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p0ng – A Journey Into HTML5

Friday, February 10th, 2012

As you may have read, m’colleague Matt recently created a small game as an experiment in developing for HTML5. This was during a training day in which the Team Cooper development team all had a chance to spend some time experimenting and see what they could come up with. Matt has already discussed many of the finer details of working with the technology, but here are my thoughts…

The first challenge was deciding what kind of game to develop. We’re generally quite busy at Team Cooper HQ, so it seemed wise to focus on a fairly simple game design, and what could be simpler than Pong?

The game I have created is called p0ng and is a spiritual successor to the original Pong. It keeps the format of two paddles locked in an eternal struggle to bounce a ball backwards and forwards, but those of you familiar with Pong will notice some subtle (and not so subtle) differences.

Unlike Matt, I mainly used images to show graphics in my game, with the only dynamically drawn content being the score display. Using images in HTML5 was initially an interesting challenge as everything must be loaded in at runtime as opposed to Flash, where images can be compiled directly into the game’s SWF file. Other than that, the actual process of writing JavaScript code wasn’t too dissimilar to working with ActionScript 3 (this is no great surprise, considering both languages are forms of ECMAScript). This meant I could dive right into coding the game’s logic, although I had to do without many of the convenient libraries I often have at my disposal when working with Flash.

Usually when creating a Flash application I will write code using Powerflasher’s FDT, a powerful tool with many specific functions designed to make the process of writing ActionScript easier. I know Adobe Dreamweaver isn’t very popular with web developers these days, but I decided to give it a shot anyway to see what it could offer an aspiring HTML5 game developer. Dreamweaver did offer some useful error detection similar to what FDT offers, but lacks some of the most handy functions that we use in FDT every day.

To be fair to Dreamweaver, much of this is actually down to how JavaScript works compared to ActionScript 3, with the former being weakly typed and the latter being strictly typed. The advantage of a strictly typed language is that your coding tool can always tell what types of variables you’re working with and provide you with a whole host of information and shortcuts that make focusing on writing code much easier. With JavaScript, there is nothing like this which makes the code much more ambiguous with regards to its exact functionality. This makes it much more difficult for software to try and guess exactly what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with your code.

That said, p0ng didn’t take a great deal of time to produce and was a very good introduction to the world of HTML5 development. Obviously there are plenty of other things I’d like to put into the game if I had the time, but I don’t think any game developer worth his salt will ever claim any of his games are ever truly ‘finished’

I’m sure you’re itching to have a go at the game, though, so here you go (Make sure you click the game to enable keyboard interactions):

Tags: Flash, games, HTML5, p0ng, Pong, Team Cooper
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Shpace – An HTML5 Adventure

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

A couple of Fridays ago, Team Cooper had a training day. We huddled into a meeting room and sat in front of the big projector screen. It felt a lot like being back at school. Tim was going to be teaching us about HTML5 and JavaScript and I for one was very excited to see what it was all about.

There’s been a lot in the media recently about HTML5′s uprising and its challenge for the throne of web-based gaming, so Team Cooper decided it was time to have a good look into it to determine if it was a viable option for the heavily interactive games and apps that we make.

As a consumer, the concept of HTML5 games is brilliant. Browsers are rushing to support all the new features, and new techniques and demos are being developed all the time. With no extra plug-ins or add-ons needed, it’s perfect for casual gaming on the fly. They’ll even (for the most part) work on mobiles!

As stated in Tim’s blog post back in November, Flash had been the go-to tool for creating rich interactive experiences for some time. HTML5 has been looking like it may change that, and from all the coverage it’s been getting, it’s clear to see that many people in the web community consider it a strong contender. As such, after our session in the meeting room, we went our separate ways to start playing about with what was on offer and to try and make something before the end of the day. Obviously with only a few hours left in the day we weren’t expecting miracles, but we all managed to get things moving around on our screens. Since then, I’ve been working on-and-off on my game, Shpace (You can play the game at the bottom of this post).

Shpace is a very simple shoot ‘em up, developed in a few days using solely the drawing functions provided by the HTML5 canvas element. As it was a test project for learning a new technology, there are certain things that could definitely be improved, so I will now provide a short run down of what I did and what I could do, given more time:

Controls

In its simplest terms, the game is just a set of functions that draw shapes at a specific position. The game checks for any of these shapes that might be colliding and carries out the required action depending on what they are. The player must navigate around the screen, avoiding the enemies and their bullets whilst shooting them for points. The controls I chose to use are the arrow keys and the ‘Z’ key to shoot. These seemed like a pretty universal method for controlling such a game, but a problem did arise in the form of having to cancel out any operations that might otherwise be performed by the arrow keys. Normally they scroll the page, but in this game, we really don’t want the scroll bar to jump up and down while trying to fend off a horde of angry red triangles. As the canvas element doesn’t have any way of knowing if it’s in focus, I had to use a click listener to check for focus myself.

Structuring the content

Laying out the page to work with the game was simple using CSS. There is an overall container to hold the game’s contents and within that there’s a separate container for the menu. JavaScript then takes care of what to show and what to hide at any given time. Finally, there is the canvas element which is what gets manipulated by the JavaScript to display everything. Learning and using JavaScript hasn’t been very difficult. It’s very similar to ActionScript as they both come from the same roots. The only issue I did have with using JavaScript was that, unless I wanted to have a huge list of script tags referencing all the different JavaScript files for each object in the game, it all had to be in one file. At first I found this very messy and quite annoying for scrolling up and down between areas that I was working on, but I soon got used to it and the web developer tools in Eclipse helped. In fact, it reminded me a lot of when I made a game in Python with PyGame – it forces you to lay out your file properly and comment vigilantly.

Future work

If I decided to work on Shpace in the future (which is quite possible) it would be good to add in a few more things. The game is quite bland at the moment, there are only two types of enemies and a distinct lack of any sort of ‘boss battle’. Creating some more varieties of enemy and giving them different behaviours would help to combat this, and wouldn’t take too much time. Adding in bosses may take a little longer, but really they’d just be a special type of enemy. There is also no sound as I haven’t really has time to experiment with the sound API. Another interesting addition, and one that again wouldn’t take very much time (I don’t think) would be high scores. I would also be intrigued to look into the possibility of WebSockets and a multiplayer co-operative mode. This is something that would definitely take some time however.

Mobile

Whilst developing the game I spent a bit of time messing about with getting it working on my phone and/or my iPod. I found a very good article and example on touch controls in JavaScript whilst searching for knowledge on the subject. After looking at that I managed to get touch controls working for the game on my iPod, albeit in a very unrefined manner. It worked okay, although as it was just a fleeting test, there were problems with scrolling and zooming not cancelling whilst trying to shoot the bad guys. This is something I’d love to look into more and get working in a friendly and accurate fashion so that the game could be played in a browser on a phone or iOS device. There are even tools like PhoneGap that enable you to package up HTML5 games and apps for deployment on the iOS app store and Android Marketplace, much like you can with Flash using Adobe AIR.

From my adventures in Shpace, I realised a few things. For a game like Shpace, HTML5 is definitely a strong and viable option. It’s simple, it’s easy to play and it doesn’t need a huge amount of code to make. As such, having the code laid out in one file isn’t a problem, and with the speed JavaScript executes at it runs pretty smoothly. That said, for a bigger game and a game with complex class hierarchies, I don’t think it’s the way to go yet. Something like Nurse Quest would just be a nightmare to get to grips with. I believe the battle between HTML5 and Flash will rage on for some time yet – Flash Player 11 has some great performance boosts and the introduction of Stage3D brings even more to the table. Whilst WebGL (Although not actually part of HTML5) can be used with it to create some stunning games and visual effects. I’m not sure there will ever be a clear winner between the two, but at the moment it really is just down to the project, your audience and what you want to do with it.

You can play the game below (Click the game to begin playing):

Tags: Canvas, Experiment, HTML5, Shoot em up, Shpace, Team Cooper
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Emerge: A Web Heroine Filled Mini Conference

Friday, January 20th, 2012

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.

Tags: Emerge, Flash, Team Cooper, UX, Web Heroines, Women in Technology
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Can Games Ever Please Everyone?

Friday, January 6th, 2012

Is it better to dislike a game than to just ‘nothing‘ it? Assuming its competently designed, a disliked game at least implies that it had a goal or aim that just might not have been your cup of tea. Worse, in my opinion, are the games who consider their potential audiences to be ‘absolutely everyone’ who are so concerned about being inclusive, all they do is generate five star ambivalence.

Admittedly, this conversation started because I got LA Noire for Christmas. Ensuing conversations revealed that Team Captain Tim had not really enjoyed scrutinising every inch of LA for clues, far preferring to battle the bad guys face to face – whereas I loved the more procedural, deliberately-paced investigation parts of the game only to instantly be obliterated whenever facing an actual gangster with a gun. (Every. Single. Time) As well as realising that we had strong potential for a mismatched buddy-cop movie, it was obvious that perhaps we were playing the game with different wants. A diverse, detailed and dramatic game – was its only mistake in thinking that it could please everyone? Or was our mistake in thinking all of LA was meant for us?

Whatever methodology you use, it seems undeniable that different games appeal to different sorts of gamers. The Bartle Test breaks us down into Achievers, Explorers, Killers and Socialisers (mostly in terms of World of Warcraft-style game play but can be expanded to general gaming) while Jon Radoff has charted the different things that motivate players across most games.

Is it ‘easier’ (or less risky at any rate) to target specific niche audiences with casual games? Maybe. But I also suspect a clear or ‘simpler’ idea also be used to appeal to all our different gamer motivations.

While anticipating the launch of our own Nurse Quest game on the [adult swim] site last December, one by one, we were all drawn into the strange world of Robot Unicorn Attack featured on the same site. A very simple game in some respects but maybe deceptively so as it seems to lend itself to all the quadrants of Radoff’s game motivation ideas.

It’s Immersive, hypnotically drawing you in with its colours and *that* soundtrack. While not so much a game of Co-operation it is certainly a social experience; a talking point – something you want to tell people about (good thing) but then ultimately can’t fully explain so you tell people to just play it themselves (even better thing).

As an endless runner it’s also a game of Achievement and Competition, attacking all of the stars is a goal and simply keeping going as long as possible can be competitive in terms of personal bests and addictiveness – as is the notion of giving you three lives, allowing you to compare scores with yourself for each go and perhaps drawing you in for more plays than you would on the average flash game.

To an extent, it’s just a game with some (clever) gimmicks…but one that has racked up two sequels, 686,000 likes on Facebook and over 41 million plays to date. We can be loyal to game genres, game brands and our own gaming habits, but how far should developers strive to create games that please everyone? Is it better to have separate puzzle and racing games than one game which has levels of each? Or is the ‘variety pack’ approach just what we have come to accept from modern games – mostly enjoyable, but always one flavour left at the end that someone isn’t that keen on.

Tags: Adult Swim, Bartle Test, Jon Radoff, LA Noire, Nurse Quest, Player Motivations, Robot Unicorn Attack, Team Cooper
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Our Grubby New Game for [adult swim]

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Christmas has come early for the team as our tribute to point and click style adventure games (and silly humour) comes alive and goes live through our collaboration with [adult swim]. After all our cryptic hinting and code names like “Project: Geoff”, it feels great to finally be able to talk about ‘Nurse Quest: Love Hurts‘.

As a new recruit, the game was 99.9% finished by the time I joined the company in October so I was given the arduous task of ‘here, play this’ and playing at my desk, slightly paranoid at the knowledge that how many times I laughed out loud was being monitored. Knowing the others were heavily inspired by LucasArts’ Escape From Monkey Island games, I had to confess (to my shame) I’d never played any of the series, but I have extremely fond memories of Day of The Tentacle (also by LucasArts) and several Discworld adventure games. So my chuckles were both natural and plentiful as my old love of adventure games came flooding back – not just how to play them, but also the endless potential for comedy the gameplay style creates.

Before I joined the team, I’d attended a talk by our lead developer Russell about agency in games using ‘Nurse Quest’ as one of his examples. I’d greatly appreciated the comparison to sitcom in terms of story design: how each level was like an episode with the hero in pursuit of the same goal but sewing the seeds of their own downfall en route. And, as with most comedies, it’s ‘downfall’ that leads to the humour (…especially if baggy trousers are worn without a belt) and where an ambulance speeding you to a hospital becomes a recurring comedy catchphrase.

But this is all getting a bit philosophical. The point is, Nurse Quest: Love Hurts is now live on the [adult swim] site. I know the team are really proud of this game. and I can see why. So join Geoff in trying to achieve that impressive injury that will win the Nurse of his dreams.

Tags: Adult Swim, Adventure Game, Flash Games, Geoff Jefferson, LusasArts, Monkey Island, Nurse Quest, Point and Click, sitcom, Team Cooper
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Who’s The Baddie?

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

You know you want a game. You’ve even rung Team Cooper and said “I’d really like a game please”. But maybe you’re not sure what sort of game would be best for you? You know you need to think about who’ll be playing your game – but a useful starting point can also be thinking about who your player might be playing against… ie – The Baddie! (as kindly demonstrated below by Pete/Pete’s evil Mirror Dimension counterpart)

In my few weeks with Team Cooper, I’ve been looking closely at (i.e. playing) the Team’s back-catalogue and thought it would be interesting to define them via the different sorts of nemesis that help draw the audience in to the game. Maybe seeing games from an opponent point of view might get you thinking “Does my game need a bad guy?”, and if so, what kind?

1. THEY’RE JUST LIKE YOU

Two completely different games but with one thing in common, whether armed with fencing épée or light cycle - the ‘bad guy’ can do everything you can. No more. No less (Even if it might seem like your opponent has been sneakily practising whenever you’ve logged of). As well as letting you try and beat their score, The Beazley Winter Rally also lets you compete against ‘ghost’ versions of players who’ve already raced. And to think they say you can’t outrun the past!

2. INCREASING ODDS.

They lure you in with nice easy early levels… But then, before you know it, your entire screen is filled with outer space invaders or queues of fussy customers all wanting a piece of you. Yes, it puts the player under increasing pressure – but maybe that’s where your player will thrive.

3. TIME WAITS FOR NO PLAYER

Sure, Wolverine would take on the whole world if he could – but Cyclops and the other X-Men only have 30 seconds in these games so it’s about doing what you can. Even if a player does well in their allotted time, there’s always that niggling thought that maybe you could have done better. Taking on time can be a great way to show improvement after multiple plays.

4. GRAVITY (and other laws of physics)

There’s probably a fighting game where you can duff up Isaac Newton and other famous physicists. But until then, you can challenge their most famous discoveries through sports games and challenges that really test your ability and let you prove your skills against things like cross-winds and targeting. Plus there’s always gravity itself. Nothing brings a game to an end like falling off a rooftop!

If you’re thinking about what kind of game you might like, this can be a really fun part of the process. As well as giving your player a goal and reason to succeed and win… you get to be the person who decides what’s stopping them from getting it!

Go on. Be mean. It makes for a better game too! Bwahahahaha!!!

Tags: Action Games, Antagonists, games, Shooting Games, Skill Games, Sports Games, Team Cooper, Villains
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BBC Online Briefing at Media City

Monday, November 21st, 2011

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.

Remote Control Dalek activated by TV show 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 “Is HTML5 ready?”, 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.

Tags: BBC, Computer, Four screens, HTML5, Media City, mobile, Tablet, Team Cooper, TV, Universal Remote Control
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Should you use Flash or HTML 5 for your digital marketing?

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

This post is mainly aimed at marketers (as they are the majority of our clients) but also applies to anybody else having a web based interactive project produced; this might be a viral game, a banner ad, a Facebook app or a website.

Not so long ago, if you wanted to create any sort of rich interactive experience for your web based marketing efforts, your choice was pretty much solely limited to using Flash. It is currently the de facto standard for creating animations and interactive content that needs to reach as large an audience as possible. But the times they are a changin’, and these days there is more of a choice from the increasingly popular HTML 5 ^[1] to alternative browser plug-ins like Unity. The web community’s reaction to Adobe’s announcement last Tuesday regarding dropping mobile browser support has only helped to fuel rumours of a trend away from Flash. Unfortunately this has created some confusion about which technology you should actually be using right now for your campaigns, and with that in mind I thought I’d share my experience on the matter.

A confession

Cards on the table, I’ll admit that I am likely to be slightly biased towards Flash in that I run a company that (currently) works mainly with Flash ^[2] and I love working with the platform. However I haven’t always been a Flash developer, I started my career in web development where my role was writing HTML and JavaScript for interactive e-learning applications (Back then they called it DHTML).

So, which should you choose?

Of these two technologies each has their advantages and flaws and so your decision should be based on a few things which you need to ask yourself of every project:

Who are your audience? (Or more specifically, what type of browser are they using?)
What type of content is it?
What’s your budget?

Who are your audience?

This is the most important thing to consider. When writing your marketing message you’ll make sure that it is appropriate to your audience. Similarly from a technical standpoint you’ll also want to make sure that it is delivered in a format they are able to view.

Flash currently has the advantage here. Flash player is ubiquitous on desktop machines, and even with factoring in your mobile audience, you can be reasonably confident that at least 90% of your total viewers will have Flash Player installed.

The biggest hurdle for HTML 5 is Internet Explorer because prior to the introduction of IE9, it did not support any of its major features. The majority of other web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) have supported these features for quite some time now. They also generally update themselves frequently meaning that they can support the latest HTML 5 features.

If you have Google analytics running on your web server it is quite simple to find out how many visitors have Flash player installed, however HTML 5 figures are a bit more awkward to determine exactly. A good best guess is to add up all your Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE 9 visitors and balance those against anything that remains (If you want to get some more accurate figures, have a look at Seth Meranda’s post on how to track HTML 5 elements in Google Analytics).

For example, on our own website 92% of all our visitors have Flash Player installed and 77% are using the HTML 5 enabled browsers mentioned above.

It is very important to check your own (or your brands) website stats for this against your expectations of your audience. In our case, we know we have quite a tech-savvy audience who will have the most up to date browsers, but some brands may not. In these cases you should expect the percentage of HTML 5 enabled users to be lower (In some cases as low as 40%).

Armed with this information, you can decide what approach best suits your audience.

What type of content is it?

This is almost as important a consideration as audience in that some technologies are better suited to certain projects.

Websites

These days, if you’re building a website there aren’t many good reasons you should use Flash and generally you should be using HTML 5 wherever possible. The two main exceptions to this would be if you’re creating a complex web based tool (e.g. a drawing tool or editing images and/or audio) or if you need to feature a lot of video (especially if you want to stream secure content).

Games

For games the best technology to use is Flash. Technically it is better because HTML 5 canvas suffers from inconsistent rendering speeds across browsers and has terrible audio support. For viral marketing it also has the advantage in that the whole game can be contained within a single SWF file, making it very easy to copy and distribute around the web ^[3]. With HTML 5, you are limited to keeping your game on your own site(s). This means you have to rely on being able to bring the audience to the game, rather than being able to bring the game to the audience.

If you’re considering a 3D game, Flash has recently added 3D support with Stage3D. HTML 5 has WebGL, though this is not natively supported by any version of IE. From a purely technical standpoint the Unity 3D plug-in is the best tool for the job, though its penetration rate is not nearly as high as Flash Player.

Richard Davey (Photon Storm) has put together a very good post on developing games in Flash, HTML 5 & Unity right now. It’s aimed mainly at developers but if you are considering commissioning a game, its well worth a read.

Quizzes

I’ve separated quizzes from games as these are generally a collection of questions with a score at the end and don’t require consistent high performance rendering. Audio is also not that important so either technology can be a good choice unless you want to distribute it around the web ^[2] (which is rare).

Facebook

As a Facebook app can be either be a website or a game, the same above advice applies but without the issue of distributing around the web.

Banners

Banners are still made in Flash but this will change over time. Most are simple time based animations and therefore there is no real issue in choosing either technology.

What’s your budget?

If you happen to have a large budget then you probably don’t need to worry about making a decision about which technology to use, you may as well build separate versions for each technology and cater for everyone. A lot of large marketing campaigns right now do just this and use a combination of Flash, HTML 5 and/or mobile apps. Some are mainly HTML 5 and fall back to Flash, some are mainly Flash and fall back to simple HTML, some may also have a supporting iOS/Android app.

If you have a more modest budget, you’ll probably want to get the most value you can out of your spend. Assuming that the content you are producing has lots of rich interaction (animation, “whizzy” bits, video, etc.) then currently it is likely to take your developer 1.5 to 2 times longer to develop that content in HTML 5 than Flash (i.e. Twice as expensive).

This is mainly due to the amount of effort required to get your content working consistently across multiple browsers, as there is still enough variety in the way that each browser currently implements different features of HTML 5 that it usually requires writing specific code for each browser. There are tools (Like Adobe Edge and Game Maker) being built which should help to reduce development times in future, but we are not there yet.

Something else to consider is maintenance, HTML 5 is not yet a ratified standard and is subject to change, as are the browsers that support it. If you have HTML 5 content developed, you should prepare for it to break (so make sure you have an ongoing maintenance agreement with your developer).

Anything else?

One final thing to consider is the security of your content. While not entirely hack-proof, Flash does do a much better job of protecting your content from being “hacked” or re-purposed once it’s out in the wild.

When built, Flash code and art assets are compiled, compressed and can also be encrypted if required. And while decompiling is possible, it requires specialist software and technical knowhow to do so effectively.

With HTML 5, while your code can be minified and obfuscated (made smaller and harder to understand) it is still open for all to view and is easily hack-able. This means that people with a simple understanding of JavaScript can gain access to the code and do anything from changing their hi-scores in a game, to copying your product – replacing your logos with theirs.

While these practices are rare, it does happen in Flash games, and will almost certainly happen with HTML 5 as developers strive to appear “on the cutting edge”.

Summary

Deciding which technology is best for delivering your digital marketing is not a simple case of “Flash is better than HTML 5” or vice versa. Each technology has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the type of content you are producing and the audience you are hoping to reach.

As HTML 5 & Flash continue to mature, the advantages of using either technology will likely be reduced, but it will be a long time before it truly makes no difference (technically or financially) between them. If you are currently producing a new piece of content and are unsure of what technology to use, or you have further questions about this post, please do get in touch.

Notes

^[1] Because the term “HTML 5” actually covers a multitude of technologies, for the purposes of this post, when I refer to “HTML 5”, I am referring to the web technologies that enable it to be a potential alternative to Flash Player (Namely JavaScript coupled with the canvas, video, audio, & SVG elements).

^[2] When I talk about Flash Player, I mean version 9 and above.

^[3] By “around the web” I mean hosted on other people’s sites.

Tags: Banners, Digital, Facebook, Flash, games, HTML 5, Interactive, Marketing, Quizzes, Unity, Websites
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New Arrival

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

It’s 21 minutes into my first day as Office Assistant at Team Cooper. That I’m blogging on a working computer (and actually sitting on a chair while doing so) instantly puts this ahead of a few other offices I’ve worked in – but these aren’t the only reasons I’m already extremely excited to be here.

As much as I’m trying to earnestly and intently focus on my monitor (and appear as diligent as possible on my first day, new shoes and everything), I can’t help but eavesdrop on the Team as they update each other on the status of a myriad of different projects. And they all sound infinitely intriguing.

39 minutes in. I’m back from a quick tour of the building so now I can actually find my way to the office, let alone direct others here. In the more abstract sense, I’ve found my way here from a TV background, moving from production office co-ordination into drama development and also working on my own freelance writing. In particular, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by games of all shapes and sizes and the different ways they find and engage their audience.

This is why I jumped at the opportunity for a role that allowed me to combine my previous work experience with something brand new. So, as much as I hope I’ll be useful to Team Cooper, I’m also here to keep my eyes, ears and brain peeled to learn everything I can.

59 minutes in. I’m off for my induction session shortly. Everyone is being fantastically welcoming for which I’m extremely grateful and I’ve already stuck a post-it note to my monitor to remind me of something for later. For now, I’ve been given the keys to office. I mean that in the literal sense but, now (checks watch) one whole hour in to my first day, I eagerly anticipate what hour 2, day 2, week 2 and beyond are going to unlock.

It’s great to meet you.

John.

Tags: new staff, Team Cooper
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My Childhood Hero: Helen Sharman

Friday, October 7th, 2011

It’s Ada Lovelace day today! Wooot!

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

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.

Janeway out.

Tags: Ada Lovelace, Ada Lovelace Day, games, Helen Sharman, sheffield, Space
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We’re hiring again: Office assistant required!

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Team Cooper is a growing Sheffield based digital studio currently producing our own browser based games and supplying multimedia development services to a wide variety of businesses and media companies. We love creating fun, online interactive experiences like games, micro-sites and social media applications and we are looking for an enthusiastic office assistant to help us manage our ever increasing workload.

This will be a varied role which is likely to expand with the company. The ideal candidate will have a few years experience and will be looking for a new challenge. You will have excellent written skills and will be as comfortable adding content to a blog or Twitter feed as you are putting together spreadsheets and filing invoices. You will enjoy playing games, have a friendly telephone manner and possess a positive attitude to your working life.

Must haves:

Excellent written and verbal skills
Fantastic grammar and punctuation skills
Amazing organisational skills
A love of casual, mobile and/or social games
A good understanding of all things digital / web related
A pro-active self-starter mentality
Experienced with word processing / spreadsheets / databases / email tools

Desirables (But not essential):

Creative writing skills
Familiarity with working in a creative, project-based work environment
A well thought out plan for surviving Zombie Apocalypse

Your main duties will be (Amongst other things):

Assisting management with admin tasks
Dealing with initial phone and email requests
Taking minutes at meetings
Keeping project progress boards / spreadsheets up to date
Games testing
Simple book keeping
Helping to maintain the company social media channels (Website, Blog, Twitter, etc)
Assisting with marketing activities
Filing / Administrative work
Maintaining office supplies
Generally keeping the office running smoothly

Salary guide is around £12k to £17k (dependent on experience).

We offer flexible working hours, a friendly team to work with and a nice modern working environment (We are based in the Electric Works building, part of the Sheffield digital campus).

To apply, please email your CV and cover letter stating salary expectations to Tim at .

Tags: casual, Flash, games, hiring, job, mobile, office administrator, office assistant, sheffield, social, Team Cooper
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New Projects Galore!

Friday, August 5th, 2011

Busy, busy, busy!

Things have been pretty manic here at Team Cooper HQ recently and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of things slowing down either. Normally at this time of year we have found that business tends to slow down a bit as everyone goes on holiday, but this year that just doesn’t seem the case (perhaps we’ll have a slow Christmas instead?). A quick count up on the project board shows that we have 43 separate jobs ‘in the system’. Admittedly these range from sales prospects we are waiting to hear back from through to completed jobs awaiting payment (and five internal projects), but still it’s a lot to keep an eye on.

All this work means that finding time for the important other jobs like marketing become very difficult. So here I am, frantically typing up a blog post in order to collect my thoughts on what we have achieved recently and what the future brings.

Project juggling

It’s always been my aim for Team Cooper to split our work between our own projects and client projects in the hope that the client work funds some development time to do our own thing. In reality this has been very difficult. Anyone working in an agency will appreciate that some client projects go well, some not so well and while these tend to balance each other out it doesn’t leave much time left over for anything else. Anyone who’s been following us over the past few years will know that our last release was nearly two years ago meaning that we are long overdue releasing something new… Until now!

Robot / Lizard: It lives!

Under our Robot / Lizard guise we have a couple of projects which although were started at different times, have come together recently and will be ready for release imminently. The first, which I shall refer to as ‘Project: Geoff’ for now, is a game commissioned by Adult Swim for their games site. The second ‘Project: Lizardware’ is a Facebook game which started life as Simon’s ‘Friday project’ but has since evolved and mutated into the madness that it is now. We shall no doubt be posting more information about each of them when the time is right, but for now they are just going through their testing and amends phases (If you would like to help us test them, please get in touch!).

With these new games arriving soon, we have also been working at updating the Robot / Lizard website to act as a proper home for our future projects (Yes, we really have been busy). The site is now live, so go and have a look and let us know what you think.

Future Projects

Both our Team Cooper and Robot / Lizard projects are looking pretty exciting right now. It’s quite difficult to talk about our Team Cooper work as it is usually under NDA, however I’ve decided I’m going to start giving all our projects code names so that I can at least refer to them here (Even if I don’t explain what they are, or who they’re for).

On the Team Cooper side, we are currently working hard at ‘Project: Merlin’ which should go live sometime in September. This is an awesome project for a family brand and we’ll definitely be posting more about it once it’s ready. We also have a couple of game development jobs due to start soon, these will be similar in size and scope to the Tron game we previously made for Sky.

On the Robot / Lizard side, we are doing some experimental work with Flash on mobile devices (‘Project: Caveman’) and we have two further games planned for when the dust has settled after releasing projects ‘Lizardware’ and ‘Geoff’.

That’s it for now!

Tim

Tags: Flash, games, mobile, nda, personal, projects, robot lizard, Sky, tron
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Matt Says Aloha

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m the new student on placement here. Like all the newbies, I’ve been asked to write a blog post. I guess it’s some sort of initiation ritual. I hope I don’t have to drink goat’s blood or anything…

Joking (I hope) aside, I’m very happy to be here. When the opportunity came up on my university website, I hadn’t heard of Team Cooper at all. Not knowing what to expect, I went on a recon mission to find out more about them. I visited the website and was pleasantly surprised at how friendly and cheerful the company appeared to be. After reading all about the Team, I knew that if I were able to get a placement with them, it would not only be somewhere I would learn a lot, but it would be somewhere that I’d be very happy to go to work to every day.

The view from my window never fails to amuse me.

I didn’t know how I was going to cope with getting up at 7:30 every morning, but after being here for two weeks now, I can safely say that I actually enjoy waking up and coming in to work. These first couple of weeks have been spent getting up to speed on AS3 and trying to get myself into the same style of coding as the other Team Cooper developers. Having only a little experience in object oriented ActionScript made me think I would be playing catch up for quite a while, but I’m getting to grips with it pretty quickly.

Everyone here at Team Cooper is really nice, and they’ve made me feel very welcome, which is something I am very grateful for. Hopefully they won’t find out that the only reason I’m working here is for the slide…

Tags: Flash Games, Team Cooper
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En Garde!

Monday, June 27th, 2011

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!

Go play the game now and see how well you can do against them!
http://www.beazleybritishfencing.com/game/

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Beazley, British Fencing, Flash, Game, Team Cooper
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Cultural Impact

Friday, May 13th, 2011

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.

Hello Team Cooper on Prezi

Tags: Culture, sheffield, Team Cooper
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Meet Adam

Friday, January 21st, 2011

Greetings from the “new boy” at Team Cooper. I’ve nearly finished my first month as a full-timer and as part of my initiation ceremony they’ve asked me to write a blog post!

Well, what can I say?… I certainly feel very privileged to be the first full-time illustrator/designer in the Team Cooper empire. Everyone has made me feel very much at home in my new workplace. They have even gone against their computer principles and set me up with a shiny new 27″ imac, for which I will be forever grateful… (I think they’re all allergic to Apples here!). I had worked with Team Cooper in the past on a freelance basis so I knew it was a great place to work, and when I found out that they were looking for a full time illustrator I was keen to get involved.

For the last six years I’ve been self employed, illustrating for a variety of different clients in print publishing and digital media. 2010 was a particularly a busy year which included a commission to write and illustrate my own children’s activity book. The experience of working for myself has been a really positive one and I’ve worked on some fun projects for some good clients, but after five years of working alone I decided that I was ready for a change.

So here I am writing my first blog; looking to the future and really excited by the opportunities and challenges of the new job. I’ve always been interested in web based media and animation and I’m really looking forward to honing my Flash skills with the rest of the team. We’re already working on a great fantasy adventure game project and there are plenty more in the pipeline.

All in all, I’m looking forward to a very interesting (and eventful) 2011!

Adam

P.S – I wonder how long it will be before the novelty of the slide wears off?!… not for a while yet I’m sure.

Tags: Flash, Illustration, Mac, Team Cooper
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New Year = New Stuff

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Phew, the Christmas rush is over and it’s on to 2011. December was a great and busy month. Not only did Team Cooper Towers sport a decidedly floral set of decorations and gain a new mascot, Pete the Penguin (both care of Emma) we also unleashed a veritable slew of games upon the world.

We all chipped in to create the SKY Ashes Tour 2010-11 trials game. It’s a series of mini-games based around bowling, catching and batting as you try to make SKY’s own Ashes team. I like to think that maybe the England team had a practice on this to hone those skills which brought us triumph in the real thing. The event may be over but our game lives on, follow the link to see if you make the grade.

Play It!!!

Also for SKY, though on a different tack, we made a game in support of the new TRON : Legacy film. Taking the classic Light Cycles a step further; you go head-to-head against multiple computer opponents across ever more difficult arenas, picking up bonuses which can help or hinder. The amount of cursing flying around our office attests to this game’s difficulty. Trust me, there’s nothing more annoying than making a game you can’t beat.

Play It!!

If that weren’t enough we were happy to once again provide the electronic Christmas card game for Beazley insurance brokers. Last year it was rallying time trials, this year it’s a rooftop challenge. Using only one button see how far you can run, jump and avoid the chimneys in this fast-paced game, which only added to the office hollering.

Play It!!

Those all capped off 2010, now it’s on to 2011 with a flourish in the form of new addition Adam! Last year saw a big expansion with new offices, Simon and of course me. This year’s already well on its way with our newest member, Adam. He’s here to provide some designer welly with his top-notch skills, after having freelanced with us several times before.

He’s already working on our new top-secret project ‘X’ due for launch later on in the year. Whilst I can’t reveal too much here’s a baffling picture of some work in progress:

Our Top Secret Project!

Can you tell what it is yet?

We’re all hard at work making fun stuff, so I’ll get back to it. Keep an eye out for more goodies to come…

Bye for now,
Russell

Tags: Ashes, Beazley, Flash, games, Sky Movies, Sky Sports, Tron: Legacy
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It really is very Interesting (up) North

Friday, November 26th, 2010

(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.

So 2 weeks ago I went to Interesting North. And it was… Interesting.

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.)

Tom Armitage took on rules:

“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!

Tags: Cake, games, Interesting North, sheffield, Tiny Horse
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We’re hiring! Game Artist / Illustrator required

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

Are you a games illustrator looking for a fun work place to rest your work hat? Or are you a digital designer looking for a way in to the world of games?

Team Cooper is a growing Sheffield based digital studio currently producing our own browser based games and supplying multimedia development services to a wide variety of businesses and media companies. We love creating fun, online interactive experiences like games, micro-sites and social media applications and we are looking for an equally enthusiastic artist/illustrator/digital designer to help with our increasing workload.

In particular, we are interested in candidates with experience creating characters, GUI designs, and isometric environments in either vector or pixelart styles.

This is a varied role and you will be working on a range of internal and client projects.
You will preferably have some games illustration experience but we will also consider hiring somebody with less experience providing you have the right skills and/or attitude.

The ideal candidate will have the following:

A self motivated and pro-active attitude towards their working practices
A proficiency in Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop
Ability to demonstrate a passion for design, illustration and web technologies
An understanding of good UX design
A portfolio of work demonstrating a variety of styles
Keen to learn (and help others to learn) new skills
Good communication skills

For the client work we do, you will also need an understanding of the need to keep strictly within brand guidelines, have an eye for detail and the creative flexibility to meet the needs of each client brief.

Also desirable (But not essential) would be:

Adobe Flash / Fireworks
2D Animation
3D Modelling (e.g. 3DS Max / Maya / Blender)
Basic coding skills (e.g. ActionScript / HTML)
A well thought out plan for surviving Zombie Apocalypse

You’ll also be expected to get actively involved in adding your own ideas and experience to our existing in house projects as well as those planned for the future.

As our games illustrator, you will be responsible for:

Producing graphics and artwork to our standards
Creating the look and feel of our productions
Character design / Environment design / GUI design
Creating initial concepts for pitches

Salary is dependent on experience.

We offer flexible working hours, a friendly team to work with and a nice modern working environment (We are based in the Electric Works building, part of the Sheffield digital campus).

To apply, please email your CV and link to your portfolio to .

Tags: adobe flash, adobe illustrator, game artist, game illustrator, hiring, job, photoshop, sheffield
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It’s alive! Aliiiiiiiiivvveee!

Sunday, October 17th, 2010

It’s been quite a long time coming, but we’ve finally got round to updating our website. In fact, I think the last time we put any new content up there was at least 18 months ago. Shame on us.

Part of the reason for not adding anything new to the old site was that it was all hard coded PHP. And with me not having much spare time to maintain it, it was awkward for anyone else wanting to add things. To hopefully prevent this problem in future, the new site has been built around WordPress (like our old blog was) so that anyone in the team can add or amend future content. Hoorah!
While we were doing this, we thought it made sense to combine the website and blog into one site to make everything sit together better. For this reason the old ‘blog.teamcooper.co.uk’ site will cease to exist soon, having been moved over to it’s own section of the website at http://teamcooper.co.uk/blog/.

Visually, it’s not a million miles away from the old site. It still has a similar theme but is just a bit shinier. It’s been carefully crafted together for us by our resident WordPress expert, Gavin. If you need some WordPress wizardry yourself, you should go and speak to him.

Content wise, we decided it needed to be rewritten to reflect how we’ve evolved as a business over the past year and is more relevent to the types clients we’ve had. Some pages are pretty much the same, some have been thrown away, and some are all new amazing experiences in textual content! There’s also a page with pictures of us all, so if you didn’t know what we looked like before, you can now. Awesome!

Finally you can of course see some new examples of the (Non NDA) work we’ve been doing over the past year or two. My particular favourites (aside from our own Beastie Burgers of course) are Beazley Winter Rally, Beehive Bedlam and TriathElite.

Tags: blogging, Business, Flash, Portfolio, Team Cooper, Website, Wordpress
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Balancing Act in Vancouver

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

I’ve just come back from Team Coopers’ first transatlantic exhibition. I was the lucky one selected magnanimously by Tim to go out and take care of a small game made to drive booth activity at a medical congress in Vancouver, Canada.

“What’s all that mean?” I expect you’re crying at your screens in eager interest. Well for us it meant the chance to create a fancy-schmancy mini-game using the fun and intuitive Wii-Fit board. For some time now there’s been libraries such as WiiFlash made for handling inputs from Wii controllers, which are just fancy bluetooth devices. Combine this with an agency whose client who is trying to sell a drug to help post-transplant patients balance their body levels and what do you get?

The game in action, with high scores one the giant screen.

… A Wii board marble maze! Made in a tight turnaround of a fortnight with all hands on pump we cranked out a fun, innovative, robust and most of all addictive game. I should know, I saw the doctors come back time and again to try for the high score, the Japanese, Turkish and German delegations being the top scorers. Using nothing but the balance board and a Wii-Mote for the menus, so no ungainly wires, players had to balance themselves to roll balls through our 3D mazes, racing the clock.

It was great fun to make (including lots of jokes about balls!) and kudos due to Kyle for making the game work using Papervision for the 3D screens and Jiglib for the physics, and to Simon for sorting Wii-Mote connectivity. It’s a great fusion of several technologies blended for fun.

For the end client the game meant a great way to increase booth activity, which of course raises brand awareness. This was previously done through give-aways such as branded pens, key-rings, USB sticks etc. However regulatory bodies now frown upon the practice leaving companies, and their agencies, looking for other incentives. This is where the game excels, by raising peoples curiosity with the temptation of a challenge, especially when they see others having a go.

Getting to grips with the game

My experience at the congress was a great one. The agency we work for, who created and ran the booth were great fun to be with; I ended up in direct competition with Toby and Claire for the high score. It was great to get out of the office and see people directly playing our game, and I learnt a lot about what the audience needs and expects which will be good for future projects of this kind and games in general. It is so rare to actually see our work in the real world, normally it’s only online, direct contact with the audience obscured through the mystical interweb. The Vancouver convention centre is absolutely massive, situated right on the coast overlooking the harbour, fantastic to watch the float planes coming and going. I was in Vancouver over last Christmas and was blown away by how much warmer it was! Thanks to Tina, the booth hostess for showing Toby and me some hidden gems of the area.

The harbour is one of prettiest!

All in all, I’d say it was a fantastic opportunity and a great experience that worked well. Here’s to more of this for Team Cooper in the future!

Russell

Tags: Exhibition, Flash, JigLib, Papervision, Vancouver, Wii, Wii board, Wii Flash
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The Children’s Media Conference

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

What an interesting time I had last week at The Children’s Media Conference in beautiful sunny Sheffield.

The keynote speech by Henry Winkler blew me away. I had no idea about his struggles with dyslexia or being accepted by his parents. I didn’t know about his advocacy work for children and I certainly didn’t know that he was a children’s author. His speech was monumentally uplifting and truly heart felt and in no way schmaltzy which I have to admit I was kind of expecting. He’s is completely endearing, funny, down to earth and very inspirational.

Hank Zipzer by Henry Winkler

The session titled ‘Development 101′ came as a bit of a surprise to me as development in TV media is more about development of character and story rather than actual creation of projects like it would be in the digital world. That didn’t stop it from being interesting though. Carl Draper was part of the panel and he was talking about his role as a TV-Digital interpreter. I really liked what he was saying about how digital media can be used to galvanise the audiences emotional connection to a brand through interactivity. That’s the main reason we at Team Cooper are interested in getting involved in the industry; we love the power of interactivity.

There was little if no tweeting which is a new experience for me (being a confirmed addict) but it had a positive effect on my ability to pay attention. The only time we were encouraged to tweet was through the very interactive and enjoyable session produced by Juliet Tzabar. ‘Get Smart with your Brand’ focused on how children’s brands could make effective use of their licensable content in the games and digital markets. As a moderately shy type *cough* I often find it intimidating to stick my hand up and ask questions or contribute in sessions. Being able to tweet diminished that issue for me so I could join in which had brilliant results as I won a magical prize for my input (which our 3yr old was extremely appreciative of).

We were only able to attend thanks to lovely people at Screen Yorkshire. In addition to getting us in they also provided us the amazing opportunity to be mentored, guided and introduced to this new world by the wonderful Sarah Muller.

The one uniting theme of the conference for me seemed to be trains. There was lots of talk about children’s obsessions with trains. This obsession was defined as being a result of a magical combination of factors it’s a vehicle with all of the elements of mastery that go along with that, a puzzle element in putting the track together and the brilliant opportunity to play at deity. Someone in the audience derailed this discussion by questioning if boy’s were interested in trains directly because of the tunnels…

So lots of new friends, great contacts made, practical skills gained thanks to Mel Norman and lots of great possibilities moving forward – woot!

Children’s Media Conference; What’s the future of children’s media? from Bold Creative Work-in-Progress on Vimeo.

Tags: Children's Media, games, Screen Yorkshire, sheffield, TCMC, Television, The Fonz, Trains
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Hello

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Hello,

I’m Simon, the other new developer.

It’s been a few of weeks now since I started my placement here at Team Cooper and a demanding few of weeks it has been. I have spent the last two years on a game programming course at Sheffield Hallam studying C++, DirectX and OpenGL and because of this, it’s been a task converting to Actionscript and adopting the MVC method of thinking. It’s all experience though and I enjoy a challenge. I think the effort has paid off and now, rather than just accepting that things work, I am recognising how different sections of code play their part and why this approach leads to a cleaner coding practice.

As I’m aiming myself towards a career in the games industry I think any experience earned in my year here will benefit me; working with Flash, which is famous for creating interactive and good looking experiences, will definitely help. I’ve been involved in various projects from Flex applications to Flash games and I’m also developing my own project in the “20%” free time which will be a suite of fast paced mini-games. I’ve mainly been working with existing code so far so writing these mini-games from scratch using an MVC approach is going to be fun.

Simon

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Free Time?

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

It’s been a little too long since I blogged, but blimey it’s been busy!

I’ve been wrapped up with completing our pitch to the BBC for the @North project. The team have been working on consecutive projects for another large broadcasting company which we’re very pleased with. We’re working on an augmented reality project. We won our second contract with the lovely people at Quba. Plus there’s our first FLEX application which is nearing completion, I’ve really been enjoying getting my teeth in to a little bit of development, I say development I’m only working on the CSS but still I haven’t done any FLEX stuff before and I love learning new things. To help us wade through all this work we’ve taken on 2 members of staff Russ has blogged already and I’m going to try and coax Simon in to a small blog intro of himself.

Coffee Helps

All of this work has led us to question when are we going to get all those game ideas built? So we’ve committed to giving everyone in the team 20% time. Any games produced in this time will launch from our gaming brand Robot / Lizard. Working on similar lines to that of Google (and we understand our neighbours Yoo Mee) everyone will get the opportunity to complete their own self directed project’s one day a week. We had an awesome brain storming session this afternoon. We’ve initially set a timescale of 10 weeks (10 Fridays) but this is a guideline and as it’s the first time of trying this we want to be very flexible and just see how it goes. I think of all the projects I’m most excited about the one Russ is going to be working on. He’s going to start our first Unity 3D project. It’s a departure for us Flash loving developers but it’s a direction we’ve been talking about for a while now – this feels like the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

Then in our ‘free time’ we’ve been enjoying participating in and getting to know the now many and various Sheffield Geek communities springing up care of the good people at GIST. Inspired by them and with Trevor Ward taking the lead we’re setting up Sheffield’s very own Adobe User Group (16^th June, The Old House 7pm – in-case you’ve missed our several tweets on the matter)

I keep talking with people about what I’m planning to do in my ‘free time’ and then I think about what I’m saying…

Tags: Adobe, BBC, Flash, FLEX, games, GIST, Quba, Robot / Lizard Productions, sheffield, Unity
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New to Team Cooper!

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Evening all,

I’m the new Developer mentioned in the last posting, settling in to the new more spacious offices. I’ve been here a month now, returning from a round-the-world trip to settle back into some good old Actionscript development in the city centre.

I’ve already been set to task working on some quizzes and with some exciting projects on the horizon it’s all looking quite interesting!

Russ

Tags: Flash, Other
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We’re moving… again!

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

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…
From this...

… to 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.

Tags: Electric Works, Office, sheffield
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Ada Lovelace Day

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

It’s the second official Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace was pretty much the first female computer programmer. In her honour lots of people are blogging today about women in technology.

So I’d have something to write about I actively went out to find (Googled) some female role models working in technology. Even though 2 weeks ago I couldn’t have named any it really wasn’t hard to find lots of women making a big impact in technology. I can now list a number of women who are inspirational figures, the most current on my list being Jane McGonigal. She recently did a TED talk that’s blown me away. She’s a games designer and she works for the Institute for the Future. She’s trying to work out how to make a link between people playing in virtual game worlds and the real world. I’ve been reading a Theory of Fun (by Raph Koster) and it discusses how fun is basically an evolutionary reward from your brain for learning something new, possibly useful. Jane feels that if the we can spend time learning how to fix problems in a fun, rewarding and engaging way in a virtual world then we’d get a lot of problems solved in the real world. The work I do is not exactly world changing, I justify what I do as creating entertainment, making people happy and ultimately I love it (who can say they love their work?) I find what Jane is working on very inspiring. I’m not saying Team Cooper will ever create anything as meaningful as Evoke just that Jane’s ideas are going to affect and inform everything I work on in the future.

Rebecca Jesson (Social Media Manager at Quba) and I have been discussing if it’s a faux pas to blog about yourself today. I think we’re women working in technology and our experiences are as valid as anyone else’s, so that said, for those that don’t know here’s a bit about me. I’m a creative person who has always had a love for science, my Mum was a physics teacher, my Dad a mechanic and I’ve grown up with a constant source of information of how stuff works. I’ve been working in technology since the mid nineties. I started as a web designer, I watched the boom and bust from a safe distance. I’ve worked as a Flash developer in E-Learning, a freelance digital creative, a web design tutor to NEETs and as a team lead in digital marketing. Now I help run Team Cooper with my husband Tim and we create fun Flash things. At the moment we’re going through a period of growth and we’re starting to think of ourselves more as entertainment developers. The public are consuming ‘casual games’ more and more as their chosen form of entertainment – so why not? We’re building on the success of Beastie Burgers by creating a Facebook version and follow up games, taking advantage of this up swell in the social games market.

Being a woman in this environment has never been an issue, ever. Maybe I’ve been lucky? I suspect it’s more to do with the industry being populated by modern thinking people who really aren’t bothered about what you are, just about what you can do. It’s noticeable in the office and at various events that the number of women is in the minority but I don’t think that’s from a lack of trying. I think I’ve probably experienced more positive discrimination than the other way around. The problem is getting young women to make technology a career choice in the first place. So I fully support Ada Lovelace Day and hope that someone reads this blog or one of the others being posted today and that they see positive experiences and role models to help them to make a choice to join in the fun. Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone!

Tags: Ada Lovelace Day, ALD10, Jane McGonigal, Women in Technology
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Team Cooper is feeling the love

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Maybe it’s the time of year but we’ve really been feeling the love recently.

Last Friday I attended We Love Technology which kicked of Sheffield’s lovebytes festival this year and I came away from it all giddy with techno joy. There was lots of talk about a convergence of ideas between the many different fields of design, craft, diy and technology. James B’s talk about social friction has given our ideas around social gaming new life. I love the idea of open hardware and as a big instructables fan I think defining an open source style process for hardware is a great idea. There were a few generative artists, an electronic log and my most loved things of the day were the thought provoking items made by Mr Jones.

Tim had an adventure to the Casual Connect conference in Hamburg and came home with the fire of social gaming burning in his eyes. We’ve generally been moving our gaming ideas in that direction, starting to focus more on social gaming (watch this space for a Beastie Burger Facebook version) and having spent 3 days hearing other developer’s love for social gaming, it’s opportunities and it’s benefits we feel reassured and motivated to move our plans forward.

And then yesterday we found out we’d made the short list of 45 companies to join in the BBC @ North project. It’s a great opportunity for us as one of the smaller companies on the list, being in a group with some of the north’s best digital and creative agencies makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Tags: BBC, casual connect, lovebytes, sheffield
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Planning for 2010

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Over the holidays and in the last few weeks Tim and I have been putting the finishing touches to our business plan. It’s something that we’ve only ever got halfway through and have been meaning to finish for ages.

Two things finally kicked us in to gear. The first being that while the business is doing very nicely at the moment we really want to grow and to develop more of our own content. We feel that if we don’t do something pro-active about it now we’ll keep coasting as we are and before we know it another year will have passed with no real change. The second was getting a great advisor from Business Link, we’ve had a few false starts with them but finally we’re dealing with someone who is actually helping us. We keep talking about how we would like to take on another developer and make more of our own games and she has helped us stop talking about it, make an action plan and just get on with it. We’ve bags of ideas for games and after the success of Beastie Burgers we’re really excited about getting on with another project.

It may sound a little stupid but the process of writing the business plan has helped us firm up what the actual plan is. I think the plan has only ever been a discussion, a virtual plan – now it’s a document it feels a lot more tangible. An added bonus is that through the process I’ve learned a lot about the casual games market, as I’ve mentioned before this is a bit of a new world for me personally. Writing the plan has made us do lots of research to back up what we think is a good idea with some hard facts. Until now we’ve had a vague idea of how things are, Tim reads a lot of industry blogs and magazines and I’ve been ‘working hard’ (or playing) absorbing myself in casual games seeing how the portals work, what works, what doesn’t and what’s popular with the audience. Now we feel we’re in an excellent position to get some funding and get our next game into development. We’re all feeling really hopeful and excited about the coming year.

Tags: Beastie Burgers, business link, business plan, casual games, funding
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A Wonderful Christmas Time

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

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.

Tags: Beastie Burgers, Beazley Winter Rally, Fairy Godmother Finder, seasonal games, Watford Palace Theatre
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Beastie Burgers has been released!

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

It’s been a long time coming, but we have finally released our Flash game, Beastie Burgers! Hoorah!

If you haven’t seen it already, you can play the game on the Robot / Lizard website. We have also released our Facebook app, the Beastie Builder which you can play with here.

Having completed it, we are now in the process of licensing it to a few Flash game portals. We have a primary sponsorship agreement with gamesfree.com which has been good to help claw back some of the development cost as well as help with distribution. We are also talking to some other portals about secondary sponsorships to be implemented once the primary sponsorships exclusive period is over.

The main reason for developing the game, was to help promote ourselves, and raise awareness of our Robot / Lizard Productions moniker in the hope that we might get some further game development work off the back of it. So far it seems to be doing pretty well at spreading itself around the interweb. In the past three days it’s been played about 80,000 times which is more than I had expected (for some reason, most of those players have been based in Spain) and the number of hits seems to be accelerating which is good news.

I’ll probably post a bit more about the development process behind the game on the Robot / Lizard blog in the coming weeks, for now though we’re still wrapping a few things up, and I’m going to wait until we’ve got a bit more data before I decide how much of a success it’s been.

I’d just like to give a quick shout out to the few people who have put up with my random ramblings and helped me produce this piece of work.
Those people are: Kyle (for all his hard work coding the thing), Phil (for making it look so good with his wonderful illustrations), Emma (for her moral support, animations, and for testing it), and Jean-Marc (for the narration on the introduction). Thanks guys! It wouldn’t have got this far without you and I am incredibly proud of the end result.

Tags: beastie builder, Beastie Burgers, Facebook, Flash, games, gamesfree.com, Robot / Lizard Productions
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Six months @ Electric Works

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

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.

Creative Review November Issue 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.

For those of you who are interested, you can see some more photos of our workspace and the building taken by Gavin Cockrem (who rents a desk from us).

Tags: Creative Review, Electric Works, helter skelter, Office Space
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Beasties ready to play… nearly

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

The Beastie Burger game is officially finished. Yay! … Well sort of, I can’t direct you to the game just yet, but we are very excited.

Raoul Montego

It has been going through a process of bidding for sponsorship. For those not familiar with the Flash games industry we’ve put the game up for sponsorship to game portals. We’re offering them a licence to have the game on their sites. The licences vary between exclusive, primary (there is an initial period of exclusivity plus they get their branding in the game on their site) and secondary (the game will simply be licenced for use on the site). As we have further plans for the game and it’s complimentary application ’Beastie Builder’ on social networking sites it’s unlikely we’re going to go for an exclusive deal – that’s unless the price is right. It’s going really well, we’ve had a few good offers and it will definately be getting sponsored. We expect to be launching it any day now!

We put it through its second round of independent user testing and we received some excellent feedback. We also got some pretty average feedback but nothing really too negative so going on the basis that when asked for an opinion some people will always try to find fault we are extremely pleased. Our favourite comment is:

“This game is fun as heck, I got sucked in for an hour and a half!”

… and that is exactly what we were aiming for. Making other people happy. Distracting them with nonsense. I shall be slapping that quote on every bit marketing I can. Whats even more satisfying is that people seem to have really understood where we’re coming from.

The fantastic graphics were created by our great friend Phil Alderson who we have done a lot of work with. A lot of the feedback we had commented that they loved our twist on the cooking frenzy theme and a large part of that is Phil’s graphics. Here is a screen grab as a taster.

Mmmm. Chilli cheese slime burger!

Tags: Beastie Burgers, cooking frenzy, Flash, games, sponsorship
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Business and Burgers

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

I spent last week testing our game, Beastie Burgers, and working on the release plan. I’ve really enjoyed playing it and can’t wait to get on with the launch. I’ve written my first ever press release, with a little help from Google, I’m hoping it hits the mark. I’d love to pay someone to do it as I’m great believer in giving work to people with the right skills but we’re trying to save expediture where possible; so for now, the PR hat is on my head.

I missed out on a lot of the main development of Beasties so all the little details and quirks were a briliant surprise and made me chuckle frequently. I love it, but then I would. My input on it so far has been a little bit of animation, a few graphic fixes and a lot of testing, I love that I get to play games and call it work.

I’m a newbie to the games world, I guess I fit in to the demographic of the new casual gaming revolution. I’ve always been remotley interested in computer games but until very recently nowhere near the level of say Tim or Kyle. With the advent of the Playstation Eyetoy and Singstar it’s like games started to speak to me in a way I could understand and then we got a Wii. I can easily say I play it as much, if not more than Tim does. In very general terms I think it’s interesting the male/female divde on the way we think about, react to, and interact with games. I love the dress up style games that are all over Facebook at the moment, I especically love my farm in Farmville. We’re talking through ideas for our next game project and I keep steering things in that direction. To work as part of this industry is, currently, much fun.

However Beastie Burgers is so very close to being finished it’s frustrating. We’re constantly fighting the battle of when to take time working on our own things and when to take on client work. Unfortunately we’re not quite at the point yet where we feel safe enough to turn work down, but feel that if we could just get this finished then we’d have an excellent showcase for our talents. The nature of working for agencies is that we’re often tied by confidentiality clauses so our best work is not up for discussion when I’m trying to promote us and get us new clients.

We are starting to learn that being in buisness for yourselves is a big balancing act. A lot of the decision making feels very chicken and egg; Do we have enough work to take on another developer? How are we going to take on more work unless we’ve got the bums on seats to get it done? Do we say no to client work this month to get our own projects finished so we can use them to get more work in?

There doesn’t seem to be a magic pill and in most cases we’ve just taken a deep breath and done what feels best for us. So far it seems to be working.

Tags: Beastie Burgers, Business Development, Facebook, games, PR, Testing
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Flash near the Sheaf (not on the beach)

Monday, September 21st, 2009

Tim and Kyle are at Flash on the Beach for 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 …

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Back to work

Monday, September 7th, 2009

… 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 view

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.

Tags: Electric Works, emma cooper, games, helter skelter, sheffield
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Mini Cooper

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Haven’t posted for a while as things have been a bit hectic for us over the past couple of months.

Aside from our client work here at Team Cooper HQ, Emma and I have been working on another special project for the past 9 months – another baby!

Over the past couple of months we have had some building work done on the house, moved the bedrooms around in preparation and I have been spending my evenings decorating and DIY’ing (Time that would normally be spent writing blog posts or playing around with new ideas). I am relieved to say that our house in now finished (It’s been a work in progress for the past 5 years) and we are ready for our new arrival, who is now two days overdue!

I’ll post a little more about life in our new offices and the new projects we have been working on soon. For now though I’ve got a few bits of work to finish off and a few cases of flat pack furniture to assemble before I’m off the radar on paternity leave.

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We're moving!

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Woohoo! It’s official, we are moving into Electric Works.

We um’d and err’d about it for quite a while, but in the end we decided to give it a shot on the basis that we think the building is cool as fudge.

We’ll be moving in on the 1st April (No really) and I’ll post some pictures and updates when we do.

Tags: Electric Works, sheffield
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Electric Works – Testing the slide

Friday, February 27th, 2009

We went for another look around Electric Works today. I finally got to go on the Helter Skelter and can confirm that it is awesome.

Em recorded the historic event on her phone (excuse the grainyness) which you can watch below. Listen out for my girly laugh as I get to the bottom, followed by chuckles from Emma and Deborah laughing at me.

I love that building.

Tags: digital campus, Electric Works, helter skelter, sheffield, slide, Team Cooper, video
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Wordle

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

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 -

Joy!

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One year on

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

I can’t believe a year has gone by already, I guess time flies when you’re having fun.

So it was about this time last year that I decided to stop being just a contractor and start becoming a flash development company. Despite fears of credit crunches and global recessions, work has thankfully been pretty steady. We have some great clients to thank for that, most of which are still offering repeat business from time to time (Thanks very much by the way!), and all of whom have been very supportive in our efforts breathe life into the business.

In the little downtime we have had, we started to develop some Flash games just for fun. However, as client work must of course come first, it has been a slow process. Our biggest game project release date has been slowly creeping further and further backwards. Originally it was going to be ready in October ‘08, then for this January ‘09, but now it looks like it will be March ‘09 at the earliest as we have client work booked in till then.

For this reason I’ve started to consider hiring another Flash developer. I have worked a few too many 12 hour days recently and I have been starting to miss seeing my son during the daylight hours. What I really need right now is a good solid flash coder who can take over most of the day to day development work that I have on. That way I can concentrate more of my efforts on moving the business forward.

As mentioned in some previous blog posts, Sheffield’s Electric Works building will be opening in a couple of months. Emma and I are going to have a look at the nearly finished building at the end of this month, at which point I shall make a decision about whether we should move in. Don’t get me wrong, I think the building is awesome and I like the idea of having a cool, purpose built building (with a slide!) specifically for “digital” companies, but what I feel remains to be seen is whether or not the whole package represents value for money for a business as small as ours. My previous worries about the building have not really changed since our last visit. Perhaps seeing it again with the walls, doors, and Ethernet ports in place will help to cement my decision.

So what lies ahead for this year? Well, we’re about to start work on a very exciting project for a client. I can’t say too much about it just yet, but both Kyle and I are itching to get started on it. As soon as I’ve confirmed what I can (or can’t) say about it I shall make sure to post some information here.
At some point after that I would like to get the game we have been building over the past few months finished, and once that is complete, I have had a few great ideas for some others which I would like to get stuck into.
Finally, our website is long overdue a makeover (or even an update) so watch this space.

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Electric Works Pictures

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Found this photostream on Flikr today.

I particularly liked the image of the workman “testing” the slide.

It’s not long before the building officially opens now (2nd March). We’re going to have another look round at the end of January, I’m looking forward to seeing it with the walls in place.

Tags: Electric Works, pictures, sheffield, slide
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My Flash On The Beach Experience

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

We just returned from Flash on the Beach in Brighton and had a great time. There were some fantastic sessions that were really inspiring both in the messages given to the community and in the actual skill displayed. Here’s a quick rundown of the sessions I attended and what I thought of each one.

Flash Now and in the Future
The conference started out with Richard Galvan and Serge Jesper giving an overview of Flash, AIR, CS4 and that sort of stuff. Looks like CS4 is going to be a huge upgrade over CS3 with some much needed features being added to Flash; being able to filter the library will be very useful and being able to stretch and squash timeline animations (e.g. a 100 frame animation can be extended to be 200 frames while keeping the same keyframe ratio to preserve the animation) is pretty awesome after working in 3DS Max (which has had that feature for ages).

The best way to predict the future is to invent it
After the keynote there was a choice of sessions to go to and I decided to check out Carlos Ulloa’s talk, mostly because I’m interested in Papervision3D and anything related to 3D. The session was interesting and highlighted some important performance issues when developing in 3D for Flash (although I knew a lot of it already, coming from a 3D background).
There were also some good ideas for developing 3D worlds, although I was a bit disappointed in how simple the end result (a reconstruction of Monaco) looked (though to be fair, the car model was pretty detailed). Hardware is only getting more powerful, however, so we’ll have to wait and see what Papervision3D is capable of in a year or two! GPU capabilities in the Flash Player should also help a lot here.

Brilliant Ideas that I’ve Blatantly Stolen
Branden Hall’s talk had some good ideas and concepts in it, both in the ideas presented and actual techniques shown. Overriding x/y to turn them into tweens is a good idea and something I’ll likely use. The whole concept of stealing ideas and using and improving them is a good one and kind of follows the idea behind open source. Why reinvent the wheel?

Exploitable acts of playfulness
This talk opened up with a few technical issues and a reboot (this was actually the only speaker I saw using Vista; not very encouraging!) but once that was sorted Andries Odendaal showed off some of his work, which was very impressive.
The most technically impressive thing was an infinite image mosaic, where an image was displayed that was made up of smaller images, with those images made up of smaller images, with those made up of smaller images, and so on. The calculations were being done in real-time as he zoomed in, with newly appearing images dissolving into their component images.

Creating particle effects with Flint
Not much to say about Richard Lord’s Flint session except that Flint looks really cool. I was impressed to see that it can do flocking operations and the snow effect looked very realistic. The fire looked a bit weird to me but fire is just one of those things that no one will ever really get right (especially with the processing limitations of Flash).

Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play
Some really impressive stuff was shown in Erik Natzke’s session. He basically wrote a bunch of applications to paint onto a canvas with various effects taking place, like inverse-kinematics ribbons following the mouse around and painting a trail behind them onto the canvas. Some of the stuff he created looks really nice and as a developer I can appreciate the complexity of the process behind it.

Modulating a Lot
This was definitely the funniest session of the conference. James Paterson gave a rundown of his life and the work he has done across the years, some of it hilarious, all of it weird. Most of it involved animations of Gilliam-esque objects appearing and disappearing and doing actions, but there were other things thrown in there like a bunch of adverts for a Canadian sandwich chain (Mr. Sub) and collaboration with a dance artist.

Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit (or 5 Rules for Hedonistic Creatives)
Grab the low-hanging fruit, create, share, profit, play make up the five rules in Aral Balkan’s talk and the general message was to go and create what you want and share it with the world, but make sure you can pay the bills as being skint doesn’t help much when trying to keep a creative environment. Grabbing the low-hanging fruit refers to doing whatever provides the most reward for the least effort, because if you don’t, someone else will and will be all the better for it.
Another important message given in this talk is that frameworks and standards can be very bad in that they can create a situation where you are so concerned with coding in the correct way and following all the various standards that you don’t focus enough on the creative aspect of coding and your creative works may suffer as a result from procrastination stopping you from actually taking advantage of the ideas floating around in your head.

Emergence
The blurb on the FOTB website says that “Emergence refers to the way that complex systems and patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions” and Jeremy Thorp gives some demonstrations of this in his session, covering a number of topics.
One thing I especially liked was the demonstration of the variance application, which helps you create logos using a complex system of generating a number of random ideas based on a number of parameters and then picking which of them you like and then hybridizing them to generate new logos. This essentially creates an artificial evolutionary process of selecting logos that is really fun to play with.

Things Every ActionScript Developer Should Know
This talk by Grant Skinner gave a brief overview of various standards that should be followed when coding in ActionScript, including variable naming and package structures. Also covered are frameworks and design patterns that can be used when developing projects.

Flash Jam Session
Because of a few scheduling conflicts, GMUNK’s session was changed to a later time, creating a gap that was filled by six speakers spending ten minutes each showing off something they have done. Present was Andre Michelle, Mario Klingemann, Joa Ebert, Ralph Hauwert, Keith Peters and Carlos Ulloa.
The highlight of the session was Joa Ebert’s ten minute live coding session where he wrote a particle emitter whose particles were influenced by what looked like fluid dynamics to move around (At least that’s what it looked like to me; I won’t pretend to understand what was actually happening [as I couldn’t even read the code on the screen!]).

Abstract Narrative
Hoss Gifford gave a very funny talk about abstract narrative and the need for simplicity in applications, as no one will ever read the manual included (or even follow any kind of tutorial). The session was introduced as being two talks in one and Hoss joked that he would get changed into different clothes on stage to help the transition into the second talk. He wasn’t joking.

GMUNKICKDOWN 08.9
GMUNK’s work was really visually impressive and the guy has a lot of talent and ability with what he does. I have no experience with video editing or the kind of graphics used in GMUNK’s work so I can’t fully appreciate the sort of stuff being shown off, but it looked really cool.

The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life
I was blown away by Robert Hodgin’s work in audio-visualisations using processing. Some of the stuff was incredible and the mix of impressive graphics and particle effects interacting and visually reacting to the audio sounds looked beautiful.

Finding Away3d
I didn’t really know anything about Away3D before this session and I know a little more now after Rob Bateman’s talk. Some of the effects shown off looked really cool, especially the underwater effect done with texturing.

Papervision3D Simplified
Seb Lee-Delisle gave a very British talk about how to get started with Papervision3D, sprinkled with a lot of humour throughout, including a Father Ted clip, an homage to Joa Ebert’s ten minute live coding in the form of a 20 second live coding in getting Papervision3D set up (to the sound of the countdown jingle) and a lot of cows. Very useful in showing the basics of what Papervision can do and how easy it is to get into the basics.

Steal this code: Decompiling SWFs for fun and profit
I really enjoyed this session by Doug McCune that gave an overview of how to decompile a SWF file and how easy it actually is (very). It highlighted the dangers of leaving things in your code that could potentially be found and ruin things for you later, with an example given of Doug finding a way to instantly log into an application as an admin that worked on the live server for that application. He also explained how users can also potentially manipulate the incoming data being sent to a SWF from the server (or vice versa), which can be used to bypass certain restrictions (like avoid paying for premium game levels). This could also be used to submit fake scores to a game’s high score system.
Methods to potentially protect against decompiling were also covered, but it seems like there is no bulletproof way to protect a SWF and anyone determined enough can eventually break down the protection and get to the code and logic behind the code inside.

“Intentionally left blank”
Rob Chiu did the official FOTB trailer and showed it off in this session along with his other works. Like GMUNK, I couldn’t really appreciate the full value of what I saw as I have no experience with any of the tools involved. All I can say is that they looked very cool.

Here be Pixels
Completely blown away by how awesome Mario Klingemann’s work was. He started off by showing how he could hold up small pieces of patterned paper to his webcam and use them to execute certain actions. He then went into detail about how Flash is used to interpret the original webcam image into the data contained within the pattern. This sort of stuff is fairly new ground in general so to see it in action in Flash is astounding.
Also demonstrated was Mario’s Peacock software (Part of the Aviary suite) which can be used for advanced image processing and, again, works in Flash in a browser environment. Amazing work.

Beyond Flash
A very philosophical talk by Jonathan Harris talking about the various works he has done to quantify human emotions with applications to gather statistics on how people use language. Also covered were experiments in Whale hunting and investigating the happiness of a small Asian country (I forget which one).
At the end of the talk came a somewhat controversial statement that many Flash developers waste their time on projects that have no long-lasting worth. The wording he used was that if Flash is a language, lots of people can speak it but not many people have anything important to say. The first thing that came to my mind when I heard this was the great number of tweening applications available for ActionScript, all of which are ostensibly identical and only differ when used in particularly stressful applications where bleeding edge performance is an issue.

Overall I really enjoyed the experience at FOTB. A lot of what I saw has inspired me and I definitely want to start trying some of the stuff I saw there (and there’s a pretty big list of what I want to try!)

Tags: brighton, conference, Flash, flash on the beach, flashonthebeach, fotb
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Flash on the beach 2008

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

In a couple of weeks, Kyle and I will be heading down to Brighton for Flash on the beach. I can’t wait. I went on my own last year and got so much inspiration from it that I thought it would be crazy not to go again this year. I’m hoping that like last year, I’ll get some great ideas to apply to our work. In fact it was last years FOTB that reminded me why I love developing with Flash and led me to decide to expand the business in order to start developing my own apps. I’m also pretty sure Kyle will get a lot out of it too. We’ve been talking recently about what sort of direction we’d like to go in with the work we take on, and what sort of training would be best for increasing Kyle’s knowledge base. This is the perfect opportunity for checking out what is currently possible with the Flash platform, and for getting pointers on where to go next to do something similar.

Tags: brighton, conference, flash on the beach, fotb, Inspiration
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So far so good

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

It’s been 7 months now since I decided to take the leap and increase the company’s operations. I thought I’d post a little on what we’ve achieved so far and where we’re hoping to go.

I’ve certainly been keeping busy. I find most of my waking day is spent thinking about the business, talking with current & potential clients or solving some problem we are working on. It has well and truly become my obsession and I have really been enjoying it so far.

The first major step was getting our office sorted. Well, I suppose it wasn’t really that major a step, but it did give a lot of weight to the feeling that things were actually progressing. Actually one of the highlights for me so far was when the “Team Cooper Ltd” sign for the door finally turned up. It doesn’t look like much, but it meant a lot.

The second major step was employing Kyle. It has been great having an extra person to help out and delegate work to as it has meant that 3 important things have been happening. Firstly I have had time to spend on promoting the company and researching the ideas I have had. Secondly, when the need has arisen I have been able to take on a bit more work. Thirdly, we have been able to start development on our first production.
I don’t want to say too much about it just yet because there is still quite a way to go. All I will say is that it has been a monstrous effort so far and I can’t wait for it to go live.

Things should be all change again over the next couple of months. Some projects will be drawing to a close and some new ones (to be confirmed) will be running alongside and/or taking their place. I think that the these coming months should be the most exciting so far as there are a number of directions we could go right now depending on what the client decides. At least 2 of the options would require getting an additional person on board so if you happen to be a Flash Developer reading this and think you might be interested in joining us, please get in touch (The email address can be found in the contact section of the Team Cooper homepage).

In terms of future activities, we have a couple more small productions planned (which I hope to start development on as soon as the current one is launched) and one larger production which may not happen for a while, but will ultimately play a key part in demonstrating what we are capable of.

Finally, we should hopefully launch our new website soon. It won’t be anything too ground breaking just yet, but hopefully it will at least look cool.

Tags: future plans, productions, products, robot lizard, Team Cooper
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To click or not to click?

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

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

http://www.lexus-rx350.ru/

http://www.mercedes-amg.com/SL65BlackSeries/

Tags: Flash, usability
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Caption competition

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

I found this photo in Phil’s camera. It made me chuckle so I thought I’d share it.

Best caption win’s some stuff from my desk (Currently the prize fund includes a plastic fork, a pen lid, some lovely Team Cooper business cards, and a Kazoo).

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Milkart

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Working from shared offices means that we share a fridge (and kitchen) with some of the other small businesses on our floor. Because all the offices seem to buy the same milk from the same shop from time to time, we’ve got into the habit of tagging ours. Today’s tag was so amazing, we decided to share it with you.

Mmmmmm. Penguin milk!

Tags: art, milk, penguin
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Agency and portfolio sites

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

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.

I still quite like Dare… http://www.daredigital.com/ for straight forwardness

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/

And finally this is v.pretty… http://www.varywell.com/

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Electric Works Tour

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Last Thursday we got invited by creative space to go on a site tour of the Electric Works building site.
Kyle and I went down at lunchtime to go and see the building and get an idea for where the new office will be.

My first impressions were so far so good. From the outside it is starting to look pretty impressive, and on the inside, although there are no internal walls or fittings, you could get a good idea of the space.
Toby Hyam took us round and was doing a good job of selling the building as we went. Apparently some of the businesses that have signed up for spaces will not completely make up their mind until the whole job is finished so I guess it’s up to the creative space team to try to get them to understand their vision for the building.

Having moved into other offices and had time to think a bit more about the prospect of moving into Electric Works, I have found myself weighing up the pro’s and cons of moving over there.

On the up side it will be a great building. I think it is very much going to be Sheffield City Councils poster child when it comes to pimping Sheffield as the new place to be for the creative and digital industries. That means lots of press attention (I hope) and lots of support (I really hope), which for a small company like us is a good thing. Toby was saying that they are looking to get in lots of high quality furniture and fittings to make the space a truly desireable place to be. In fact, he said it was going to be the nicest building they have been involved with so far and having been pretty impressed with the facilities at the round foundry in Leeds, I can’t wait to see the finished product here in Sheffield. Toby also reminded me of the regular networking events they are planning to hold. Parties, exibitions, shows and that sort of thing to give the tenants an opportunity to get to know each other better. This could be very handy for meeting people to collaborate with on larger projects. I think that being a small company it will good to keep close to other small creative companies for skills exhanges and other such things.

On the down side, the cost of renting the office is going to be almost double what we’re paying now and although it is a bigger office, it’s not twice as big.
Also, whilst the offices themselves will be arguably the best Sheffield has to offer for small businesses, their location is not. Sure they’re right next to the bus & train stations which is great for visitors (especially during conferences), but for the people that work in them, I can’t think of many nice places in close proximity to go eat, entertain clients, have informal staff meetings or after work beers. There is the Showroom, but that’s not a lot. In our current location we have all of West Street and Divison street to keep us amused.

That said, I won’t have to make the decision anytime soon. Apparently the building won’t actually be ready until March 2009 because the internal fit out has had to be delayed until the external work is finished. That’s 10 months away and a lot could have happened by then.

On a final note, Did I mention the slide? No? I wasn’t sure if it was going to actually happen, but Toby says there is definately going to be a spiral slide which runs from the 3rd floor down to the reception area at the front of the building. How cool is that!!?? I keep telling people about it, and nobody seems to believe me. As sad as it sounds, I think that is the single greatest thing about the building and those that know me well will find it no surprise that the office I have reserved is on the third floor. Heh heh.

Electric Works from the rear. Our office will be in the top right hand corner.

This is where our office will go. It will stretch from the window to the fire escape and will be 5 windows wide. Got that?

This is what will be the view from our office window. Should be fun watching the crazy’s hanging out in the bus station.

This is inside the front of the building taken from the 3rd floor looking down to where reception will be. You can’t really see properly because of all the scaffolding in the way, but this is where the slide will go.

Tags: digital campus, Electric Works, first impressions, sheffield, slide, tour
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I'm the new guy

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I joined Team Cooper just under a week ago as a multimedia developer for ActionScript 3.0, PHP, MySQL and other fun stuff. I’m actually pretty new to those things so don’t expect to see any amazing AS3 stuff right away, but i’m learning!

I’ve just finished up a degree doing Computing (Visualisation) at Sheffield Hallam University where I did all sorts of stuff (databases, programming, design, even film editing and special effects!) but all throughout that I found that the thing I liked doing most was Flash, specifically Flash games. In fact, in my final year I even set up a website and so far I have a couple of games posted there along with a few bits and pieces of coding i’ve done.

Up until now i’ve mostly been working in AS2, self-taught from online tutorials, so as you can imagine my coding style was a bit sloppy. Moving to AS3 and learning the proper way of doing things has been an interesting experience (I can’t believe how easy it is to do some things that I was doing an incredibly difficult way before) and i’ve been enjoying it a lot so far.

Also, I’ve been tasked by Tim to create a cool game for the site so look out for that sometime in the future!

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New staff

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

2 people joined the company this week which I am very excited about.
Emma brings with her a wealth of experience in delivering digital projects to end clients from her previous role. She will be spreading her time between helping with the marketing and branding aspects of the business and assisting with the contracting & consulting side of things.
Kyle is a very talented chap and has joined as an additional multimedia developer to assist me with the Flash and PHP work that I am doing. He has some background in the design and development of Flash games and should prove a valuable asset in helping to acheive the aspirations of the business.

Tags: emma cooper, kyle rodgers, new staff
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Flash chat

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Oooo first day, second blog post… cracking!

I’ve been a fan of Red Interactive’s website for a while but…

…I saw the Minuit site earlier and even though it’s probably quite a bit simpler I think I like it more, it’s definately cuter.

Tags: Chat, Flash, Minuit, Red Interactive
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Joining the team, human space invaders

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

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???

Tags: Space invaders, Team Cooper, You Tube
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Pitching & Pricing workshop with Inspiral

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Inspiral are a charity based here in Sheffield that help new businesses within the creative and digital industries. Businesses exactly like me (Actually, I should say like us now that there will be 2 more of us in the company soon).
Today I attended a free pitching and pricing workshop that they had organised. The aim of the day was to develop your technique for pitching yourself and your business to potential clients. First of all, we had to attempt our “pitch” to the rest of the group. This was then followed by comments from everyone in the group about what their first impressions of you and your business were. With this mind, we were given some further pointers and then had another go at our pitches. There then followed some more discussion on pricing and a final go at giving the pitch.
I found the day very useful and enjoyable and I would highly recommend it if they put on any more. I think everybody else who attended also felt that they got a lot out of it, and certainly everybody’s pitches were a lot more focused, and to the point. I hope that Inspiral put on some more workshops on other subjects as I would be keen to attend them too going by the standard of this one. On top of everything we got a free lunch too. Nice!

Tags: creative industries, free, inspiral, pitching, pricing, sheffield, workshop
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Employee Interview

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

I have been hunting for a developer to join the company for a couple of months now. It has been an interesting experience being on the other side of the employment process. As a recruiter, it has proven to me how important it is to have a well laid out CV. I had so many arrive in my inbox that were just complete garbage. I couldn’t believe what some people were sending as a means to sell themselves.

Fortunately, a CV arrived yesterday that caught my eye. I interviewed him today and I think he is exactly the sort of person I have been looking for, so I offered him the job. He should start within the next month or so. I can’t wait for him to get stuck in so I can begin to work more on the business rather than in it.

Tags: cv, recruiting
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Emma quits day job

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

For various reasons Emma quit her job today. She will most likely join the business in some form, but neither of us is quite sure what she will be doing. I had always imagined that one day she would leave her job to join me and help manage the business (Hey, that’s why I called the company Team Cooper) but that was going to be when there were actually people to manage (aside from ourselves I mean).

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The first big step – New offices!

Monday, April 7th, 2008

It’s been 4 months since my decision to expand the company’s activities. Things have been all go recently and as well as working on my current contracts, I have been thinking hard about the direction I want the business to go whilst saving up some cash reserves to help kick things up a gear.
It occurred to me that it’s still going to be quite a while before the Electric Works is actually finished (At least 6 months) so I figured I should make other arrangements until then. Now feels like to the right time to take some action, so I have.
I have moved into an office within the Innovation Centre which is located in the city centre here in Sheffield. It is in a great location, just off of west street which has various bars and restaurants to go for lunch at or drinks after work. The building is quite modern, and the actual office itself has only just been fitted out as it part of what used to be a much bigger room.
I will try to remember to put some pictures up as soon as I have unpacked the boxes of stuff I have transported from home.
All this means that I can now start looking to get an extra person on board to help with my workload. As an added bonus, moving my home office to a real office has meant that we now have an extra bedroom at home – We might even start inviting people round to stay again!

Tags: Electric Works, Innovation Centre, New Office
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Interview Published

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

I picked up a copy of Yorkshire Business Insider today to find that the article about the digital campus had been published. I’d been quoted twice! I felt quite pleased with myself being that it was my first bit of real PR I’ve done for the business.

Tags: Electric Works, PR, yorkshire business insider
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Interview for Yorkshire Business Insider

Friday, February 15th, 2008

Following on from the photo shoot that I went on a couple of weeks ago, I was invited down to the Creative Sheffield offices to join in with a discussion with a journalist from Yorkshire business insider. The main topic of conversation was the creative and digital industries here in Sheffield and how the new digital campus was helping to shape them.

A comment made that stuck out for me was that the Electric Works will be a great opportunity for small companies like Team Cooper to meet other small companies and partner up on larger projects. It gave me a lot more confidence about the prospect of becoming a small specialist agency.

Tags: creative sheffield, digital agency, Electric Works, sheffield, yorkshire business insider
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Artificial Life Experiment

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Thought I would put this link up to a tool I made for the Smart Assess website. I’ve been playing around with writing some artificial life algorithms and this is the result. It’s kind of a refined version of the particle behaviours of the dynamic art stuff I did at the end of last year. If you click the flash movie once, then type “tails” on your keyboard then they look even more life like. Needless to say the tails have caused much amusement in the office.

Tags: actionscript 3, artifical life, Flash
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Electric Works photo shoot

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Creative space emailed me last week and asked if I wouldn’t mind doing some press shots and commenting on Electric Works for a press release they were doing. Today we went down to the site and had some pictures taken outside. It was good to go and check the building out up close, prior to today I have only driven past. I can’t wait to have a look round the inside.

Tags: Electric Works
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Meeting at SENTA

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

As my company is less than 2 years old, it means I can get free business advice from the Sheffield Enterprise Agency. Today I went down to go and chat to them about my ideas and to ask a few questions about some problems I’ve been having putting together my new business plan.
The chap I spoke to was very helpful. He certainly put my mind at ease about a few things and I hope to get back in touch with him again in the future. It was a shame the meeting was only for an hour I could have continued chatting for quite a while after.

Tags: advice, business plan, senta
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Electric Works

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I went to see creative space management today at the Round Foundry in Leeds. They’re going to be managing the new Electric Works building being built near the station here in Sheffield.
It looks like it’s going to be brilliant. Purpose built serviced offices for the digital industries. To me it looks exactly like the sort of offices I would like the business to call home. In fact, I went ahead and reserved one.
They are due to be completed in October, so that gives me 8 months to get the rest of my plans up and running.

Tags: Electric Works, Office Space
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Visit to BETT Show

Friday, January 11th, 2008

I’ve been meaning to go to the BETT show for years now. A lot of my work has been for some of the e-learning companies based in and around Sheffield, so it makes sense to me to go down and check out what other e-learning businesses around the country are offering. In previous years, I’ve had to cancel my plans to go for various reasons (New baby, Too much work on, etc) so this year I had resolved I was definitely going to go. Fortunately, the company I am doing some work for at the moment had a stand there, so not only could I go down and see the show, but I also had great bunch of people to chat to and go out for some alcoholic beverages with when the day was over.
I found the overall diversity of the companies and products very interesting (From comments from colleagues who had been in previous years, I was kind of expecting to see lots of small companies selling very similar products). There were a lot of e-learning companies there, but I was also fascinated by some of the hardware that is being offered to schools these days. Lego robots are cool, 3 dimensional printers are even cooler (CAD drawing goes in one end, actual plasticy rendering of the item comes out the other end!)

Another reason for me visiting BETT was to see if there were any companies doing things that could inspire the future of Team Cooper. The 2 companies that stick in my mind were 2Simple software, and FutureLab.
2Simple make simple (Or at least simple in appearance) e-learning products for infant and junior schools. They appear to be doing a very good job of it too as they had one of the largest stands there and they seemed to be selling stuff by the bucket load. I love making learning games. Back when I used to work at ACT e-learning, it was the best part of my job. To see that a company like this can make fun looking games, and be profitable is good news in my book.
FutureLab just seem to do cool stuff. They help develop experimental learning materials and on their stand they had a brilliant interactive, erm … thing. It’s hard to describe what it was really, kind of a hands on Reason meets Etch-a-sketch meets disco light. Really good fun to play with, and fascinating to watch the creators start making tunes and rhythms with. They also had some nice “build your own” java games for deploying on mobile phones. The idea being kids could build a “game” on their PC, then download it to their phone to play and share. A nice idea. Something I would like to investigate if Flash ever becomes common on mobile phones (Probably not that far off I would imagine).
If Team Cooper could somehow combine the experimentalness (If that’s not a word it should be) of FutureLab with the straightforward, useable appeal of 2Simple’s products, it could result in something very interesting.

Tags: 2simple, BETT, FutureLab, games, Inspiration
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1. THEY’RE JUST LIKE YOU

2. INCREASING ODDS.

3. TIME WAITS FOR NO PLAYER

4. GRAVITY (and other laws of physics)

Who are your audience?

What type of content is it?

What’s your budget?

Anything else?

Summary

Notes

Busy, busy, busy!

Project juggling

Robot / Lizard: It lives!

Future Projects

“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.”

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