It has just been announced that we will be showcasing Cletus at the Eurogamer Expo’s Indie Arcade this October. As you would expect we are very excited to get the opportunity to show off all the hard graft we’ve been putting into Cletus. For those that attend it is your chance to see and sample what we and the lovely Dyson fellas have been up to as well as Introversion and other indies.

This is a great model to make if you are creating a beach scene. This is a bit of a fiddly model to make so don’t drink lots of coffee first. Steady hands are your friend.

1.Start by making the base of your sandcastle. The bigger your base the more towers you can fit on it so it is up to you how epic you want your castle to be. I stuck with just a couple of towers but there is no reason why you couldn’t build King Arthur’s dream palace!

2.Create your first tower by rolling quite a fat little sausage. Put it vertically on to your base and attach it with a bit of extra clay or just by pushing the end of the tower into the base with your fingers.

3.Roll a smaller sausage. This should be as thick as you want your turrets to be. I made the mistake of making this sausage too small the first time I made the turrets which meant I had to chop off the top of the tower and start over. If you aren’t sure about the size of your turrets, make a test tower that isn’t attached to your base. This is also useful to have if you want to practice making windows and doors for your castle. Once you have your smaller sausage that is the right thickness for your turrets, wrap it around the top of your tower. Blend it to the tower with your fingers.

4.Now you need to mark out your turrets. Check that you can remove every other turret without leaving a huge gap or two turrets together. Once you are ready you can remove every other turret which should leave you with a real castle like tower.

5.Next step is adding any doors and windows. All you need here is a pen. For the windows you just need to stick the pen tip into the clay and drag down very slightly. Any doors can be done the same way although you will need to scrape away any excess clay.

6.No sandcastle is complete without any flags. Wire is the best way of making the flag poles. Simply cut a small length of wire ready for your flag. Make a small triangle of clay and attach it to the wire. Then just place your flag on top of a tower, just like you would with a real sandcastle.

Your sandcastle is now ready to sit majestically on the beach.

Sarah and I are the middle of putting together another big collection of artwork for the game. Lots of little overlooked bits and pieces; targets for the tutorial area, extra bits of scenery, the odd minor enemy or trap that we had neglected to deal with earlier. Once that’s done, the majority of the core game should be 100% artwork complete. I’ve been going over the game design document we wrote, so long ago now it seems, and lots of old lists I’d made of things I had to do. There were all kinds of enemies, traps and effects, and hundreds and hundreds of individual pieces of scenery.

A danger sign to go next to the boiling mud. A wooden ladder. Tractor (plus two wheels). Tree stumps (3-4 variants). A haystack. A window frame. Blades of grass. A butterfly. Bits of fence. Mountains. A turbulent sea. A waterfall. A pile of old tyres. A robotic octopus. A life preserver. A can of cola. Every individual element in dozens of different scenes, all written out in endless long lists. It would be depressing to look at all of those hundreds and hundreds of listed items if it wasn’t for the fact that we have already completed the great majority of them.

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Plants are a good staple model to put in any level. They can be dotted almost anywhere and add a bit of variety to a scene.

1. Start with a good old clay sausage. Make it the length of your desired plant. Taper the end by rolling it a bit more than the rest of your sausage. Repeat the process with smaller sausages of clay to make your branches.

2. Flatten out another chunk of clay to cut your leaves out of. This isn’t the only way to make leaves but I find it is the easiest way to make three pronged leaves . Cut your leaf shape into the clay, making sure you cut all the way through.

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