Monday 4th December - Friday 12th December - bp alternative energy + christmas

I was very exited when this brief first came through, it was a chance to develope my flah and action script skills and i was looking forard to working with carol. The brief was to make a game for bp's alternative energy web site. The game needed to show different forms of energy generation and the pros and cons of each one. The website seems to be a bit of green washing by bp but at least its something. We decided to make a sim city type game where the player is given a country and has to add power stations too it creating enough power but without creating too much C02.

It was a pleasure to work with Carol and we encountered no real problems with the brief, we just go on with it and tackled any issue as soon as it cropped up. I like the finished game we produced, here is a small version:



for a larger version please go to full size version which is currently on carols blog.

i will stick it on my portfolio at some point but i probably wont have time for a while. The hardest and most time consuming thing about this course at the moment is keeping this blog up to date though it is helping my typing speed.

i had a nice relaxing time over christmas and was given Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, i was suposed to be reading a copy of the google story that james gave me but im now hooked on snow crash. Its a great book and an interactive media clasic, it was written in 1992 and has alot of elements of the modern web in it mainly second life. im about half way through and i dont want it to end at the moment, im kidding myself that reading it counts as study. I will stick it in Amazon when ive finished to see what they can sugest at what else i should read. I really like the dystopian future vision, very H G Wells.

Apart from alot of reading ive also been looking int what makes a good flash game, ive been looking at all the best games on the web and trying to work out what makes them good. Having an ineresting style and clean look apeals too me but i think more important is the quality of the animation and physical realism, thing in the game have to behave as you would expect them to. If something dosnt behave as you would expect in real life then the illution is broken and the magic is gone. In the next game i make im going to study my animation books to try to capture som real phisical reactions in objects and charectures within my game.