are now in the industry, interesting to talk to them about life in the big wide world after leaving the hand-holding of university and everything prior.

At about five we all headed over to the pub next door for some jolly alcoholic beverages, after that we went out for a Chinese for dinner and then ended up at the local Whetherspoons drinking cheap, though nice, Salor Jerries.

Finally we got round to the moment myself and Sneddon had been waiting for; the awards after party. I got invited, well, I say invited but it was a global invitation sent to everybody in the 2009 Expo Facebook group. It was never really a personal invite but I'll pretend it was. Anyway, I got invited, via Facebook, to attend this after party hosted by .

We met a number of developers including various people from Lionhead and Realtime worlds, two fantastic companies. I also spent I don't know how long talking to Kieron Gillen, a pretty awesome reviewer from PC Gamer, Edge and Rock-Paper-Shotgun.

All that plus an open bar equals a brilliant night. I will no doubt be saving up the £300 to go to the actual conference next year.