Digital Outlook
Moving from London to Leeuwarden
After spending 5 years in London of which the last 4 years with the great people of Digital-Outlook it was time to move on and return to the Netherlands. I had a great time with Digital-Outlook, it is a great group of people who really understand their audience and know how to party. So if you’re in London and you’re looking for a great place to work give them a call.
But there are some cool new challenges ahead as well. I’ve joined theFactor.e which is a very well established company in Holland. They’ve set up a new business unit focused on casual and serious games in Leeuwarden. They brought me in as the games and social media specialist.
It’ll be really cool and challenging at the same time to setup this part of the business. I’ve worked here for 3 weeks now and am already enjoying it. What makes this place extra special is the link with Gameship. This is a high end motion capture studio that sits in the building I’m working in and is co-owned by theFactor.e. Pretty cool to have the possibility to do awesome stuff with it.
Mocap Studio Gameship
Alice in Wonderland Papervision site is live
Great day yesterday. After all the hard work my colleague Graham and I put in, the site for the new Tim Burton movie has finally gone live.
Alice in Wonderland screen shot
For this project we wanted to showcase the characters in a way that made sense for the movie. So we came up with the idea of having them fly past while you (Alice) are falling down the rabbit hole.
The site is my 3rd Papervision site and I’m starting to understand more and more about creating a good working site using this technology. It is really important to re-use your objects and keep an eye on the memory used. If you’re not careful, you can grind a site to a halt quite easily.
The tunnel texture is a looping Movieclip that I put on a cylinder. The camera is inside this cylinder. Then I have a bunch of flat planes with things like a watch, a chair, a crown etc mapped on top of them. They fly past and as soon as they go off screen, they loop back from the bottom again.
The main object of course is the picture frame. I first started off with just a box but that didn’t give the right feel. So I created this more detailed shape that has all the edges and depth of a real picture frame. Graham then created the textures and I put it all together. I love how much more depth it gives the frame.
I use the interactive moviematerial for the front (character) and back (downl0ads) sections. I then added the neat things like the FileReference style download of the icons, so we didn’t need a popup.
Have a look at the site here: http://www2.disney.co.uk/DisneyMovies/alice/
CornPops Challenge live on MiniClip
This is a rebuild post from last year. The game went live at the end of August 2008. Still going strong though 
Big day yesterday, the game I’ve been working on for pretty much the whole of August has gone live on Miniclip. It’s an advergame we built at Digital-Outlook for the Corn Pops cereal.
This was my most advanced game to date, involving a lot of physics. Building it had extreme ups and extreme downs, it really was the summer of physics for me. A nice little bonus was that I have a cameo in the end screen wearing a mullet wig…
I opted to build the engine myself instead of using one of the readily available Flash physics engines like Box2D. The main reason was that I just really like to know how it works and find great joy in figuring out these difficult math & physics problems.
If you ever want to build an engine like this yourself you might want to check out these useful links:
- Elastic collision on Wikipedia.
- 2D collisions explained by Fu-Kwun Hwang
- Ball vs line collisions in Flash
- Verlet integration on Wikipedia
I think one of the main things that caused a lot of gray hairs was the fact that the engine can work well for 15 seconds and then all of a sudden something happens that makes the ball go through something it shouldn’t go through. You really learn to debug properly.
In a nutshell this is how it works:
- define your objects. Walls are a bunch of vectors that go between 2 points. They don’t move. A ball is basically a point with a radius. It also gets a mass for ball to ball collisions. And a rag doll is a bunch of points that need to stay together using Inverse kinematics.
- Once it is all defined you go through your list of objects checking if a collision is about to happen in this frame, the collision detection. You basically want to find out the time within this frame that the collision happens. Let’s say the first collision happens at ‘t=0.4′ (t=0 is the start of the frame, t=1 is the end of the frame). Then you move everything up to t=0.4 in the frame.
- Now comes big step number two, the collision handling. You need to deal with different style collisions in a different way. The options I had in this game were ball-ball, ball-line or point-line. You pick the right one and then you deal with the collision adjusting the speed from the objects in collision.
- Once that is done I have a look if another collision will happen after t=0.4. If so repeat the 2 points above until you’ve reached t=1 and you move onto the next frame.
Now go and enjoy the game over at Miniclip 