Brandon Van Slyke

So maybe I’ll make updating the blog a yearly thing.

To be perfectly honest, I probably haven’t cultivated the necessary intrinsic motivation required to update this place regularly. That’s probably normal. I’ve never been much of a social media person either, despite how often I consider participating in it. That’s probably normal too. I’d like to change that, though. Anyway, while maintaining a personal blog has always been a noble goal, it hasn’t really worked out so far in this particular case.

That said, this past year has been busy and filled with a lot of progress toward my continued educational goals and personal projects. I also began some much-needed organization and cleanup in preparation for whatever comes next. If you know me, you know I’ve said versions of that before, but there’s a difference between thinking about what’s next and actually going out and finding it. For a long time now, I’ve been kinda stuck in that first category.

Which means some work needs to get done around here as well. There are a handful of small projects and prototypes I’ll be sharing, lots of little things that have accumulated over the many years of tinkering and learning. I’ve been meaning to get them on here for a while. At some point I’m also going to move off WordPress, which will warrant a bit of a redesign. The site has always used it and it’s been okay, but that was before I went back to school for computer science. In all seriousness, I feel the site is more bloated than it needs to be, and I’m not the biggest PHP fan if I’m being honest (note: I wrote this a week before the recent hack). I’ve been looking at alternatives and I think I have a solid one picked out. I’ve been developing a fansite with it and so far it hasn’t been too bad to work with. I’ll post more about this as that work comes down the pipe. It’s the type of project I’ll try with an open-weight model and a local agent first, and when I get to it I’ll document the process and share what I did.

I’ve also started work on a new video game prototype recently, and I’ll definitely be discussing and sharing its progress and how it comes together here going forward. The past couple of weeks I’ve been modeling and texturing individual props and environment assets for it in Blender. As a hobbyist 3D artist, I’m aiming for something along the lines of what you’d see in the 32-bit era. I’ve also started hand-modeling a character, using a locally generated 3D model as a starting point and applying an aggressive quad remesh to reduce it to a lower-poly base. That approach has worked pretty well so far, and it still requires a ton of cleanup work, which I don’t mind. I love the process of development, and that’s really the entire point of this prototype, to make something cool, fun, and interesting to me.

Well, that’s pretty much where things stand at the moment. I’d like this site to be the primary place for sharing the stuff I’m working on, and ideally it ends up less empty than it is now. In the meantime, the next screenshot should have at least one object in it that isn’t just a colored cube.

Until next time,
Brandon