Flash

This was a takeover banner for Nijago LEGO – giving the user the control of a flaming 3d lego sword with which they could chop up a website.

It was done at Aardman Digital and the client was McCann Bristol

The sword was built by a low poly modeler and then converted in to .awd model for the 3d engine.
The backgrounds were designed by Gav Stange and animated by Sun and Moon.

I used Away 3d to load in the model and handle all of the sword movement / interaction and the particle effects were done using Flint particle system

The effect of cutting and slicing was done by firstly drawing a path that followed the tip of  sword, the thickness of the path was determined by its velocity. I then drew the part of the line I had drawn each frame, directly to a bitmap. This was to keep the performance as high as possible.

The effect of the pieces falling out was done by checking each frame for intersection between the last section of the cut made, and all the previous sections (using this kind if technique http://www.gotoandplay.it/_articles/2006/08/vectors.php). If an intersection was discovered, I would draw the foreground image data within the loop I had just created, animate it falling, changing colour and turning. Then chop that loop out of the list of previous sections to check against. I’m not going to go in to any more detail than that because I can hear you yawning already, but there were a load of issues with bitmap data alpha channels and the such.

If you are trying to do any of the things I mentioned and are having trouble, please feel free to contact me and I’ll give you more info.

I’ll hopefully be able to get a working demo up soon, but until then you can watch this slightly un-exciting youtube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcY7RHNBfC0

Built by Aardman Digital, Championsheeps is a suite of games tied into the bafta award-winning animated series; Shaun the Sheep. Though principally aimed at the same demographic as the series, the games have proved very popular with adults and older teenagers, offering as they do, both instant pick up and playability as well as more difficult, technical challenges.

The five games offered within the suite spanned a number of genres, though those I built, Flock Together and Sheep Stack, are both physics-based puzzle-ish games. The former, a Tetris variant, challenges the player to drop the leotarded ruminants into colour coordinated piles, whilst the latter is more of problem solving game involving levers, balances, hungry sheep and an underpants catapult.

Initial animation test were done by Robin Davey and Phil Webster which looked fantastic and made everyone involved in the project very excited. Some mock-ups of initial designs by Gavin Strange further added to the anticipation. Then the prototypes were developed for us by Gaming Your Way and we could see that this was going to be really great once it all came together.

At this point I thought I would make a lot more work for myself and decided to broaden the scope of the games I was making from simple, single-level progressive games to multi-level challenges with a greater variety of problems and obstacles for the player to negotiate.

As this were my first stab at physics-based games (I had dabbled before but nothing on this scale), Championsheeps presented me with a new challenge in learning how to easily design and edit levels that would work in Box2d. Chris Underwood pointed me in the right direction, using a technique which allows easy production and editing of levels using the Flash IDE.

Championsheeps has been live for three days now and has already clocked up 90, 000 views. Despite being one of the more stressful projects I’ve worked on, I am especially happy with the results and the reception it has received.

The Farmyard

Leader boards

Sheepstack

Flock Together

Now a geeky bit

As well as the games, I also built, with the assistance of George Crabtree and Richard Davey, the main structure of the suite environment. This handles scores, user data and loading and unloading the games. As expected it presented quite a few of its own challenges, one of which is as follows.

The problem with loading one swf into another is the communication between the two. This can be done reasonably well using bubbling events, but that relies on the dispatcher being on the display list which I don’t really like. You could write a shed-load of interfaces, or if you don’t mind remembering what all of the method names are and leaving everything untyped you could do it that way (gets very messy though). But I am lazy and I like Flash Develop to fill out all the bits it can without me writing any extra code.

What I wanted was a single place I could dispatch events from and listen to.

So I started playing around with static vars in classes and experimenting with what overwrote what when one swf was loaded into another and they are referencing the same class. I discovered that the host swf always wins, and they do both end up referencing the same value.

This meant I could set up a commonly shared registry (just a class full of static vars) in which I instantiate a listening post (essentially a class that extended EventDispatcher). I used this to communicate from game to manager and back again. It also had the functionality to turn on and off events from all of the games except the one that was playing, so no erroneous events firing and games starting, stopping or quitting when I didn’t want them to.

As long as I didn’t reference anything in either the games or the manager from the commonly shared classes I wouldn’t end up compiling one thing in to another.

There were plenty of other challenges that arose in building this, but I thought this was of note because its quite a nice way of dealing with multiple swfs – all with their own logic and all needing to communicate with one another.

update  18/03/2011
look

On the bbc homepage

The idea of the Tate Movie Project is fantastic; to get kids to contribute their ideas to an animated movie. They’ll create every bit of the film, from drawing the characters to writing the plot and recording the sound effects. The site, built by Aardman Digital, takes the form of a film studio beautifully illustrated by Robin Davey. You can go to different departments to make various aspects of the film and you will be guided around the set by the crew; characters developed and animated by the ever-so talented Felix Massie.

My role as lead flash developer was to put together all of the beautifully crafted bits and bobs to make them work as a microsite whilst maintaining the subtlety inherent within the design.

I also built the tools that allow the kids to play around with, or submit their ideas and creations to the film. They can write scripts, make their own animations, record sound effects, send in pictures.  They can also save their ideas and add to them later before getting them just right so they can be submitted to the director for inclusion in movie.

There are loads of hidden treats waiting to be discovered within the rooms and awards to be won for finding them. One example is that you can knock musical dandruff out of the composers hair, pick it up  drag it to a stave which will start to play the music you are creating.

I am very proud to be a part of the team that put this site together, why not take a visit and look around.

Oh and BTW this recently won a BIMA award for best website.

I worked with the designer Dave Gillet and together we created a warm, safe but exciting environment for kids to enjoy.

The playroom

Make a picture, a place to add your own things to a picture

A dance along activity where you can choose what dance you want to do

Counting quiz instructions

On finding the correct number of items you are rewarded with a fun animated sequence

Choosing a story

Searching the sky in cloud hunt to find things hidden in the clouds.