A quick post from me? On a Monday? Well, let’s see…
So, last week me and Tim went to the TIGA Games Industry Awards. We’d been nominated for 2 awards. Nurse Quest was nominated in the Action/Adventure category and Blockbusters in the Serious Games category. Sadly we didn’t win, we genuinely hadn’t expected to. In the grand scheme of things we’re new to the industry and getting a nomination was an unexpected joy. The big winner from the evening was The Chinese Room for Dear Esther which is a visually stunning, explorative narrative kind of an experience, a ghost story. It’s well worth a look if you haven’t seen it already.
After playing Mush pretty solidly for the past month or so on my phone I was quite exited to meet the Angry Mango team who are all lovely and full of brilliant ideas, I’m really interested to see what they come up with next. Sitting on a table next to some fine folks from Mediatonic meant I got to bore them endlessly of my love for their work.
Attending the event meant we got to meet and talk to a lot of really interesting people in the industry and hang out with our friends from State of Play and Games Britannia (um, and drink far too much wine… sorry everybody) And now (since the hangover lifted) I’m full of buzz and bounce, I’m hopeful for the future and challenged to take one of those shiny tigers home with us.
We are really very pleased, ecstatic in fact, to announce that we snagged a commission from Auntie. The Beeb. THE BBC! And not just any old bit of the BBC either, no, one of our favourite bits… CBBC! The day we found out there was much dancing and some drinking (of pints (of tea)). The project is for Dick and Dom’s newest incarnation on the channel, HOOPLA! A dark and murky carnival of weird games and mildly terrifying clowns. What’s not to love?
The Hoopla game is a series of mini games in which you get to torment Dick and Dom. You can either play to collect tokens which you can swap for astoundingly ‘good’ prizes or play against your mates in a shared keyboard mode. The games are a little bit odd and a little bit vile, but that’s just how we like it. In the first two of the games available to play you get to either shoot at Dick and Dom via a ‘Bogie Blaster’ or fire ping pong balls at them and the pesky Clown Kids to protect your prizes.
I have, however, started to develop a slight aversion to clowns.
We have been quietly amused for months with the physics of snot. One of the games in the second batch (due out in the next few weeks) now has us focusing on the physical properties of vomit. All in a day’s work, we keep saying (whilst not quite being able to look each other in the eye). It has been a lot of fun though and getting to spend the weekend in Devon at Dingles Fairground Heritage Centre where the show was recorded and call that ‘work’ is currently a career highlight for me.
There will be more games going live soon so keep checking back here and on the CBBC site – although I’m sure you’ll hear me shouting from the roof tops once we’re all done!
Last week I had to go to Paris. I HAD TO! It was for work. Yeah, I can hardly believe it either.
We recently built a game for the local charity Safe@Last who do amazing work with and for young people in South Yorkshire around issues relating to homelessness. I went to speak at Games For Change Europe as part of Futr En Seine. It was a day for game designers, makers, teachers and developers in Europe working in the field of games for social change to come together and share their projects and experiences – all brought together by Jean-Michel Blottière who has been working to unite the community for a few years.
The game we’ve made for Safe@Last isn’t quite live yet but it is the first project that we’ve produced that aims to have a social impact. For more information about the game we made, you can find my slides here. Games with a social impact are something that we’re interested in and I jumped at the chance to go and talk about it in Paris (it being in Paris did help the decision a little) because I wanted to try and learn more about the market and how other developers have approached similar projects. We’ve since been able to do another game in this field for Terrence Higgins Trust and the benefits of doing this kind of works are amazing. Not only did we get to learn about positive work these charities are doing but also try to help them achieve their goals is immensely satisfying.
The day was amazing, it was jam-packed with people in and around Europe working on games for social change or that are intended to have a social impact. I can’t cover it all but the highlights for me were…
Stéphane Buthaud of HumanoGames spoke about their efforts to build an alternative Facebook game. It’s very much in the Farmville mode but the in-game currency ‘Happy Cash’ can be spent on in game items, as micro-loans to your friends to help them get started in the game or you can opt to convert them from virtual currency in to actual micro-loans for real people via Kiva. The intention of the game is to teach people about and promote micro-loans but also through sponsorship hopes to make and actual difference to people lives. The game presents you with real people from the Kiva site who need small loans to help them restock or expand their small business but banking or traditional finance routes are not available to them. I’ve since realised that this game is not on its own. There are other similar Facebook games such as WeTopia but it’s certainly the great implementation of the concept – converting the hours spent working at long term management games on Facebook in to genuine social change.
Prof. Dr. Michael Wagner spoke about his experience of designing games for the classroom. It was really interesting to see how he had tackled the much-discussed on the day issue of Learning versus Fun. A lot of the speakers recognised that there needs to be a balance struck between teaching and what is fun. As Michael said, game design is an iterative process and this doesn’t always lend itself well to formal learning but can be very useful for procedural learning. He demonstrated Ludwig, a physics game that aims to introduce students to the way physicists think, that he was involved in the development of. Notably Ludwig was specifically developed with high immersion and slick graphics in attempt to make it feel like game rather than a learning tool.
Andrew Nash presented his Facebook game that aims to educate the public about town planning. Based on the concept that empowering the people who know a transport system the best (ie – the people who use it everyday) to understand the constraints put on town planners, together they can create greener city streets by making better public transport systems. I love the idea of this project. Andrew said they were looking for some support in developing the project further and I hope that he finds it.
As well as coming together to share our work, the purpose of this get together was so that Jean-Michel could find out from us if we felt there was a need for a separate entity to the main Games for Change organisation based in the US. They’ve just held their annual conference there in New York (if you haven’t seen it I recommend watching the key note speech by Jane McGonigal it’s a very enlightening and quite a personal insight in to how games like this can help people). From listening to the other speakers, I think that there is certainly enough interest and I think there are needs mostly for economic reasons – personally I would love to have been able to go to New York this week but it’s expensive in both time and money. The live stream this year has been really good but it’s still not the same as being there to focus on the event and talk with like-minded people, I think a local organisation might help more with support and forming a network. Regardless of what happens I am definitely looking forward for the chance to meet up with this community again, I feel very honoured to have been invited to be part of it.
This week I experienced a web conference with a difference. Not only were all the speakers women, but, women were in the majority in the audience too. In addition to this 2 of the 3 days were spent at my desk in Team Cooper Towers here in sunny Sheffield.
I’ve never experienced a Webinar before but I’m really impressed with the technology, there were only a few hitches that were effortlessly and quickly dealt with utilising freely available simple technologies like sharing a Google presentation. It enabled me to listen in to the sessions while still at work and, as Keri Lambden suggested, I could have been sat in my dressing gown if I liked – sadly the windows at TC towers are large and I’m not sure the innocent people of Sheffield (let alone my poor colleagues) are quite ready for that horror.
I really enjoyed Rebekah Lock’s talk about unblocking her creativity by setting herself a 365 challenge , to create a heart in whatever style or media everyday for a year. The great thing about her session was she set us the challenge to come up with our own heart, I gave myself a 20 minute time limit and came up with this. Which reminded me that at Flash On The Beach I’d promised myself to do more doing and making for myself, I’m now considering setting myself a daily creative challenge, but, I’ll get back to you about that.
I found Annette Priest’s session on mobile user experience invaluable. Taking recent apps made by Starbucks as an example of good and bad usability design. I found it interesting that the one they made for “fun” she considered to be an empty experience. I think this is a problem, finding a place for fun interactions that are not a whole game but have value as an added bonus for your audience. It’s not really wise to make something flippant intended as a few minutes of interaction as a downloadable app. The user has expectations linked in to downloading an app. It’s why frippery and fun is best handled in browser, and I would say this, by Flash.
The final panel discussion featured four highly accomplished, experienced and inspirational women who had to tackle some really big questions about being women working in technology. Well respected UI design expert Sarah Parmenter spoke about teaching herself how to code. Entrepreneurial power house Sarah McVittie spoke about her deep love for data. Julie Howell discussed her years in the industry and how she and her peers invented social networking by creating large forums where groups with similar interest and needs would discuss their issues. Jess Ratcliffe, founder of the awesome site GaBOOM, talked about having an idea at 15 and setting up a business at 19.
I think the main thing that I got from the conference was that, despite being a minority, women are a thriving vital part of the web community. We really enjoy the work and we bring a specific point of view to the market. We feel a little sad that there aren’t more of us but an event like Emerge gave us an opportunity to be more than the 12% in the room, even if it did mean there was a queue for the loos.
Last week I had the opportunity to visit Media City UK, the new Salford home for six of the ten BBC products.
The offices at Media City are shinier than a really shiny thing. Nearly every static vertical surface is covered in whiteboard material, there are bare concrete pillars and grey felt-covered chairs with brightly coloured furry buttons and zips. I was really struggling not to touch everything. Oddly, the lifts have the floor selection buttons on the outside of the lift, I assume possibly serving as a constant daily reminder to staff that user journeys and choice are very neatly intertwined.
The day started off with a rapid and tantalising tour of the R&D department. We were whisked through listening rooms, labs, user testing suits and shown a flashed ankle of what the R&D team is up to. Frankly, I want to go back and spend a whole day (maybe 2) badgering the staff about what they’re doing and why and how and … I digress. The highlight for me was discovering the Universal Remote Control API which has been developed to solve problems of accessibility but potentially has a wider scope, giving viewers the opportunity to control and interact with their TV screens from their phone or tablet, and the possibility for programme makers to add an extra character to your living room.
The rest of the day revolved around the BBC’s vision for our four screens – TV, Computer, Tablet and Mobile.
Based on the fact 97% of homes have a TV and there are 1.3 mobile phone contracts per person in the UK, the assumption is that quite a lot of us are at least two screen people. Our consumption of media is not limited to those two screens though so adding in desktops, laptops and tablets means that the BBC’s digital output will now cover four screens.
My favourite presentation of the day was from Holly Goodier, Head of Audiences, who presented results of her teams extensive research. They’ve been listening to how we say we interact with our screens, but also looking at how we actually interact with those screens given the data trails we all leave behind us. Basically it comes down to context and interaction level. We love our phones; they are our limbs and our hearts. We see Tablets as frivolous entertainment and in many cases they’re now being used as personal TV’s. Most people associate their desktops and laptops as a work space. TV is divided between different generations, older people see it as the hearth of the home, younger people see them as background noise.
She explained that about three or four years ago they were wondering when screens would become ubiquitous – At what point would there be a screen everywhere? In a very short time that has become a reality. Holly also hinted towards a concept that has been buzzing around my brain after reading this blog post. She asked, “When will the glass disappear?”. Sadly she didn’t take a punt at answering the question.
So the BBC have set their stall out. They’re going to be creating digital content across all four screens for all ten brands. Even if that means some forms of interactive media are going to look ten years behind others. At the time I raised this point in an ill thought out tweet. Actually, after talking it over with some of the BBC staff and considering the issue of “IsHTML5ready?”, I think it’s a very brave move that’s been forced by events they have no control over. Considering the lack of knowledge and experience in these new areas but recognising a shift in the way we use our screens, they are starting and supporting a move over to looking differently at the ways in which we can produce digital content.
Top GPS tracking folk Yellowbrick asked Team Cooper to help visualise the yacht races they provide GPS tracking units to. The result not only allowed race entrants to view their own progress but also provided the public a chance to spectate and cheer on the whole event from the comfort of their own computers (without any of that getting wet malarkey).
The team really enjoyed this project and are dead proud of the result of all their hard work. The fact that the tool had over 2.6 million views in its first season, seeing the tracker rental stock nearly double in this time are just an awesome added bonus.
So far, we’ve watched the race viewer track 98 yacht races and over 200 treks and expeditions all across the globe, Yellowbrick’s tracker fleet transmitting 1.3 million position reports between them.
Even if a contest is halfway round the world, it’s clear audiences are enjoying keeping an eye on their favourite entrant. Each of our visitors stays on the viewer page for an average of 7 minutes and 20 seconds each time they pop by so frankly, whether you’re in the race or watching from home, everyone’s a winner!
So, for the first time in ages I’m sitting down to write a blog post, I’m sorry it’s been so long. If you want to know more about Ada Lovelace and what this day is trying to achive please go and read more here. However, to summarise, Ada was the first computer programmer and blogging about women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics is the order of the day.
This year I’ve decided to write about another woman who achieved a first, Helen Sharman.
Helen Sharman is from Sheffield and in 1991 she was 27. She was a chemist and at the time had been working for Mars, in what I can only imagine, was a Dexter’s Laboratory meets Willy Wonker type set up making chocolates and sweets EVEN more deliciously addictive (this isn’t actually true as far as I know but I really like the idea that it might be). She heard a radio advert, entered a competition and became the first British astronaut. How cool is that? There’s a little bit more to it than that, but rather than me go on about it in detail you should go and watch Helen talk about herself in this excellent video.
I’m from Sheffield and in 1991 I was 14. In addition to my basic core love of science, I have a deep fascination with space, space travel and the possibilities this affords us. I was (am) a massive sci-fi nerd (I even have my own Star Trek communicator pin badge so I can pretend I’m Captain Janeway when no-one else is in the house). A year or so later I was lucky enough to see her do a very similar talk to the above at my school. She is one of the best speakers I have ever seen, she enthuses about her experience in space and explains it with such clarity. In a pretty recent article from a local news paper I was pleased to find out she’s still working in the sciences as part of the analytical science team for the National Physical Laboratory.
All of that lovely inspiration and I STILL didn’t choose science as a subject beyond GCSE or as a career. I don’t know why. I kind of wish I could go back in time and shake my teenage self to tell her it was a missed opportunity. That said I wouldn’t change the opportunities that DID happen and led me here to work in technology. I mean, Seriously. I’m writing this and anyone in the world, should they find it, could read it. Anyone. I still love that.
Hello world
Anyway… I also wanted to quickly mention the blog post I wrote for the last Ada Lovelace day about Jane McGonigal and the concept of gaming for change that she has been promoting. In the 18 months or so since I wrote that blog post lots of projects have been carried out with that concept at their core. The one that interests me the most is the Fold.it game. It has taken a scientific problem and turned it in to a puzzle game. After playing it for 3 weeks, a small group of people (who are not scientists but gamers) solved the problem and contributed to scientific progress. Amazing.
We were very excited when our clients Beazley asked us to create a game for them to help with their support of British Fencing. We really enjoy working on projects for Beazley as their core audience is usually very competitive. You may have noticed but we love a bit of competition!
By shear coincidence, Russell is a keen fencer and was happy to bring his kit in to the office for us to get to grips with the rules and flow of the game. ‘Researching’ this game was one of the most fun things we’ve done this year, if only because it was an excuse to wave swords around in the office. I think maybe sometimes I go on a little too much about how much I love my job, but seriously… look:
Kyle did a great job on the development of this game. The creation of artificial intelligence for the computer opponent seems a little like witchcraft to me but he assures me it’s not (no frogs were sacrificed in the making of the game).
The game was launched a couple of weeks ago and it’s been really well received. We were very pleased when we realised that some of the British fencing team were playing – quite competitively!
Last night I spoke at a Culture Club showcase at the brilliant Site Gallery, hosted by The North marketing agency and supported by Sheffield City Council. The theme was impact, they wanted to show how Sheffield’s creative community is having an impact around the world.
I’m really aware of all the creative digital work being done in Sheffield but there’s lots of other kinds of brilliant work being done here that I had no idea about. Highlights of last night for me were The Hantu Collective, specifically their Project Bright and Fauna Graphic who does some of the most stunning murals featuring birds.
I have to say I was nervous as this is a first for me but I really enjoyed it. Me and Tim are so passionate about what we’re doing that sometimes it feels like it’s all we talk about. I worry that maybe we talk too much about it. Last night made me realise that while maybe that is true in some circles there are still extremely large groups of people that don’t really know about or understand what it is we’re doing.
Thanks so much to Ben, Mavis, Jonny, Stella, Amy and the Site Gallery staff for aiding and abetting my evangelising of Team Cooper’s work!
For those that are interested this is my presentation.
We were asked by Sky to help them produce a game to celebrate the movie release of Disney’s “Tron: Legacy”. This made us at Team Cooper quite excited, not least because we’re all massive retro gaming nerds.
The sequel to the classic 1982 film needed a top quality game to go with it and nothing says quality Tron like light-cycles. Being sly foxes, we crafted a series ever infuriating mazes to dart around as you attempt to out-manoeuvre up to three other computer players with increasingly tricky AI.
Just like the Cricket Skills game, the game also featured dual high score leader boards so that players could compare their scores to their Facebook friends as well as everyone else.
The only way to win is to survive (and avoiding the walls and other players will probably help!)
It was a glorious Ashes for the England Team in the 2010/11 series and Sky were keen to give it top coverage. As part of their online presence they came to Team Cooper for a way to turn the gentlemen’s game into a short, action filled online experience. We thought back to playing Ian Botham’s Cricket on the Amiga before deciding to strip cricket down to its three main elements – bowling, batting and fielding. And so was born Sky Sports Cricket Skills.
The overall aim of the game is to score as many points as you can in each mini-game to set the best all-round score. The top eleven players would then make it onto the hallowed Sky Sports Ashes team.
Each mini-game was specifically designed to be as quick and as simple as possible to encourage players to replay it again, and again to beat their previous score. Dual high score leader boards were also featured so that players could compare their score to their Facebook friends as well as everyone else.
Following on from the success of the Winter Rally game, Beazley asked Team Cooper to build them another game to send out to clients with their 2010 Christmas e-card.
Once again, it needed to be speedy, competitive and addictive whilst adhering to their brand guidelines.
Our solution was to blend Christmas, Beazley and a tried and tested game mechanic to create the Beazley Broker Dash. Using only the spacebar, the aim of the game is to help the broker jump over obstacles and vault across the rooftops for as long (and as far) as you can.
In the first two months since it was sent out, the Broker Dash proved to be twice as popular as last year’s game with some players having hundreds of go’s to try and beat their high score. So far, nearly 120 million metres of rooftops have been dashed over.
(Sub-titled) RULES ARE RULES (Sub-sub-titled) I’m surrounded by Tiny Horses
I started writing this blog post a week ago. And, to say I’ve been struggling with it would be an understatement. I think the problem is there are too many thoughts and not enough conclusions. Everything just drifts off in to the dusty recesses of my brain and so instead of letting them rattle around any longer I am hereby releasing them in to cyberspace. I’ve spent this morning tidying it up writing this prologue/apology for lack of sense and hoping in the process I can find a conclusion before I get to the end.
There were lots of things to absorb my interest, The opening talk from Chris Bell has given me justification for my hardcore Twitter addiction by explaining to me that it was in-fact an art form. He talked through the history of art and eventually concluded that Twitter is a blank canvas. This temporarily effected my tweeting habit to the extent that I hovered over the send button for a few seconds longer than normal before sharing what I had, had for breakfast. This was possibly unnoticed by my followers and I soon sunk back in to the comfy-ness of over sharing the delicate in’s and out’s of my life in public. But it did make me think about the opportunities it’s given me as a form of communication. As a creative, that’s all I’m really looking for – a platform to share.
Some talks made me laugh, some made me look in to a very dark place within and some sparked ideas. So many ideas.
Stefanie Posavec’s passion for data visualisation, specifically baseball game scorecards was fascinating. She spoke of the level of detail and personalisation that goes in to the score cards as being so strong that it has become part of family traditions. This data collection is a process for enjoying and engaging with a long-winded sporting event rather than simply spectating. It led me to thoughts of creating a similar thing for Formula 1, one of the only sports I truly enjoy watching but often struggle with, losing focus as they go around the same track for the 50th time.
My inner science nerd and outer internet nerd was very satisfied by Suw Charman-Anderson’s talk about Eyjafjallajökull. The discoveries and information that was shared and debated by a thriving community of geologistis online. Which I think had a interesting connection to Elliot Fineburg’s talk about Wikiality and of how if it’s been written online, and backed up by at least one other source then it must be fact. Then Mike Wallis’s talk about Cake got me a little bit too excited. Cake as a science – what’s not to love? Seriously? And that’s not to mention the amazing revelations made by James Wallis about a genre of literature obsessed with Nazi’s and Hitler. All of which have incredibly good/bad titles/covers (I’ve taken to over subtitling as a result.)
“The thing that makes games game’s isn’t joypads, or score, or 3D graphics, or little bits of cardboard, or many-sided dice. It’s the rules and mechanics beating in their little clockwork hearts.”
I love rules. I have rules for everything. I think structure is very important. If you know where you stand at any given time, what’s expected of you and what is considered acceptable then ultimately you can’t accidentally get it wrong. Something I also suffer with. Rules are needed. If there aren’t any rules I invent them.
Tom discussed how rules give you a choice, a choice to obey them or not. What I liked most about what he was saying is that a good rule needs a little give, and that rules are a starting point for creativity. So actually my rule set needs a new rule about being flexible with rules.
But I haven’t even told you about the countless struggles of the grown-up Lego fan community around colour and equality. Or James B‘s idea of soft city’s of the future designed for a bicycle riding population. Or the fact that for some, riding a horse side saddle is having a revival. Or that people sleep on public transport, this is not so much a revelation as the fact that some of them are really well prepared for it. It might even be catching. Finally, all of the above is in-fact a Tiny Horse.
The best place to find out all about what actually happened at Interesting North is the Lanyrd Coverage page – which is in and of itself really interesting, loving Lanyrd’s work. I hope Tim Duckett and the others find the energy/time to get it together to do again next year. I need more input!
Sheffield digital agency Quba loved what Team Cooper did on the Speedo Sculpture project, so they asked us to work with them on a new project for Speedo; this time to promote their TriathElite range of suits. They wanted some 3D elements similar to an existing microsite they’d developed, which we achieved using PaperVision3D. They also wanted Google analytics, deep linking, and XML-driven content, as featured in the Speedo Sculpture site we worked on. Talk about demanding.
Team Cooper were contacted by Sky to build an online version of their popular interactive TV game, Beehive Bedlam. We were especially keen to get involved in this project as we’d all played Beehive Bedlam at school / university (years before we got proper jobs).
Sky supplied artwork from the TV version, so it looked as close to the original as possible. Then, the Team made sure it was XMLdriven, so levels could be changed at a later date, as well as having a high-score leader board and the ability to connect to Facebook. Sky were very pleased with the end result, and we’ve been asked to work on several further projects since then.
Damn fool, did you scratch my van? Team Cooper were asked to code up a couple of mini-games featuring 80s A-Team legend, Mr T. The games are featured in the arcade section of a website promoted by a recent advertising campaign for Snickers. Get some nuts and play, fool!
The first game is a version of the classic Breakout, only the blocks have been replaced with chocolate bars. The second lets you bowl T-style, with manly wrecking balls and old tyres instead of bowling balls. We always enjoy working with Addicted, so we jumped at the chance and were quite proud of the end results. We pity the fool who says different, you hear?
Every year, specialist insurance underwriters Beazley send out a Christmas
e-card to their clients with a web game. With the majority of their clients being male city trader types, they wanted something that was very competitive and addictive, with a leader board and a prize for the best player.
Smell that testosterone.
Team Cooper suggested some ideas within Beazley’s budget, and they settled on this racing game with a twist. Each player has to race round the track to try and set the best time, but they can also race against ‘ghost’ versions of times that other players have set. The ghost element made the game great fun and very competitive and the game was extremely popular with Beazley’s clients. The top players even managed to blitz our developers’ top scores. Dammit. See if you can beat them.
This is something we’ve worked on to help promote our Beastie Burgers game. It lets you build your own monsters, similar to the ones found in the game, then add them to your Facebook photo albums for your friends to see. Shameless self-promotion using social media. And why not?
Why not have a short biscuit break, and make a monster yourself?
Once upon a time (well, it was the end of 2009 actually), in a land not too far away, Watford Palace Theatre contacted Team Cooper to produce a game for promoting their Christmas production of Cinderella. After a short consultation, the client tried on a few ideas, glass slipper style, and picked the one that fitted. The Team were overjoyed, and that night, they set to work coordinating the artwork, audio and of course the coding. Oh yes they did. They also liaised with the client’s current website provider, waving their wands to make sure everything ran smoothly on their servers and the viral ‘send to friend’ functionality was all working correctly.
Watford were very pleased with the end result, and so were Team Cooper. Don’t you love a happy ending?
Can you fire beams from your eyes? Can you read minds? No? Tsk, call yourself a mutant? Look, it’s very important to know whether or not you’re a mutant with superhuman powers – especially for kids who watch the ‘Wolverine and The X-Men’ cartoon on the NickToons TV channel. Luckily for you, Team Cooper worked with Addicted2TV to provide the Flash development (using AS3, Eclipse and FDT) for 4 games, as part of a website to promote the TV series. So off you pop – testyourmutantpowers.
Green Spaghetti approached Team Cooper with an idea they thought up while working with local school children, and they asked us to develop it. This is an older piece of work, but it’s a great example of game development and everyone seems to love it.
Team Cooper just like it because it’s fun, and for us, that’s a lot of what Flash development is all about. Come on, it’s a game with hippos and monkeys in it. What more do you want? Take a look.
We were contacted by Sheffield digital agency Quba to work with them on a microsite project. The site promotes Speedo Sculpture, a new swimsuit range that’s more tailored to body size than standard suits. Quba managed the project and provided design and creative direction, Team Cooper supplied the Flash coding. Speedo supplied the state-of-the-art swimwear.
I know you want to see the site, but first, you have to read this technical bit, because it’s really impressive. You see, the site had to be modular, needed to be tracked by Google, and had to easily convert to other languages at a later date. Team Cooper built the site to be entirely XML-driven, so everything from the order of the menu items to the wording in the product descriptions could be changed using a basic text editor. We also added deep linking and Google analytics, so not only could Speedo track which pages were being viewed, but they could easily direct people to a specific page within the site. Clever eh?
Well, it has been a year (almost to the day) since we moved in to The Electric Works and we like to keep things fresh. We’re not moving too far this time – actually just in to the office next door. It’s approximately 1 meter door to door so hopefully it won’t take us too long.
We’ve got a student starting his placement year with us at the end of May and we’re starting recruitment for a Senior Flash Developer so we thought it was about time we had some room to stretch our (in my case very long) legs.
From this…
… to this
It’s not a huge difference, theres room for about 4 more desks but to us it’s a sign of our continuing growth and that makes us very happy.
Roth Creative asked Team Cooper to help them build a Flash website, complete with admin system, for The Globe Theatre’s Swan Restaurant. Roth had the entire creative content ready, but they needed a Flash developer to help them bring it to life. “The show must go on”, said The Team, all enthusiastic and keen, if a little bit dramatic.
We built the main elements, and incorporated an admin system so staff could add news and event listings. We also built a very cool photo management system, with content stored on a MySQL database on the server. It lets event photographers upload pictures directly to the website, and The Swan’s clients can log in to see them. Nice. And as the site features deep linking, URLs for specific Flash pages can be given out. It’s XML-driven too, so Roth can easily edit content without our help.
Hello Team Cooper blog, its been a while, I’m sorry but we’ve been really busy. The launch of Beastie Burgers did exactly what we needed it to do – it generated a lot of interest and ultimately has won us some top new clients. Beasties has had over a million plays now and is proving to be a brilliant ambassador for the company.
It feels like Christmas and the new year has become our busiest time of year. It’s possible this is beacause of the increased number of businesses sending their clients seasonal greetings digitally rather than the considerably more expensive, less sustainable and pretty old fashioned Christmas card. I’m quite excited about Christmas and in the last few weeks we’ve been creating a few animated cards plus a couple of seasonal games. We’ve made an extremely cute game to help Watford Palace Theatre promote their panto Cinderella. And at the moment we’re putting the finishing touches on a winter rally game which is extremely addictive - it had most of us in the office fighting for the top score during development.
When we get back in the new year we’ve lots of work to get on with for some new clients and a couple of well know brands. Exciting stuff!
A very Merry Christmas to all our clients, suppliers and blog readers – see you in the New Year.
Amazingly, it’s now been just over six months since we moved in to Electric Works which is weird because it still feels like we only just moved in. I guess thats because the building is still so shiny and new. That and the fact we’ve been pretty busy with various projects and bringing up our two kids.
We originally said to ourselves that six months in we would re-assess the situation and check that it was working out for us. As the past six months have flown by, it’s been difficult to say if we’ve been better off here or whether we would be in the same position anywhere else. We decided we’re going to give it another six before we properly evaluate whether the move has paid off. Regardless of success, it is nice being here and walking up to the building in the morning still makes us feel good and that things are moving forward for us. The reality of the slide is that most of us in the office don’t use it much as the novelty has worn off. It’s actually quite a shock to the system as it’s very fast – however, Tim uses it every chance he can. When he was a kid Tim used to dream of having a helter-skelter in his house. Now there’s one at work it makes him very happy. I think if your work environment has the power to make you happy then that can only be a good thing.
When we moved into this building we’d hoped that being in such quirky new place would help generate interest and ultimately work. Recently that hope became a reality as we have had a mention in Creative Review’s November issue! This issue is focused on creative workspaces and one of the articles is about the emergence of creative hub’s around the country. They’d asked us for our opinion of working in the Electirc Works so this week we were very excited to recieve our copy in the post. For the business this is brilliant – a mention, for free, in a popular industry magazine for our target market. Maybe it’s not that amazing, but to me it felt worthy of a small interpretive dance.
Tim and Kyle are at Flash on the Beachfor the next few days and to say I’m jealous would be an understatement. This is the 3rd one Tim’s been to and every time he comes home he’s always bouncing full of energy and new found love for our work and industry. Plus I love Brighton (not as much as Sheffield though) but our family life is just too hectic at the moment to allow both of us to go down. Maybe next year I’ll get chance to join in the fun. Watch this space for a report from one or both of the boys.
This leaves me in the office, almost, alone to get my head down and do loads of work …
… although as it’s September it feels a little like going back to school after the summer holidays.
Important things out the way first, the new addition to our team at home, Kirsty, was born a little later than expected, but all was good and she’s now happily joining her brother at nursery 2 days a week while I get back in to the world of work.
I’ve been set the slightly daunting task of getting us new business. Not something I’ve ever done before but this is the joy of working for yourselves getting a chance to get your hands dirty at different tasks. I’ve accepted the challenge and will be blogging, emailing and phoning up a storm over the next few months.
I missed the office move as I was on maternity leave so I feel like it’s a completly fresh start. The Electric Works building is brilliant, its a great environment to be working in. Plus we have quite a view from our office, I love Sheffield, ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you how I’m constantly evangelising the city’s many amazing qualities, but everyday I come in here it strengthens those feelings. I can confirm the slide in the entrance is awesome, very fast, it makes me cackle all the way down, not great in such an echoey space.
The rest of Team Cooper are very busy working on various client projects and trying to find time to finish our own work, our ‘Beasite Burger’ game (2nd version) is so very nearly finished it’s painful to leave it while we’re so busy. Hopefully I’ll be letting you know in the next few months that it’s live and ready to play. We hope to maintain this level of working so that we can finally take on another developer and continue our growth.
It’s not flash but it is pretty… a picture with words, where the most used words are made bigger and bolder. So, like, really, here’s a wordle from our blog -
A friend just sent me these links… and thought I would share. He likes the Lexus site best as he feels the navigation is really intuitive, even though it’s a very pretty site I found it frustrating, I’m very old fashioned and used to clicking my way round sites – it kept telling me off… so I’m voting for the AMG site
When we’re not busy… which is usually the crack of dawn on a Wednesday morning… we’ve been thinking about reworking the Team Cooper website. I’ve been looking at other agency sites to find inspiration - thought I’d share my current favourites…
http://www.mcbd.co.uk/ apart from the acid yellow (I can’t decide if I love it or hate it) I love the approach of this site, the movement and use of offset planes.
It’s a different industry but I really like the home page idea for getting everything you need to tell your audience quickly… http://www.seymourpowell.com/
How exciting? As of Thursday I will be joining Tim and helping him/us build and develop Team Cooper.
I’ve been working as a web designer, flash developer, team manager in the digital world for over 8 years. The chance to work with Tim, for the clients we want to and on our own terms was too much to resist.
Also, I saw this… and even though it’s not that relevant, it reminded me of our branding, and it made we wonder - how much time do some people have???
Last week I had the opportunity to visit Media City UK, the new Salford home for six of the ten BBC products.
The rest of the day revolved around the BBC’s vision for our four screens – TV, Computer, Tablet and Mobile.
When we moved into this building we’d hoped that being in such quirky new place would help generate interest and ultimately work. Recently that hope became a reality as we have had a mention in 
