~Grogdon

Because everyone’s doing it and I'd hate to be out of the trend I'm writing up this sort of history info thing about me. Below you'll find places I find of interest, other VIP I know (not necessarily from deviantART), a little info about yours truly and anything else I can think up on the spot. (Please keep in mind I'm writing this at 1 o’clock in the morning)


A Little about Me

Hey, I'm Phil aka Grogdon. I'm 14 and am in year 8 at my school (moving off to year 9 next year and past the 'ratty' year). In my life I've got to major interests and they include world building (mapper, level designer whatever you want to call it) for mods and/or games and drawing. My interest in mapping for mods came after my dad bought a game called Morrowind a fair few years back. Before Morrowind I had a huge likeness to a sires of games called Might and Magic which like Morrowind is an rpg (role playing game). Anyway it was with Morrowind that I discovered an editor and set myself to learn as much as I could about it.

After following my interest with this editor I ended up starting up my own project called The Life of a Slave. After the announcement of Oblivion in the making (a sequel to Morrowind) I moved the project to that engine and that is where it stand today. I'm currently in the pre-production stage working on the plot and figuring ways to make the gameplay more interesting and higher in the fun-factor for the player.

Being a Morrowind fan I followed quite a few large mods in their progress. One of which was Ultima IX Redemption, a remake of an old Ultima game. It's beautiful landscape looked amazing (check it out in the screenshots page). I admired the worldbuilders on the team. But at one point I read on their news page that they required a number of new team members one of which was a world builder. Having a great interest in it I applied for the job and was surprised and overly excited to be given a shot on probation on the team.

So far my time with this team (The Titans of Ether team) has taught me so much. I respect both Corv, the team leader also a world builder, and Diddy, who is the Lead Worldbuilder so much. Both taught me how to create detailed landscapes with the Morrowind engine and looking back at past work I can say I have improved a lot.

If I could I would show you a screenshot of what I can do now to what i could do before but I'm not aloud to talk about or show any information that is not yet on the site. After I've got more time by finishing my own project I'll try and work on the UT2k4 editor and Half Life 2s editor. I touched UT2k4 editor once but free time took away any more chance to continue work there.

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My other interest which as of yet is much more brief then to my worldbuilding interest is drawing. I realized I was quite an alright drawer when i started drawing 3D objects at a young age whilst everyone was still doing stick figures. Even today some of my classmates can't draw accurate 3D objects. My art teachers seemed to always be praising me and telling me I've done a good job and what not and my mates seemed to always be looking over my shoulders grumbling why there work didn't look as good as mine.

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying I'm incredibly gifted or anything, I've still got much to learn like perspective I still need to touch on giving objects a nice textured look and other effects. I'm just trying tell you about my past. Anyway all through primary school and onwards to high school everyone’s seemed to be impressed with my work. I was doing at lot of what could be classified as concept artwork so my recent interest in modding brought me to offer my help as a concept artist for a mod. I posted on the moddb forums with a thread titled 'Crappy Concept Artist Looking for Work'. This title seemed to get a lot of attention mostly because it was different.

Anyway I got a few people interested in my offer, one of which was Dragonlord (around here LordofDragons), another man I greatly respect. His game Project Epsylon he was working on practically caught my eye with the dragon part. I always liked Dragons which is possibly why i have a similar liking to Lizards. I also had a mate who was obsessed with dragons. Every second week or so he'd have another dragon to draw in a different pose. It seemed to change. It'd be one for a while then he'd see another dragon and that would be all he'd draw for the next 3 weeks.

Annnnd I'm sliding from my story. Back on track: So there begun my work for Dragonlord, popping out pieces of artwork for him. I seem to hang just around the line which separate contributors to team members as I don't appear to submit enough work in on a good time. Although if i were to look at what I've done for Project Epsylon on order I would see my skills as a drawer progress. It used to be just sketchy drawings on paper which when I gave to him were quite dodgy looking because of the smudges and the paper colour which always was brownish for some reason. Then I tried outlining my work in pen. I didn't like that because I can't shade with pen any good so I moved back to pencil but this time I had different pencils which all varied in darkness of the grey lead. This allowed me to do a sketchy version really lightly then gone over it with a darker pencil which acted a lot like a pen except I could still shade. I also managed to make the picture look much more clear on the computer by removing the smudges and dodgy looking paper so it was white background with dark pencil lines.

My drawing skill also improved. The piece of work I'm working on now is much more detailed then what I had a first. Hahah Dragonlord doesn't know what it looks like yet. But again this leaves me to where I stand now. I guess my drawing interest is as details as my worldbuilding one.

I hope this wont take up too much space once I'm done. Anyway moving on, it's 1:30am already and I preferably don't want to be caught by my dad being up this late. If I do, you'll hear about.


Very Important People (VIP)

Here we have a list of people I consider quite important and who I respect quite a bit. I hope the people who i don't list don't feel to bad, your still very important but these guys stand out more, sorry.

-Dragonlord aka LordofDragons - Project Epsylon
-Corv aka Florian Kasper - Ultima IX Redemption
-Diddy - Ultima IX Redemption
-Clone - Clone Studios


Places of Interest

Here are a few places of interest that I check regally and well, am interested in.

-Moddb - [link] - Best Mod Database EVER!
-Project Epsylon - [link] - Wicked game in the making lead by Dragonlord also of which I do concept art for.
-Impossible Studios - [link] - My site for The Life of a Slave mod.
-The Titians of Ether - [link] - Ultima Redemption IX, Morrowind TC Lead by Corv, I'm a worldbuilder there.


Well I do believe that's all. It's a quarter to 2 now and I'm tired so I'm going to nick off to bed now.