Biting off more than I can.....

After a long time thinking about it, I eventually decided to get my own website - in my own REAL name so I'm now off making that, at my lesiure (-:


Hope I'm not biting off more than I can chew.

Alan's Questions

“Deep Philosophical Questions” is the latest work by Mr Alan Bigelow.



Alan provides many of his digital stories at webyarns.com and they offer his specific perspective on various aspects of digital story making....

Alan, a generous, talented and kind man, combines Comic strips and philosophy in this particular story to answer six important questions that have eluded some of the more widely known philosophers.

enjoy, I did.

A head in the game

I needed a laugh recently, for reasons I'm not going to detail right now, suffice to say I really needed cheering up. I also had a stinker of a flu so was behind in doing email, etc, etc & my usual surfing rounds, visiting those sites and communities of which I have been a long time member, I happened upon a bit of ole banter from three even older friends of mine. Namely Mal, Chris & Steve, chinwaging like a crowd of old codgers over at gamedevelopers.ie , they were kindly & light heartedly discussing one of my past creations the 'guy' above:

Danger Magee: Irish Eco-Warrior Goose.

Now When I say that Danger was 'my' creation, it actually took an on-site team of ten people to get us to the point of capturing that 'in-game' shot above in one of the prototype levels, our team of ten were further enabled by off-site teams in both NDL and Havok and elsewhere. It was a 'Goose' but everyone kept forgetting that and for some reason kept calling Danger a duck ! When everyone knew all too well that ducks don't wear bullet belts or confederate caps, I mean, come on guys....

While I did come up with the idea of Danger the goose, in that I wrote the game and level bibles and all that creative type jazz, Kev and PC and Mark all helped to get him, proportioned, low poly modeled, rigged, cycles going, and eventually into our Beta PS2 Engine. It was a genuine collaborative effort, with Nick and Paul as driving forces behind making it happen. Joe, Tony and John were doing additional bits and pieces.

That was almost ten years ago, and despite a couple of significant publisher offers; when we brought the working prototype demo to VC's for matching finiance they just couldn't understand the appeal of a funny smashing stuff up 'game' ? Let alone why anyone would want a game to be physics driven, explosion laden, for a new console yet to launch, and all that wrapped up in a comic environmentally subversive message to boot ? or to quote one bright moneyed spark:

"I mean this is 1999, who's interested in the the global environment or computer console games for that matter ?"

Of course not long after that, Abe hit big as we ran into the dot com bubble and cash flow challenges. The VC's decided to support an array of insightful technologist's with the .com suffix and life with a little less Danger went on for us. Our Goose was cooked before he ever got outta the egg.