My second day hiking the West Highland Way was less successful than my first. I had unfortunately not paid proper attention to how much micro fiber tape I had left from previous hikes, and so I ran out first thing in the morning. Since I wasn’t wearing suitable footwear, and had no tape blisters started to form pretty early in the day.

If you’re going to hike like I did… wear proper fitting/broken in shoes for hiking. Wool socks are also much better for absorbing sweat than the cotton ones I was wearing. Tape, socks, shoes. They make a huge difference.

At any rate, I was able to get a nice time lapse of Ben Lomond on this hike, but I wasn’t particularly satisfied with the first stages of the West Highland Way. It’s an experience that I’m glad I attempted, but it’s not worth lugging tons of camera equipment with you. At least not for these first two days. I imagine that the last half of the full trail has some great scenery.

Aside from the time lapse, I only ended up with about eight photos that I was satisfied with. You can see them over on my flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/allegrodigital/sets/72157646306034728/

I’ve been pondering for quite a while now what I want my own game to look like. I’ve been waffling between it being somewhere between a Zelda-like style or a Quest for Glory-like style… I haven’t been sure how much I wanted it to be tile based, versus each screen being a unique illustration. I think I’ll try to find some sort of a happy medium where I make unique backgrounds but find a way to get some re-use in there from time to time. But while exploring syles I think I’ve decided that I’m going to go with a look similar to what I’ve done in the below Street Fighter II fan art. I whipped these off today as an exploration, and I think that limiting the graphics to this quality will give me something I’m happy with while not being overly time consuming to produce.

Anyways, I chose Street Fighter II to play around with as it was an amazing game that I loved as a kid. It’s got a great ensemble of characters, and it was fun to sit back, relax, and play around with some pixels today. I tracked down the old profiles from the game to make sure that they were kind-of-sort-of height proportional to each other.

Be sure to click the thumbnail to see the larger image!

Which was your favourite character to play?

We start off this vlog with a bit of rambling about my exciting plans (which I’ll only give myself two days to actually plan -after- my three day hike…).

I then start off on a short journey along the West Highland Way, one of Scotland’s most hiked trails and one which bring tourists from all around the world. These would be tourists who are generally used to living a more active lifestyle than I, I’m sure.

My last vlog was essentially just an announcement that you could go watch the time lapses that I recorded while in the UK.

In this vlog, I include two additional time lapses from places I’ve visited, but hadn’t included in my montage sequence. Both the Fairy Pools, and Quiraing are excellent places to visit on the Isle of Skye. While the weather was quite rainy at the Fairy Pools, my time at the Quiraing was perfect, but I just didn’t feel that it fit with the other sequences.

Now that I’m back in SF, I’m set-up with a phone plan and am beginning planning a few new things, but I still have plenty of backlog for videos to post. Expect to see more from my trip around Europe over the next couple of weeks.

Also, did I mention that I’m going to be a father? I’m going to be a father.

I’m back in San Francisco! This vlog’s mostly an announcement video that you should check out and share my first ever time lapse montage video. The real meat of today’s edition of Allegro Digital, is the actual time lapse montage below.

Finding myself in the United Kingdom for a couple of months, I made an effort to get out now and then and see some of the landscapes that the nation has to offer. Most of where I visited was throughout Scotland, however there’s a little bit of Cornwall to be found in this video as well.

I used a Canon 7D with either a EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM or a Tamron SP 24-70mm F/2.8 Di VC USD for the various shots in this montage.

Scotland has some beautiful landscapes, and I hope you enjoy this taste of them and share if you like it. It was great to have the opportunity to shoot these time lapses. Some of the photos from this trip can be found on my Flickr page at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/allegrodigital. Also expect me to continue playing “catch-up” as I post the rest of these vlogs which were recorded in the United Kingdom.

Music is:
“Ambiment” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

For those not in the know, in 2012 I began working on some indie game development. This later turned into incorporating a business, doing a fair chunk of design, pixel art, music, and marketing before development ended up coming to a halt. My partner and I went our separate ways, and this led to me taking my short contract in Scotland in the first place.

Earlier this the year, I had begun tinkering with a new project and learning Unity when I first saw that my partner was falling behind on programming our original project. My experiences here in Scotland have made me really want to get back into working on this Unity project, and so I’ve decided to revisit it.

There’s a bit of a time gap between Vlog 6 and 7; in that time I was redesigning my website, going through Unity tutorials, and doing some preliminary planning for the game. By the time I felt it was worth making an update, I had decided that Unity is not the direction I want to take this game.

It’s a bit of a tough decision as I’ve already invested a considerable amount of time into Unity and like the tools… but I feel that as a one person team, I’m going to have to use whatever tools I can to get the job done efficiently. I think that for what I have in mind now, Adventure Game Studio is going to be the tool that makes this project the easiest, and so I’m going to be pursuing that going forward.

If you’re interested in game dev yourself, you may wish to check out some of these tools:

• Adventure Game Studio – Game development package for adventure games
• Aseprite – Animated Sprite Editor
• Famitracker – a free windows tracker for producing music for the NES/Famicom-systems
• Graphics Gale – Powerful tool for spriting and pixel art.
• Little Sound DJ – A tool used by the original Game Boy/Emulators to create chiptunes with the Game Boy sound chip.
• PETileMapper – An importer for getting pixel art created with Pyxel Edit easily into Unity.
• Pyxel Edit – Pixel art editor designed to make tilesets easy
• Solarus -The free and open-source Action-RPG engine
• Unity – 3D and 2D game development environment with multiplatform publishing

After sleeping in Rubha Hunish, it was an early day out. We headed westward over to Uig for breakfast and I had a savoury haggis and cheese panini with a glass of orange juice.

After fueling up, we headed down to the Fairy Pools, a very beautiful part of Skye. Unfortunately the weather was not on our side and, while even though in poor weather it was a great experience, my photos of the area aren’t worth getting excited about. I did take a timelapse here which will be shown in the future.

From there, we made our way back up to Uig to take the ferry over to the Isle of Lewis. We found ourselves making a tough decision, when we were told that return tickets had been sold out for the following day and that we would be gambling on whether or not we could return the next day or the one after. Realizing that it would be our one and only chance to see Lewis, we decided to just go with it and took the ferry.

At the north part of Lewis, is the Calanais/Callanish Standing Stones, where we made our camp for the night on a sheltered hill. In the morning, we explored the north a bit before heading back and queueing in the wait list for the ferry.

While luck wasn’t on our side this far with weather, it was on our side with the queue, and we were able to get onto the ferry. The weather even cleared up while we were on the ferry, and by the time we were back in Skye, the sky was perfect.

We headed east to Staffin to hunt for fossilized dinosaur prints, before setting up camp in a sheep shearing pen at the base of the Quiraing. Oddly enough, though we were in an area designed to hold sheep, it was probably the furthest we’d camped from sheep while on Skye. It was however, my first encounter with Nettles. These plants are bastards, and everyone in Europe seems to be aware of them from an early age.

On the final part of our trip in Skye, we began with a hike of the Quiraing, and then continued on to explore Dunvegan, Fairy Glen, and Eilean Donan (neither of which I have video of) before returning to Glasgow.

All in all, Skye is a visually stunning place. For photos of it, head on over to my flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/allegrodigital/sets/72157645154973935/

Being unexpectedly out of work isn’t a good situation to find yourself in, and it’s especially difficult when you find yourself in that position in a brand new continent.

I made the decision to change my flight, leaving myself with a couple of weeks to look around. I figured that with no money coming in, it made sense to return home. I was surprised however that it was now peak season for air transport, and changing a ticket on short notice was actually going to cost me more than my return flight had in the first place. Eff that. If it’s cheaper to remain in one place and patiently wait for my original flight date, then that’s what I’m going to do.

This disappointment in realizing I couldn’t change my flights came right as I was about to start a week trip to Skye, so I tried to just ignore the situation and enjoy my road trip. Day one of this trip meant driving from Glasgow, to Rubha Hunish and making camp at the northern-most point of Skye.

The drive from Glasgow up to Rubha Hunish isn’t bad at all. We took the route up across the bridge which meant getting a brief stop at Eilean Donan. We only stopped here this day to stretch our legs and get a quick time lapse since the clouds were nice… but our plans involved actually stopping here on the way back to properly explore.

Keep in mind that some of the more northern roads in Scotland become one track paths. Expect polite waves from other drivers as you take turns letting each other pass, and expect sheep to indignantly bleat as you honk your horn to get them off the path in front of you.

Once out at Rubha Hunish, it’s a short walk out to The Lookout. Bothies, and the overall attitude toward wild camping are absolutely fantastic aspects of Scotland. I wish more places in the world were this friendly towards those who want to get away from it all. Just cause you’re out in the middle of nowhere however, don’t expect to be alone. Bothies are popular, and you need to get there early if you want to claim space in one. I anticipated that though, and brought camping gear with me.

Keep in mind that Scotland gets quite boggy in areas. While our view of the sunset was stunning, it did take a good bit of hunting to find a dry enough spot to pitch our tent for the night. Still though, I absolutely recommend you find your way out here if you’re looking for a place to sleep on the Isle of Skye.

After hiking from Stirling, I needed to take a few days off to let my feet recover. Be glad that I’ve decided to spare you the video detailing how I lanced my blisters and covered myself in tape. I used my downtime to plan a more realistic tour around Scotland, and after a couple of days decided to give walking another try. This time, I caught a train out to an area that had been on the top of my to-see-list since before departing for this fair country: Dunnottar Castle (Dùn Fhoithear, “fort on the shelving slope”).

These ruins have as rich of a history as one might hope for, and are very inspiring to look at. I imagine it must have truly been epic in it’s heyday. I’ve been taking heaps of time lapse videos in Scotland, like the two that I mention in the above video. While I haven’t had a chance yet to process them for you (or myself) to look at, I hope to edit them together into one video at some point so they can all be seen at once.

Some of the photos from this day trip can be seen on my Flickr page.

When trying to decide whether I could walk around Scotland, I decided to do a trial. Google was estimating that the distance I wanted to do would take three weeks… I needed to see how accurate Google’s esimates were, as well as whether my body could even handle long treks after years of being a couch potato. Google seems to think that a 25+ mile walk (from Stirling to Glasgow) will take 8h33 min. Not knowing what a mile is, I figured that’s as good of as an estimate as any. It turns out that it’s not.

I should mention that the first 8 photos over here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/allegrodigital/sets/72157645096283521/ were taken while on this walk.