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.

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

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

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 on Flickr

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