Visits

We have had a few very interesting visitors so far this year. Leo from Sequence popped in to show us some flash games he had been working on for the BBC and Dr Who. Having visited the BBC at the beginning of the course it was very interesting to see a project from another angle, as a client the BBC seem to be quite particular about what they want. My current work experience at sequence has given me yet another angle of the same project. I think that I would definitely enjoy developing flash games in the future. Leo seemed to really enjoy his work; the only thing I worry about is if I would be able to get a job/career as soley a flash developer. I doubt it unless I worked in a very large company and I would then probably be churning out the same stuff night and day. Also it would be risky because if flash fell out of fashion I would be out of a job.

We also had a visit from greenfields, a blue tooth broadcasting company. They travel to events with a load of blue tooth transmitters; the event organizers hire them to broadcast advertising or multimedia content directly to customer’s phones. They had had some impressive results and although I usually keep the Bluetooth on my phone turned off I would switch it on to get a free animation or something useful like a map of the event. The advantage of using blue tooth over traditional paper based flyers is large, there is no waste and you know that your message has been read. I don’t know what greenfields charge but I imagine that at a big enough event it may even be cheaper to set up a few transmitters rather than have to pay for the printing and distribution of hundreds of leaflets. If the content you send out is good enough people my end up forwarding them to their friends which you probably wouldn’t do with a paper flyer.

Contraction and Convergence

Since christmas a lot of people at D10 have been working with James Cook on a student campaign on a mission to stop climate change. I was charged with creating a game to put on the website, idealy it would be viral and the kind of game which people would send to each other and tell people about.

It was a great project and i really enjoyed the chance to try out new things and work on a project on my own. here is the finished game:

here is the link to the original site
http://www.climatejustice.org.uk/media/emissionsimpossible/

From the project i learnt a lot about managing my time, we had 2 other briefs at the same time. I put a lot of hour in, mostly in the evening but it never felt like a chore, i really enjoyed making the game. It i not the most oringinal game but because of the time constraints i felt i couldnt risk making anything to blue sky. I would like to say a big thank you to james for giving the final game his designer magic.