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.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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