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PS3 The Game

I think I can finally tell the world about this. I spent a couple of months at LOVE (lovely bunch of award winning chaps) in the summer, working on a Top Secret project to create a whole herd of mini games in record time (I think it worked out at 1 mini game every 2 days) for ‘The Game’ a fantastic game site concept – one half of the world (Team A) versus the other half (Team B). You choose a team then collect points by playing challenges (user-created timelines of mini games and questions). The points go towards your team’s total. Dunno what happens then, I guess we’ll find out when the challenge deadline arrives.

It was really cool to do some games again, and throwing a game together in 2 days really focuses your skills on the mechanics of what you’re doing. So many games I’ve worked on have revolved around a product or a brand at the detriment of game play, so it was nice to concentrate on fun for a change. You know, like games are meant to be about.

We used the box2d physics engine for lots of the games, which (once you get your head around it) gives you the tools to make something worthy of a PlayStation site.

So get over to The Game and join a team (Team B is where the cool kids are) and try all the games, or just play all my mini games in the challenge I created.

Top Tips for Account Managers

I started tweeting some Top Tips about account managers this week which seemed to strike a chord, so I’ve written a few more. If you agree, disagree or have more tips please add them in the comments. I’d especially love to hear from account managers about the frustrations of precious designers and non-communicating developers. May I suggest anonymity to prevent being sacked.

I’ve worked with many account managers and producers (I was never sure quite what the difference was, different titles at different places). Some are brilliant, some are absolutely terrible. I’ve also done quite a bit of account management myself with my own clients. I guess I’m lucky because most of my projects are small and since I’m also building the thing communication is very easy. I just look in the mirror and talk.

It’s easy to do a rant about how an account manager has pissed on your bonfire but I’ve tried to be constructive, I’ve drawn on my experience of good and bad to make some tips which might actually be useful to someone.

Top Tip 1: You are a conduit for communication

• Your most important job is to aid communication between your team of experts and the client
• If your desk is out of shouting range of the team, you’re not in the team
  
• The client is not ‘your’ client. They are not a delicate flower to be shielded from those big scary developers
  
• If another member of the team talks to the client, they will not insult the client’s mother, shit on the client’s sofa or have sex with the clients partner and post a video on youtube
  
• If you feel you are the only one who really understands what the client wants and therefore have final say in what is presented you have failed at your most important task
  
• Projects run much more smoothly if the client meets with key members of your team at key points in the project, especially at the start.
  

Top Tip 2: Tools to use

• Microsoft Word is not a tool that can be used to design interactive experiences
• Flat designs in Photoshop are fine for straightforward web pages and look & feel but they don’t tell the whole story for more complex interactive projects
  

Top Tip 3: Prototype

• Clients will sign off flat designs without understanding all the implications of the interaction they represent, so if it’s complex get them to sign off a working prototype

Top Tip 4: Your team are experts

• If you only do design amends your client suggests your project will go over time and budget
• Your team have (or should have unless you’ve employed retards) years of experience in the thing you’re trying to create. Dismiss their input at your peril
• Don’t nitpick and pixel push design work based on your personal interpretation of the clients requirements. Your area of expertise (should be) communication, documentation and management

Top Tip 5: Honesty never bites you in the ass

• Setting deadlines based on when the client wants to ’see something’ will not make that feature quicker to develop.
• Don’t create false deadlines to motivate your team to work faster, you’ll get unnecessarily rushed design and code that will take longer to get right in the long term

Messing around with 3d and pixels

This is a little proof of concept experiment thingy for a client. It turns an image into a 3d depth map based on pixel brightness. I think it looks pretty, hopefully the client will go for it and I can take it a bit further.

It’s a bit rough round the edges, but have a play: pin art

Blast Off! and a time before the App Store

Back in 2007 myself and award winning games designer / producer Caspar Field got together to have a go at designing and building a mobile phone game because it looked like it’d be fun, we’d learn stuff and might even earn us some cash if we had any sort of success. We called our little enterprise Modern Industrial Games.

The plan was to prototype up a game mechanic then build a fully working demo in Flash Lite which we could run on a phone. We achieved this first bit and it was indeed good fun, we learned a lot and produced a cool looking game. The problems began when we looked at the issues surrounding getting the game to mobile phone owner’s phones. You have to remember that this was before Apple came along a showed everyone how it should be done (I always smile when I hear iPhone developers whine because Apple took a few weeks to approve their app – you should have tried getting a game ‘out’ before the concept of the app store arrived).

Caspar got us meetings with key mobile phone game producers (a process that in itself took a few months), we attended meetings to be told in addition to the porting costs we knew we’d have to pay we would have to shell out to have the game ported to anything from 30 to 300 phones, each with different screen sizes and graphic capabilities. Once we’d got to that stage (and we’re talking over £10k of investment here) the mobile networks might put it on their games download stores, where we’d get a pretty pathetic cut of the sale price (between £2 – £5 in those days) and we’d be directly competing with the movie franchises that made up the majority of mobile phone game downloads in 2007. The companies we went to see also got a cut of the sale price (I’m not sure what for since they weren’t putting up any of the cash for the porting).

In conclusion it looked like a very bad investment even if you had a sure fire hit of a game, and a huge risk for a small time developer. It annoys me that time after time Apple has to come along to show a whole industry the common sense approach to selling their own products. Can none of them think for themselves any more?

This turned into a bit of a rant, so cheer yourself up and play Blast Off!

Cornwall Photo Woo

We went to Cornwall for a fortnight and it was pretty cool. The first week had some wild weather, which always makes for good pictures at the seaside.

Cornwall on Flickr

First Direct Live – Outdoor media

I got to do some outdoor media for the first time which was pretty cool. These big LCD screens are in the Westfield center in London (which I’ve never visited but I believe is big and fancy). I also created a series of animations for the LCD screens you see on the escalators on the London Underground.

JWT Cheethambell got me in to create the animations (lots of swarming positive and negative symbols, like shoals of fish chasing bait and a Star Wars style shrinking word animation). The animations use live data provided by the First Direct Live site.

If you’re in that London and you see one of these, please send me a picture or video – I’d love to see them in action and the images they sent me are a bit whack. If you’re not in London you might get to see the web banners I created in the same style – they’re all over the interwebs.

Jane Sebire

Here’s a nice site I did for Garden Photographer Jane Sebire using the 3d stuff built into Flash Player 10.

I love doing photographer’s sites, because great images always (or should always) make it easy to design a great site.

With Jane’s site I used the idea of a single pivot point, with all the site content rotating around it.

janesebire.com

Digital Literacy

I designed and built this site for the North West Learning Grid, who are an outfit producing open-source digital learning products for children all over the UK.

This brief was to teach 11-15 year olds how to make the most of online tools such as search engines, information sites and maps.

Challenges included making the AS2 games content I was given work in the AS3 site I created and making the site accessible to screen readers.

Check out the background, it’s populated with images randomly pulled from a folder and uniquely drawn and animated on every page.

Digital Literacy

Scribbles

Here’s an spin off from the Digital Literacy project I recently did. It draws a scribbly line of varying thicknesses with an inky effect created by using the drop shadow filter.

Have a play: scribbler

BBC Bloom

Bloom is the BBC’s highly interactive climate change site, conceived and built by magneticNorth. mN initially got me in to do some character animation but I ended up staying for the whole project, designing, prototyping, building and helping to turn the concept into the rich experience mN and the BBC required.

The Bloom project was the first time myself and the mN team really got into AS3. It was at times a painful experience, but well worth it.

You can see the site here: BBC Bloom

Bloom has won a crazy amount of national and international awards since it was launched (10 now, according to mN). Here’s some of the highlights, I’ll get a proper list together one day:

Favorite Web Awards

Two Webbys  awards (people’s choice and lifestyle)

BIMA

W3 Gold award

Keep & Share

Keep & Share is Amy Twigger-Holroyd’s luxury knitware brand which I’ve had the great pleasure of designing, building and updating sites for since 2006.

Amy truly embraced the internet as a way of promoting herself and brand and it’s worked really well, with the Independant newspaper naming Keep & Share the number 1 e-boutique store of 2007.

We’re hoping to get her new kids fashion site, Riot & Return, up and running soon.

Keep & Share

David Marsh Furniture

A portfolio site for David Marsh’s furniture design business. David and me studied furniture design together at university. He stuck with it, I defected to the dirty world of pixels.

Check out the nifty Polaroid style image pile interface. I like it a lot.

David Marsh Furniture

Saxton Leeds – Urban Splash

magneticNorth made a whole bunch of cool flash sites for Urban Splash, I got to design and build this one. It features a herd of parping gnomes from mN’s award winning BlueTooth Gnomes campaign for the same development.

Saxton Leeds

Meg Hodson

A simple portfolio for Meg Hodson, a fantastic fashion photographer. Just one page deep, all the information you need is just where it should be letting the images be the star.

Meg Hodson

Consult New Business

This site showcases my illustration, animation and ideas skills. I developed the concept for John and Jeff who wanted a site to put across their simple message in an engaging way. The concept I came up with was the interactive pop-up book with a part of their message on each page.

Consult New Business