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Making pigs fly into the third dimension

The nice folks over at KMP got me in to do a game for Manchester Airport. They wanted something to do with flying pigs that showed off all the destinations you can fly to direct from Manchester so we came up with this global pig flinging device.

I used the elastic code from the PlayStation site for the catapult animation, then added a load of Papervision to simulate the airport environment. Displaying all the destinations was quite a big interface design challenge in itself.

The second stage of the game was creating a Papervision globe and getting a Collada pig to fly around it in a convincing manner.

I repurposed some javascript to calculate geodisic distances and borrowed and hacked together various bits from Papervision globe examples I found on the interwebs. The code for detecting a water or ground landing was interesting too, the solution I ended up with involved taking the average hex number of the 16 pixels around the landing site to see if they were mainly water coloured.

KMP did a nice job of packaging it all up for Facebook, adding highscore tables and all that jive.

If you want to be a contender you need to reach Singapore and you have to be very, very accurate: Pig-a-Pult on Facebook.

I cannot believe this is not cow output!

You simply won’t believe this isn’t an amazing game! I did this one with Chris from Advergamer for I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter. The game is fun and pretty addictive although I spent half the development fighting Facebook which is the opposite of fun.

It got played by half the population of indonesia, according to the Google Analytics. Non dairy butter substitute  type games are obviously massive over there.

And I should point out that I didn’t design this one. At all.

So I can now do Facebook apps, if you want one.

Play Yum Yum Yum

Clear Swift

This a nice little bit of data visualization with some question answering interfaces combined, all made for Bight Digital‘s new client Clear Swift.

I think stuff like this really helps to engage users with what is essentially some pretty dull numbers, especially considering the usual interface for this sort of thing is radio buttons. From a UI point of view I think it’s really important to combine results and questions in one space and style.

Go interact with ClearSwift

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.

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!

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

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