neotic

Thanks for the feedback. I killed the autoplay on the galleries. Hope it runs a little better

Thanks for the nice comments!

Hey big update to the website! 

http://www.tygames.design/

My only real question is, does the animated galleries hurt or help? I kind of like them going through the screenshots but I could see it as distracting as well. 

Hey guys, just updating this thing... for the usual reasons Put a bunch of my new work up... 

http://www.williamtylerbuser.com same as always. Just thought I'd share

Haha you just love chairs. Love love love. Lookn good though.

Nice looking site and nice looking levels. GJ

What's not to like? It looks and works very well. I love the little GDC button on the top right. Wish I could go

I really like how you have everything arranged on one page, and when you "get to the end" there's the nice suppliementary information about yourself. Clicking to expand projects is a great idea versus just taking you to another page.

Some comments though:

1. Browsing on my android tablet. Everything functions quite well, but I noticed the image gallery was very hard to navigate on the tiny buttons you had in the corners. I had to zoom in very far for them to be large enough to interact with like a normal button. Perhaps boosting their size a little bit would work, or having an easy to read alternate way to naviage between pictures? Aside from that, everything worked flawlessly.

2. Might be a good idea to have some kind of non-intrusive (design wise) table of contents, instead of having to scroll through the list to just get to "personal work" and "thesises", which are slightly harder to distinguish at a glance compaired to the previous. I don't think you really need to categorize professional/personal/bio/etc beyond what you've done, but it could be helpful from simply a convience/curiosity standpoint to have a table of contents that jumps srtaight to where on the page you have your personal work, or your bio/resume/misc information. Especially the last part. Its never a bad idea for there be an easy way to see or jump to contact information as soon as a page is loaded

Granted this is not a major issue now, but if/when you decide to add more and more to your portfolio it could become a navigation issue for anyone who might want to look at your portfolio for something specific versus a general overview.

Ooooooh thanks. I was going over it with a friend and she wanted the resume stuff up top, but I think a table of contents could satisfy a lot. And yes, mmh. That's shadowbox, I'm just lucky I got it working... I'm not sure if I can get those arrows bigger but I'm going to try. And thanks for the nice comments, yes, one-page portfolio was my goal. I hate getting lost in nested portfolios. And when you do go to GDC you'll have to let me know!

Ninja edit: I couldn't easily make the buttons bigger but I did space them out. I'll still look in to making them bigger themselves, but theres a lot of .css and java in there. Ugh, I made this 2 years ago and I forget how everything works.

Ninja edit 2: added a menu ooooooooh

Ninja edit 3: Looks like I'll have to reconsider the vertical menu... doesn't play well on the tablet emulator I ran it on.

Looking pretty good overall. You have some typos under your new entries, and your resume is missing your time at id.

Heh thanks for pointing those out, probably going to rewrite everything again... ugh, need for feedback makes me careless. :embarrassed:

Updated the site a bit... appreciate any feedback.

www.williamtylerbuser.com

Thanks for taking time to give me some pointers from a good web designer. Hopefully I'll be able to address these sooner than later.

Thanks man, that was one of my primary goals... I hate getting lost in too many sections hehe.

Just did a minor update, changed some headers and overall text font.

Added my thesis on their finally.

Are you equally a designer and an environment artist or does one describe you better? Buttons to models/demo reel/flash is to obscure. I only found the demo reel the first time. Scrap the "portfolio" section and just make a model section, flash section, etc. The flash is cool but I'm not sure how it applies to environment artist or level design... there might be some cool nuggets for game design there but I'd put those in the back somewhere.. not up front. I'd make your resume so it can be seen all at once rather than piecemeal. One huge problem with it right now is that I can't highlight its text to copy it if I were to want to.

You used to be able to but shortly after it was announced FileFront was NOT closing down, I lost all my files and I'm never using FileFront again.

Should be hosting them on your own site. Any ad-based download site is a turn off.

I find that pdfs can just be weighty... or at least feel slow loading. Where I got hired, the leads referenced only my Word and HTML versions... and ignored PDF. I'd say the customer is always right, or rather whatever makes it easiest on them.

Could use some clarifying of what your are... are you a level designer who does some art or an artist who does some level design? Or rather, are you seeking employment as a designer or an artist?

Looks nice.

I know you probably don't want my opinion because we go to the same school... but it looks great man! Really impressed with a lot of the extra work you've done.

Nice architecture and composition but man, lose the bloom and post effect filters. I'll be brutally honest here: they are making the level look pretty crappy. You could have a much prettier scene with better lighting and no crappy filters. Really, you got a killer scene underneath all those filters, just get rid them asap!!

The tricky part of using the unreal 3 engine is actually making your game NOT look like an unreal 3 game. Only a few succeed imo (Mirrors Edge comes to mind).

Thanks for the tips! I have to use this level for testing my thesis but I think when all is said and done I might just do that.. and pullout the filters. I agree 1000000x about bloom though, it looks terrible in most UT3 games with a few exceptions.

My current project... still a work in progress.

I'm not expert, but it takes 3 clicks for me to get to one of your maps. That seems a bit much, I'm not sure what the answer is but I think you could definitely find a quicker/more organized way of displaying your awesome work.

Yeah I can't really even tell why there is flash to begin with... it looks like HTML. I redid my own site like three times... the first time after I had put in like 3 months in to learning Flash.. and then I wised up. Even the most intuitive Flash still requires learning.. where a HTML page is something everyone has used.

Just some Matinee tech for my level for my thesis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIRbk8czsMM

I was there too, what a ride!

I concur, I spoke with Robin for like 40 minutes. Very supportive and knowledgeable. He ignored my Gears of War, looked mostly at my HL2 and a few minutes at my Fallout. Where CCCP focused almost entirely on my Gears of War level, ignored most of my HL2, and then focused on my Fallout. Insomniac gave some good tips too, mostly focused on general gameplay, but still gave a lot of great feedback. If there is one thing I learned from GDC and the Career seminars is that everyone wants different things. Thats not to say you should do whatever floats your boat, but different companies clearly make different things which require different focuses.

Well cool, thanks man!

PS. Mandate of Heaven looks awesome. If I ever get Crysis installed I'll have to try it.

A question for anyone who has visited my site... I'm wondering if the link to my contact information and about me is apparent? I hope it is but having made it I can really see the page with fresh eyes.

I'm going to point the obvious here, but the description for the Source level is copied everywhere else except for the Gears one. Either that or it's a bug.

Navigation wise, I think it's a little too much. Not too sure how to word this, but it feels like it needs a bit more fresh air in between the levels once they're all expanded, and the entire layout could use a little polish. Fonts, the blue with the rollover, it all feels "low res". Not sure you catch my drift. Basically the quality of the screenshots often put the website layout to shame, and I think you could design something that make them shine a little more.

On the technical side, I'll point again the difficulties of running lightbox on iPhones. Your choice really.

Ahhh. It was not all HL2 text! I was working on my laptop earlier today and forgot to download the newest version of the html to my desktop! Thanks for catching that!

I think I understand what you're saying though. I put a drop shadow on the banner/header images which makes their rollover/highlight seem bigger or less polished. So maybe I should revert them to what I had before, without a drop shadow, so that the rollover/highlight hugs the images more closely and uniform. I can easily add some "air" between the levels, I'll see what I can do on that front as well. And we're totally thinking the same thing about iPhones. I already have it set up to go to a different page without shadowbox if you're on an iPhone. Its an easy script if anyone wants to steal it from my source.

Where are all your old POW maps?

Hey dark! Long time no see. Last time I installed Quake 3, some months ago, I could hardly find any of the original Prisoner of War installations... and only a few of my maps survived the merger with JB:PoW. So... sadly I don't have any backups of those maps.