Flash

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | 4 Thoughts →

Yellowbrick Yacht Race Viewer

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Top GPS tracking folk Yellowbrick asked Team Cooper to help visualise the yacht races they provide GPS tracking units to. The result not only allowed race entrants to view their own progress but also provided the public a chance to spectate and cheer on the whole event from the comfort of their own computers (without any of that getting wet malarkey).

The team really enjoyed this project and are dead proud of the result of all their hard work. The fact that the tool had over 2.6 million views in its first season, seeing the tracker rental stock nearly double in this time are just an awesome added bonus.

So far, we’ve watched the race viewer track 98 yacht races and over 200 treks and expeditions all across the globe, Yellowbrick’s tracker fleet transmitting 1.3 million position reports between them.

Even if a contest is halfway round the world, it’s clear audiences are enjoying keeping an eye on their favourite entrant. Each of our visitors stays on the viewer page for an average of 7 minutes and 20 seconds each time they pop by so frankly, whether you’re in the race or watching from home, everyone’s a winner!

Tags: Flash, GPS Tracker, Team Cooper, Yacht, Yellowbrick
Posted in Flash & Flex Applications | Comments Off

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
Posted in Blog | 11 Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

Tron: Legacy

Monday, February 14th, 2011

We were asked by Sky to help them produce a game to celebrate the movie release of Disney’s “Tron: Legacy”. This made us at Team Cooper quite excited, not least because we’re all massive retro gaming nerds.

The sequel to the classic 1982 film needed a top quality game to go with it and nothing says quality Tron like light-cycles. Being sly foxes, we crafted a series ever infuriating mazes to dart around as you attempt to out-manoeuvre up to three other computer players with increasingly tricky AI.

Just like the Cricket Skills game, the game also featured dual high score leader boards so that players could compare their scores to their Facebook friends as well as everyone else.

Remember – the only way to win is to survive (and maybe to avoid the walls and other players using the arrow keys).

Tags: Flash, Game, Team Cooper, Tron: Legacy
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Sky Sports Cricket Skills

Monday, February 14th, 2011

It was a glorious Ashes for the England Team in the 2010/11 series and Sky were keen to give it top coverage. As part of their online presence they came to Team Cooper for a way to turn the gentlemen’s game into a short, action filled online experience. We thought back to playing Ian Botham’s Cricket on the Amiga before deciding to strip cricket down to its three main elements – bowling, batting and fielding. And so was born Sky Sports Cricket Skills.

The overall aim of the game is to score as many points as you can in each mini-game to set the best all-round score. The top eleven players would then make it onto the hallowed Sky Sports Ashes team.

Each mini-game was specifically designed to be as quick and as simple as possible to encourage players to replay it again, and again to beat their previous score. Dual high score leader boards were also featured so that players could compare their score to their Facebook friends as well as everyone else.

Have you got what it takes?

Tags: Cricket, Cricket Skills, Flash, games, Sky, Sky Sports, Team Cooper
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Beazley Broker Dash

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Following on from the success of the Winter Rally game, Beazley asked Team Cooper to build them another game to send out to clients with their 2010 Christmas e-card.
Once again, it needed to be speedy, competitive and addictive whilst adhering to their brand guidelines.

Our solution was to blend Christmas, Beazley and a tried and tested game mechanic to create the Beazley Broker Dash. Using only the spacebar, the aim of the game is to help the broker jump over obstacles and vault across the rooftops for as long (and as far) as you can.

In the first two months since it was sent out, the Broker Dash proved to be twice as popular as last year’s game with some players having hundreds of go’s to try and beat their high score. So far, nearly 120 million metres of rooftops have been dashed over.

How long can you last?

Tags: Beazley, Beazley Broker Dash, Beazley Winter Rally, Flash, games, Team Cooper
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | 2 Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | 1 Thought →

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

Speedo TriathElite

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Sheffield digital agency Quba loved what Team Cooper did on the Sculpture project, so they asked us to work with them on a new project for Speedo; this time to promote their TriathElite range of suits. They wanted some 3D elements similar to an existing microsite they’d developed, which we achieved using PaperVision3D. They also wanted Google analytics, deep linking, and XML-driven content, as featured in the Speedo Sculpture site we worked on. Talk about demanding.

Tags: Flash, Jeff, Speedo TriathElite, Team Cooper, Website
Posted in Flash Websites | Comments Off

Beastie Burgers

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Okay, so you’re Raoul, a dog boy who wants to be the best burger chef in Monsterville. Fair enough. But if you really want that success Raoul, then this is where you start paying – in sheer hell. You’ll have to visit various locations to serve your burgers, and naturally all your customers are monsters. No really Raoul, they’re monsters.

Beastie Burgers is the first full game we worked on under our Robot / Lizard guise. We released it in Halloween 2009 and it’s had over 5 million plays since then. We’ve even built a Facebook version, with micro payment options to help you speed your way to success.

Tags: Beastie Burgers, Facebook, Flash, Game, robot lizard, Team Cooper
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Snickers mini-games

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Damn fool, did you scratch my van? Team Cooper were asked to code up a couple of mini-games featuring 80s A-Team legend, Mr T. The games are featured in the arcade section of a website promoted by a recent advertising campaign for Snickers. Get some nuts and play, fool!

The first game is a version of the classic Breakout, only the blocks have been replaced with chocolate bars. The second lets you bowl T-style, with manly wrecking balls and old tyres instead of bowling balls. We always enjoy working with Addicted, so we jumped at the chance and were quite proud of the end results. We pity the fool who says different, you hear?

Tags: Flash, games, Mr T, Snickers, Team Cooper
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Beazley Winter Rally

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Every year, specialist insurance underwriters Beazley send out a Christmas
e-card to their clients with a web game. With the majority of their clients being male city trader types, they wanted something that was very competitive and addictive, with a leader board and a prize for the best player.
Smell that testosterone.

Team Cooper suggested some ideas within Beazley’s budget, and they settled on this racing game with a twist. Each player has to race round the track to try and set the best time, but they can also race against ‘ghost’ versions of times that other players have set. The ghost element made the game great fun and very competitive and the game was extremely popular with Beazley’s clients. The top players even managed to blitz our developers’ top scores. Dammit. See if you can beat them.

Tags: Beazley Winter Rally, Flash, games, Team Cooper
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Beastie Builder

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

This is something we’ve worked on to help promote our Beastie Burgers game. It lets you build your own monsters, similar to the ones found in the game, then add them to your Facebook photo albums for your friends to see. Shameless self-promotion using social media. And why not?

Why not have a short biscuit break, and make a monster yourself?

Tags: Flash, Team Cooper
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Fairy Godmother Finder

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Once upon a time (well, it was the end of 2009 actually), in a land not too far away, Watford Palace Theatre contacted Team Cooper to produce a game for promoting their Christmas production of Cinderella. After a short consultation, the client tried on a few ideas, glass slipper style, and picked the one that fitted. The Team were overjoyed, and that night, they set to work coordinating the artwork, audio and of course the coding. Oh yes they did. They also liaised with the client’s current website provider, waving their wands to make sure everything ran smoothly on their servers and the viral ‘send to friend’ functionality was all working correctly.

Watford were very pleased with the end result, and so were Team Cooper. Don’t you love a happy ending?

Tags: Fairy Godmother Finder, Flash, games, Team Cooper, Watford Palace Theatre
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Are you a mutant?

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Can you fire beams from your eyes? Can you read minds? No? Tsk, call yourself a mutant? Look, it’s very important to know whether or not you’re a mutant with superhuman powers – especially for kids who watch the ‘Wolverine and The X-Men’ cartoon on the NickToons TV channel. Luckily for you, Team Cooper worked with Addicted2TV to provide the Flash development (using AS3, Eclipse and FDT) for 4 games, as part of a website to promote the TV series. So off you pop – test your mutant powers.

Tags: Flash, games, Nicktoons, Team Cooper, X-Men
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Tri-shooter

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. That was before our time,
but we can tell you that our ‘Asteroids’-esque Tri-shooter game
was*. In an ‘aren’t we big, bad-ass game developers’ kind of
way, we set out to build it in 24 hours. Just for fun.
Come and have a go.

*Technically, it took longer than a day if you count the extra
features like music, sound effects and a high score system that
we added after the day. But it was worth the not-particularly long
wait.

Tags: Flash, games, Team Cooper, tri-shooter
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Hippo and Monkey’s Swamp Adventure

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

Green Spaghetti approached Team Cooper with an idea they thought up while working with local school children, and they asked us to develop it. This is an older piece of work, but it’s a great example of game development and everyone seems to love it.

Team Cooper just like it because it’s fun, and for us, that’s a lot of what Flash development is all about. Come on, it’s a game with hippos and monkeys in it. What more do you want? Take a look.

Tags: Flash, games, Team Cooper
Posted in Flash Games | Comments Off

Speedo Sculpture

Monday, July 19th, 2010

We were contacted by Sheffield digital agency Quba to work with them on a microsite project. The site promotes Speedo Sculpture, a new swimsuit range that’s more tailored to body size than standard suits. Quba managed the project and provided design and creative direction, Team Cooper supplied the Flash coding. Speedo supplied the state-of-the-art swimwear.

I know you want to see the site, but first, you have to read this technical bit, because it’s really impressive. You see, the site had to be modular, needed to be tracked by Google, and had to easily convert to other languages at a later date. Team Cooper built the site to be entirely XML-driven, so everything from the order of the menu items to the wording in the product descriptions could be changed using a basic text editor. We also added deep linking and Google analytics, so not only could Speedo track which pages were being viewed, but they could easily direct people to a specific page within the site. Clever eh?

Oh go on then, have a look at the site here.

Tags: Flash, Speedo Sculpture, Team Cooper, Website, xml-driven
Posted in Flash Websites | Comments Off

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | 1 Thought →

Swan at the Globe

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

Roth Creative asked Team Cooper to help them build a Flash website, complete with admin system, for The Globe Theatre’s Swan Restaurant. Roth had the entire creative content ready, but they needed a Flash developer to help them bring it to life. “The show must go on”, said The Team, all enthusiastic and keen, if a little bit dramatic.

We built the main elements, and incorporated an admin system so staff could add news and event listings. We also built a very cool photo management system, with content stored on a MySQL database on the server. It lets event photographers upload pictures directly to the website, and The Swan’s clients can log in to see them. Nice. And as the site features deep linking, URLs for specific Flash pages can be given out. It’s XML-driven too, so Roth can easily edit content without our help.

Tags: Flash, Swan at the Globe, Team Cooper, Website
Posted in Flash Websites | Comments Off

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | 1 Thought →

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
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

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
Posted in Blog | 1 Thought →

New Year, New Business

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Having had a particularly lazy Christmas in France with the in-laws, I have spent a lot of time collecting my thoughts on where I want to go with my business. I have been a contractor since September 2005 and I feel now is the time to expand my operations.

My vision for the future is that we would have 2 main objectives. The first is to continue as I am at the moment, providing development services of web apps, games, tools, & e-learning to other new media companies. I would like to think if another company needed to build a kick ass app for their client, they would consider Team Cooper to build or help build it. The second objective would be to spend time developing our own products.
My recent experiences with AS3 have shown me that there isn’t really that much you can’t do in terms of building web apps and I really like the idea of being a company that develops a “thing”. So my basic thinking is that I’d like to build something useful that people / organisations would want to buy. The question is what? I’ve had lots of ideas, I just need to decide on the one to go with.

Obviously this means I need to get some extra talent on board, there’s only so much code one person can write (If anybody out there is interested in joining me, please get in touch). Office space is also going to be a requirement. Lots of thought needs to go into how everything is going to work but I’m confident I can put together a good plan of action.

One thing’s for sure, I’m very excited about what lies in wait in 2008.

Tags: as3, Flash, new business, startup
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →

Chasing patterns

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Had another go last night.

Basically, I have been trying to recreate some of the things I saw at Flash on the Beach as follows …

First, create some particles, then set them off in random directions at random speeds and update their positions on every frame.
Second, draw a random image at the same position as each particle to create a footprint of where that particle has been.

That’s basically it.

For this attempt I added a few more rules. I wanted the particles to stay within the frame as much as possible, so I made sure if they left it they were attracted back in. I also wanted it to end reasonably quickly, so when a particle gets close enough to another (e.g. within 5 pixels) it stops moving and is not updated any further. I player around with the points being attracted to random fixed points on the page, and with each other. I think I prefer the effect when the particles are attracted to each other you can see the results here:

http://labs.teamcooper.co.uk/chase_002/

Next I think it might have a go at plotting images, or other shapes as the particle footprints. I’d also like to make the chase algorithms a bit more intelligent.

Tags: as3, chasing algorithms, Flash, particles, random
Posted in Blog | Post your Thoughts →