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We’re Hiring: Digital Designer

Friday, January 11th, 2013

Hey you! Yes, you with the Wacom tablet! Looking for a new role this year? How’d you fancy joining us?

Having survived the Mayan apocalypse, we realised it’s about time we took on an extra digital designer to complement our existing in-house design talent.

We build digital amusements* for a range of international clients so we’re looking for someone who is digital through and through. You’ll have a wide range of experience designing interfaces for a variety of audiences and brands with UX considerations in mind.

We are not looking for a graphic designer who has done a bit of web, nor are we looking for a web coder who wants to focus on design. What we ideally need is a versatile, digital creative and while this is primarily a design based role, any illustration, 3D modelling or other digital audio/visual skills you have would come in very handy.

This is a mid-weight to senior role and the successful candidate will play a large part in influencing the future standard of digital design within the company. You’ll be involved throughout a variety of projects, from initial concepts for pitches right through to designing the look and feel of all manner of fun digital things such as Flash games, Facebook apps or HTML5 content for mobile devices.

You’ll get to work in a shiny office environment with a lovely scenic view including the bus station (We’re based in the Electric Works, part of Sheffield’s Digital Campus). You’ll also get to work with a team of nice people on interesting projects for organisations like the BBC, Nickelodeon, BSkyB and Topps with semi-flexible working hours**.

We have strong relationships with Game Republic, Yorkshire’s indie scene (GA-MA-YO, SHINDIG) and as a part of Sheffield’s flourishing digital community, this is an opportunity to play a big part in the continued growth of a small but dynamic digital amusements agency.

Does this sound like you?

  • Excellent Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator design skills
  • Good UX and interaction design skills
  • Strong composition and typographic skills with excellent attention to detail
  • Ability to work quickly and accurately to tight deadlines
  • Self motivated, with a positive and pro-active attitude towards your work
  • Have a portfolio demonstrating your best digital project / personal work to date
  • Good written and verbal communication skills
  • Loves games and the web

Possibly with a dash of the following?

  • Experience creating UI for games aimed at young audiences
  • 2D Animation skills (Using Flash)
  • Character and/or Environment Illustration skills (Particularly in vector or pixel-art styles)
  • 3D modelling (e.g. Blender)
  • Motion graphics / Video for web
  • Photography skills
  • Basic coding skills (e.g. ActionScript / HTML)
  • Music composition / Sound design
  • A well thought out plan for surviving the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse

Salary is negotiable dependant on experience.

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

No agencies please!***

Closing date for applications is the 11th February 2013.

We are unable to arrange international work visas.

 

*Digital amusements are games and other fun interactive digital things that we build to enable brands to engage with consumers. We don’t do websites.

**Generally we like everyone to be in the office at 9am for our daily stand-up meets, but if you want to do more hours on Tuesday so you can free up time on Wednesday afternoon to go to your offspring’s school play or work on your LARP costume, we are usually cool with that.

***The last time we posted a job advert, we wrote ‘no agencies please’ and then had an office sweep-stake to see how long it would be before an agency ignored our request and called us anyway. I won, but was it a wholesome win? No. It was not. So, to re-iterate: NO AGENCIES PLEASE! NO AGENCIES PLEASE! NO AGENCIES PLEASE! 

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Our Favourite Games From Last Year

Monday, January 7th, 2013

When we’re not making games and other digital amusements… you can often find us playing games and other digital amusements. I asked the team to tell me their games of their year and write a line or two about why. But we went with a slightly broader set of rules to the usual lists:

1. It can be any platform at all (console, browser, phone, board game etc)

2. It can be anything loosely termed a game or digital amusement (including ARGs, viral things or any fun applications)

3. It doesn’t have to have been released in 2012 (just as long as you played it this year)

These were just some of our favourite things…

 

Tim

I think the most memorable one is Kingdom Rush. I love the art, the audio and of course the game play. It’s certainly the one game I’ve played in the past year that I think “I really wish we made that!”. I’ve probably played more Rachet & Clank (Crack in Time is my favourite) and LEGO [Insert Franchise Here] games than anything else though as these are what I play at home with the kids.

That’s not one line is it?

 

 

Emma

Triple Town. They broke me, it’s the first (and still only) game I have made ‘in-game’ purchases in.

I loves it.

 

 

Russell

Kill Doctor Lucky. I’m a big fan of Cluedo and this game turns the concept on it’s head. You play as a would be murderer attempting to bump off old Doctor Lucky as he wanders around his stereotypical mansion. Sounds easy, but the twist is that you must commit the murder out of sight of any other player, and they can gang up to try and stop you.  The mechanic to stop you is a deck of ‘failure’ cards, each card describing a new and comical failure, turning the game into a Ladykillers-style parody of bungled murder. This is a really fun game to play in a group as tactics change with the numbers of people involved.

 

Adam (whose surname is ‘Clay’ by the way)

Clay Jam … and not just because it involves my name!! The main reason I like this game is the quirky sense of humour and the innovative graphic style (I’ve not seen anything else similar) But it’s also quite addictive. Basically, you are a ball of clay. You have to roll down a hill and make yourself gradually bigger by hitting clay monsters and absorbing more clay. Then the bigger you are the larger objects you can absorb.

 

Kyle

Torn between the great writing of The Walking Dead and tight mechanics of Hotline Miami. Every decision you make in The Walking Dead feels like it actually matters to your story whereas, even though Hotline Miami is surreal and strange, the gameplay provides a sense of logic even if it feels like you’re playing in a weird fever dream.

 

 

Simon

Jetpack Joyride. I was seriously addicted last month and would play it every time I had a spare minute. Probably because it was so easy to pick up and play without having to be immersed in a story but it still had progression and targets to achieve.

[NOTE - Simon also managed to get his fiancée addicted too]

 

 

Kieran

Dishonored – it’s a stealthy Steampunk assassins game with magic and a storyline affected by your actions.

What else could you want?

 

 

John

Although I only ended up watching one episode of BBC’s Hunted, I got really immersed in their viral site for Byzantium Security and their online tests to join ‘the 1% that matters’. With timely marketing to chime with the Occupy Movement’s anniversary and devised by cognitive psychologists and members of the Magic Circle, the tests/mind games utilised webcams, psychological profiling, your Facebook feed and frighteningly accurate results that engaged you far more than with your usual Byzantine corporation! You can’t play the tests any more but you can read about the campaign here.

 

A fair spread! If you want to know any more about the people above making the choices, we’ve also just updated our Meet the Team page. But we’d also like to know your games or digital amusements of the year too (same rules as above).

In the meantime, here’s wishing you all a playful 2013 from all of us at Team Cooper!

 

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We’re hiring: Digital Project Manager of Doom!

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

Hey you! You like managing projects, right? How’d you fancy coming to work for a digital amusements agency?*

We’ve been growing steadily for the past few years and the time has come to bring someone on board who actually knows a thing or two about project management**. You’ll need to be exceptionally organised and will ideally have some prior experience in managing digital projects in a creative environment, most likely another agency.

This role sits at the heart of our company and is crucial to our future plans for growth. We expect the role to grow and evolve with the company but to begin with you’ll be responsible for liaising with clients, project producer(s) and the company directors to plan, schedule, resource and monitor our production activities (making sure of course that everything stays on track and on budget). I know, that sounds easy right? So secondary to this you’d also be expected to help out with a variety of other tasks as and when the need arises (we are a small company after all, and sometimes it’s all hands to the pumps!). So any prior experience of marketing, design, development, testing, or zombie apocalypse survival strategy would come in pretty handy here.

You’ll get to work in a shiny office environment with a lovely scenic view including the bus station (We’re based in the Electric Works, part of Sheffield’s Digital Campus). You’ll also get to work with a team of nice people on interesting projects for organisations like the BBC, Nickelodeon, BSkyB and Topps with semi-flexible working hours***.

We have strong relationships with Game Republic, Yorkshire’s indie scene (GA-MA-YO, SHINDIG) and as a part of Sheffield’s flourishing digital community, this is an opportunity to play a big part in the continued growth of a small but dynamic digital agency.

Your main duties:

  • Maintaining strong relationships with existing clients
  • Managing client expectations and approval of deliverables
  • Brainstorming ideas with the team to meet client needs
  • Planning, scheduling and monitoring of project builds
  • Team management and supervision across projects
  • Working daily with the production team to ensure tasks are completed on time and on budget (often to tight deadlines)
  • Contracting external resources
  • Reporting back to directors on project status
  • Being awesome

Does this sound like you?

  • 3-ish years experience as a Producer/Project Manager, preferably within the digital/media industries
  • Excellent interpersonal and communications skills
  • Proactive self-starter
  • Multi-tasking problem solver
  • Able to motivate others with your level 10 charisma or baked goods
  • Highly organised with an obsession for detail and keeping production on track
  • Able to provide concise and constructive feedback to colleagues
  • Good understanding of casual/mobile/social games
  • Flexible and able to apply different tools, methods and processes to projects as required
  • A bit of a geek

Salary is negotiable dependant on experience, although if you’re a senior producer/project manager reading this, we probably can’t afford you (yet). So let’s say, up to £30k.

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

No agencies please!

Closing date for applications is the 3rd December 2012.

We are unable to arrange international work visas.

 

*Digital amusements are like, games and other fun interactive digital things that we build to enable brands to engage with consumers. We don’t do websites.

**Actually, you’ll need to know a lot more than a thing or two. Practical experience of project management methodologies like PRINCE2 and/or Agile would be good.

***Generally we like everyone to be in the office at 9am for our daily stand-up meets, but if you want to do more hours on Tuesday so you can free up time on Wednesday afternoon to go to your offspring’s school play or work on your Harry Potter fan-fiction novel, we are usually cool with that.

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TIGA Games Industry Awards

Monday, November 5th, 2012

A quick post from me? On a Monday? Well, let’s see…

TIGA Twitter Wall

So, last week me and Tim went to the TIGA Games Industry Awards. We’d been nominated for 2 awards. Nurse Quest was nominated in the Action/Adventure category and Blockbusters in the Serious Games category. Sadly we didn’t win, we genuinely hadn’t expected to. In the grand scheme of things we’re new to the industry and getting a nomination was an unexpected joy. The big winner from the evening was The Chinese Room for Dear Esther which is a visually stunning, explorative narrative kind of an experience, a ghost story. It’s well worth a look if you haven’t seen it already.

After playing Mush pretty solidly for the past month or so on my phone I was quite exited to meet the Angry Mango team who are all lovely and full of brilliant ideas, I’m really interested to see what they come up with next. Sitting on a table next to some fine folks from Mediatonic meant I got to bore them endlessly of my love for their work.

Attending the event meant we got to meet and talk to a lot of really interesting people in the industry and hang out with our friends from State of Play and Games Britannia (um, and drink far too much wine… sorry everybody) And now (since the hangover lifted) I’m full of buzz and bounce, I’m hopeful for the future and challenged to take one of those shiny tigers home with us.

Shiny TIGAs

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We’re hiring! Digital designer / Illustrator required

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

Team Cooper is a Sheffield based digital agency. We build games, Facebook apps, and other digital amusements for the web, mobile and beyond.  We have a number of projects approaching which require an additional digital designer / illustrator to join our team, initially on a short contract basis, but with the possibility of becoming a full time position in future.

The first project is for a very well known client and we require an experienced digital designer to work alongside our in-house illustrator to deliver artwork for a game project aimed at a young audience (6-12).

We are particularly interested in candidates with experience creating graphical user interfaces and 2D environments in either vector or pixel-art styles.

Must haves:

  • Excellent Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and/or Flash design skills
  • Understanding of good UX design
  • Ability to work to tight deadlines
  • Be self motivated, with a positive and pro-active attitude towards their work
  • A portfolio demonstrating your best digital project / personal work to date
  • Have good written and verbal communication skills
  • Must be willing to work with our team in our Sheffield office

Desirable:

  • Specific experience creating digital UI for games aimed at a young audience
  • Animation skills (Flash)
  • Knowledge of video for web

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

PLEASE NOTE: This position has now been filled. However, we are always keen to hear from designers and illustrators in regard to potential freelance and staff roles arising in the future so please feel free to say hello at the above address!

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REVIEW – Indie Game: The Movie

Friday, June 29th, 2012

As part of the recent Sheffield Doc/Fest, Russ and I headed to see a screening of James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot’s successfully kickstarter-funded Indie Game: The Movie which follows the creators of Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez before and after the release of their creations. (EDIT: Turns out Tim and Kyle have seen it as well).

While the final film received a little flak here and there for not really delving deeply into the world of indie games, it’s clear from the outset that this documentary is far more focussed on the indie developers who devoted/demented themselves to bring their dream games to virtual life. Where the film succeeds absolutely is as an entertaining and engaging love letter to the commitment, passion and sheer obsession that, as players, we can sometimes forget that it takes to get these games made whenever we turn on our computers or consoles and demand instant entertainment.

Where the film perhaps falls short is in its slightly rose-tinted portrayal of its hard-working heroes. While audiences will easily be on Phil Fish’s side as he faces an expletive-laden message board of gamers lamenting Fez’s delayed release, when Fish is confronted by a series of setbacks mostly resulting from an ex-business partner, it’s difficult to know quite what you think because we are never given the full back-story to the antagonism. (It’s understandable that full details are never divulged, but it leaves an uncomfortable edge in what has otherwise built up as an optimistic underdog story).

In contrast to the pressurised build-up to Fez‘s first PAX demo, Jonathan Blow’s account of his own Braid comes as a dose of thoughtful hindsight. As well as looking back at the game’s surprisingly ‘yeah, someone should really do a game like that’ origins, it’s fascinating to see Blow’s response to how the game is perceived as well as received to the point where he appreciates the high review scores but thinks people are enjoying his game ‘wrong’. It’s in moments like these that the film shows off its stars as more than just game-makers, all of the participants are striving to express something and connect with other people through their games.

The film’s heart is perhaps best emphasised through Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, co-creators of Super Meat Boy. Where Refenes is clearly passionate and dedicated to their game as something he desperately wants to play himself, it’s probably McMillen who garners the greatest affection from the audience. As we are shown the monsters and madness of his childhood sketchbooks, it’s easy to see that any compromise at all on what he dreams of creating won’t be worth all the hard work and struggle. I’ve read a few comments that say this film legitimises games as an artistic form but – as someone who never thought games needed legitimising – all that’s clear is that there’s no other medium that could possibly communicate better what McMillen wants to say.

Above all else, Indie Game: The Movie is an absorbing cautionary tale that entertainingly shows how much you have to shut yourself away and sacrifice in order to share your ideas with the gaming world. While the film (perhaps wisely) doesn’t delve too deeply into the darker side of the protagonists’ self-doubt or isolation, what it firmly puts across is the infectious enthusiasm of the indie devs, the clarity of their vision and their sheer bloody-mindedness.

My verdict: 4 out of 5.

Russ’s verdict: 3.5 out of 5.

Kyle’s verdict: 3.74 out of 5. (Tch, typical Kyle :) )

Tim’s verdict: 3.5 out of 5.

So, all in all, we give it a score of 3.685 out of 5. Definitely worth a watch!

 

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Challenge TV’s Blockbusters

Friday, June 8th, 2012

To celebrate the launch of the All New Blockbusters series hosted by Simon Mayo on Challenge TV, the team were only too happy to take on the challenge of developing an on-line version, whistling the theme tune all the way.

Just like the show, the game pits you against another team to answer questions and build a chain of hexagons from one side of the board to the other in order to get to the Gold Run. As well as playing computerised opponents, the team are particularly proud of the multi-player mode that lets you play with or against other real-life players across the internet.

Play the game as a guest, or continue to build and beat your own scores by creating a profile or logging in with Facebook. There’s also a fun avatar builder so you can really put yourself in the game (or go for something a little different with that haircut/chin you’ve always wanted).

In its first few weeks of release, Blockbusters is already the most popular game on Challenge’s site. Have you got what it takes to get to the Gold Run?

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Team Cooper and The Curious Case of What We’re Working On.

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

Judging by the amount of the Post-Its on the wall, the team have a fine splodge of projects on the go right now (Don’t bother checking, I think you’ll find ‘splodge’ is the approved collective noun for projects). The only trouble is, it would be terribly indecent of me to go into any detail of what we’re working on before we’re finished. So, in time-honoured tradition, I thought I’d drop a few hints about what’s soon to be heading to a browser near you!

This is me, holding/about to run off with the stand for the line of toys we recently developed a game to help promote…

This is our Emma, trying to find sound effects that don’t sound *too* much like sex noise…

And this is our Russ who is trying to remember the theme tune of a quiz show he’s developing a game for (but keeps getting it confused with the theme from Quantum Leap)

There’s a splendid no-prize for anyone who guesses all three projects correctly!

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We’re hiring! Digital Producer / Project Manager required.

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Team Cooper is a growing digital studio specialising in the development of games and other digital amusements for the web, mobile and beyond. We are predominantly a work-for-hire studio with a varied client base but also work on our own in-house productions.

As our workload continues to increase, we’re looking to hire an experienced Producer/Project Manager with a passion for digital media and games to join our expert team of developers and artists. You’ll be a (highly organized) people-person at the heart of our company, coordinating and communicating between our internal teams and the outside world to ensure the smooth running and delivery of our projects.

Your key role will be to manage the day-to-day functions of our tight-knit development team in order to deliver projects on time and maintain our impeccable standards. You’ll be combining your passion for all things digital with your planning, leadership and project management skills, often working on several projects at once. If you’re tech savvy with an appreciation of games and the web plus plenty of client-facing experience then we’d love to hear from you.

With strong regional relationships with Game Republic, Yorkshire’s indie scene (GA-MA-YO, SHINDIG) and based in the heart of Sheffield’s flourishing digital community, this is an opportunity to be a big player in a small but dynamic digital agency. This position will be crucial to the continued growth of Team Cooper and we expect your role to grow along with the company. So what are you waiting for?

Duties:

  • Maintaining strong relationships with existing clients.
  • Managing client expectations and approval of deliverables.
  • Brainstorming ideas with the team to meet client needs.
  • Wire-framing and assisting in planning project builds.
  • Scheduling projects.
  • Team management and supervision across projects.
  • Working daily with the production team to ensure tasks are completed on time and on budget (and often to tight deadlines).
  • Assisting with project pitching.
  • Contracting external resources.
  • Reporting back to management on project status.
  • Responsible for all phases of project delivery, from conception through to completion.

Does this sound like you?

  • Excellent interpersonal and communications skills.
  • Good understanding of usability and user focused design.
  • 3+ years experience as Producer/Project Manager in digital/interactive media industries.
  • Self-starter and able to motivate others.
  • Highly organised with obsession for detail.
  • Able to provide concise, constructive and detailed feedback to colleagues.
  • Strong general knowledge and understanding of games.
  • Able to adopt existing tools and development processes.
  • Multi-tasking problem solver.
  • A lover of casual, mobile and/or social games.

Salary is negotiable dependant on experience – Ideally in range of £25k to £35k.

We offer semi-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 digital campus and Sheffield’s hub of digital media development) in a thriving region for digital and games development.

To apply, please email your CV and cover letter stating salary expectationsto Tim at:.

No agencies please!

We are unable to arrange international work visas.

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Cleverdicks

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

You think you’re clever… but what does Ann Widdecombe think?

To accompany Cleverdicks, Sky Atlantic’s special blend of intelligence and irreverence (please note all the big words I’m using, Ann!), the Team was tasked with making Ann interactive so audiences can try and be Cleverdicks in their own home.

Following the format of Cleverdicks‘ quick-fire against the clock quizzing, each question serves up multiple answers to choose from. Get it right first time and you’ll be crowned a ‘Cleverdick’ by Ann herself in one of many videos integrated into the gameplay.

So, calling all so-called Cleverdicks. Ann Widdecombe wants YOU!

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Digital folk wanted for future projects

Friday, March 16th, 2012

Plans are afoot here at Team Cooper HQ and we are looking for contract and permanent staff to resource some potential future opportunities. While we don’t have a definite requirement yet, I wanted to issue a pre-emptive call out to anyone out there who may be interested in working with us to introduce yourselves (We are NOT looking to meet new recruitment agencies).

We would like to meet the following peeps:

  • Senior graphic designers with tons of experience delivering interactive projects for well known brands, preferably from an agency background.
  • Project Managers/Producers with proven experience in delivering digital projects on time and on budget.
  • Pixel artists with proven experience illustrating and animating pixel art graphics for games.
  • Senior developers with a can-do attitude to new projects and experience with some of the following: PHP, MySQL/MSSQL, .NET, Flash, HTML5, ActionScript, JavaScript, C++, C#, Java, OpenGL, DirectX.
  • Students looking for placement or post-graduate roles.

Don’t be shy, if you’re a contractor looking for a potential future client, or a full timer considering a change of scenery, come and say hello and tell us a little about yourself.

We just want to know who you are at this stage, portfolios and CVs would also be nice, but not essential if you just want to introduce yourself (discretion is assured for full timers).

Please contact us at jobs@teamcooper.co.uk.

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Too Much Story?

Friday, February 24th, 2012

ME: Right. So maybe the player-character is striving because of their troubled relationship with their father–

M’ COLLEAGUES: John, it’s Pong. Let it go.

ME: Ugh. *throws quill down in disgust. flounces off stage left*

Hopefully the above scene isn’t too accurate but, having spent most of my working life in film, TV drama and theatre, it’s not surprising that story is my usual starting point – for describing anything really. That and the fact I’m human. For better or worse, stories are how we describe things to each other and we all have an innate understanding of beginnings, middles and ends. Everything else is just a matter of taste (and, occasionally, snobbery.)

This recent Gamasutra interview with David Jaffe on the Language of Interactivity is one of many recent articles forming a bit of a backlash against narrative in games. Jaffe highlights Sid Meier’s brilliant “a game as a series of interesting choices” quote to highlight what a game really is. I totally 100% agree. It’s just that it also perfectly defines narratives as well. No matter what obstacles or set-pieces are thrown into a protagonist’s path by bad guys/fates/studio execs, it’s the main character’s choices that create, shape and define a story. So what’s the difference?

For the record, I’m not really a fan of cut-scenes. Even when they’re done well, all they really are is a pause in gameplay. I don’t think a cut-scene of showing protagonist Chell looking all confused in the opening of Portal  could ever beat our own disorientation of just being dropped straight into the beginning of Valve’s puzzle masterpiece. Similarly, (SPOILER) the lack of definitive ending for Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption meant I was able to conclude the game’s story however I wanted. (For anyone interested, after all my vengeful murdering, I then went and completed all of the challenges that would unlock the Marshall’s outfit and, in my head, became a proper lawman in an effort to achieve the ambiguous ‘redemption’ of the title). Two powerful bits of storytelling, made all the more immersive by not spoon-feeding.

But, in thinking of games with stories, we instantly think of triple-A games that we play over a number of days as if reading a novel. So what about the ‘magazine article’ equivalents that we play every day in smaller chunks? In my opinion, Cut The Rope succeeds over Angry Birds as the latter needs a little movie to explain their war against the pigs. In Cut the Rope, we just need to get the cookie to the Om Nom because…well, who isn’t always hungry for cookies? Games like Diamond Dash on Facebook are exceptionally crafted examples of no story at all, just good game play. Or the upcoming IGF-nominated Gunpoint which conjures an awesome storyworld defined by its visual/audio aesthetic and how you stealthily interact through the (potentially infinite) levels.

With Portal, the story is ‘we want to escape’. With Cut The Rope, it’s simply ‘feed the hungry thing’. So when we say that games have too much story, I wonder if what is really meant is that games have too much BACKstory (or possibly if we just mean ‘too much talking’ – says he, waffling on). And that can be the trouble with some bigger games, the need to show you everything, to tell you and explain everything. As with movies, just because your graphics can genuinely create anything, doesn’t mean we need to see it. Similarly, unless I can play it, let me imagine it. The first thing anyone learns about narrative is that less is mostly more. Stories are not about complexity – the best ones rely on clarity.

And one thing that also seems clear is that in importing cinematic qualities to games, we also seem to have inherited a fair amount of cinematic snobbery. For years the nadir of storytelling in games seems to be in ‘creating a game that can make you cry’, when we’ve already made games that make us laugh or scared. At this time of year, the nature of the beast means that cinemas are filled with stories up for BAFTAs and Oscars. This in turn creates a predictable backlash against the Oscar-‘worthy’ films by proponents of more popcorn-driven movies which feels like an echo for the argument against narrative in games.

Isn’t there room for both?

I think so. Last week in games, indie-darling Dear Esther sold 16,000 in its first few hours of sale while the demo of Mass Effect 3 also shoved pre-sales through the roof. And there’s a good chance there were a few people out there who coughed up for both. I know what I like in games and movies so there are certain genres of both I’ll never grow tired of. But knowing I already like one sort of thing so much just makes me want to investigate what else a medium can do! My favourite game story personally is Silent Hill 2, but it’s not to say it doesn’t clunk in places. And that’s pretty much my point. No one has got narrative in games perfect. But then neither has anyone written the absolutely ‘perfect’ book, film or TV show that pleases absolutely everyone yet either.

So it’s frustrating to see David Jaffe saying things like “…if my only goal is to make people feel emotions and that’s what I really want — I want to make them feel sadness, or I want to make them think about man’s place in the universe. Think about that. If you’re really a f***ing artist. If you’re really a f***ing artist, and you’ve got something to say, then you f***ing pick the right medium to say it in.”

If the argument is that you shouldn’t try to do something because nobody else has done it yet, then maybe we should all just give up now. I like Bioshock, Fahrenheit, LA Noire, Heavy Rain and Alan Wake. None of them have got storytelling exactly ‘right’ yet but I love how they’ve all moved the idea in different directions but, ultimately, moved game narratives forwards. Storytelling techniques had to be re-invented when film and television each first emerged. Now it’s the same thing in making stories interactive and immersive. It’s easy to see how a game like Heavy Rain can be latched on to by journalists as an immediately dramatic and drastic turning point in games – but we all know that change is and will be a gradual process.

So when articles fervently tell me what games are, what games should be and where story can shove itself in relation to games, my response is that games, like any medium, should be something that evolves to match constantly evolving consumer tastes and opinions. Anything else is just stating opinion as fact or a sweeping generalisation. And you know what they say about people who make sweeping generalisations. They’re ALL idiots :D

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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):

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Roof-Top Rush

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

It might be the season to be jolly – but poor ol’ Santa is still going full pelt in ‘Roof-Top Rush’, our seasonal running game for Ebuyer.com. Picking up some last-minute bargains at the Ebuyer warehouse, Santa finds his impatient reindeer have left without him. As Santa, you must pursue the reindeer, using the space bar to jump from roof to roof and navigating any weather vanes, chimneys or easily-startled cats that might slow you down.

To give our game a fun competitive edge, we’ve also included a leaderboard to store your best score and Ebuyer are offering entry to a prize-draw for any players running Santa past 1000m. ‘Roof-Top Rush‘ is a fun, accessible and addictive challenge designed to bring a little extra joy to your online Christmas shopping experience (Plus it answers that age-old question ‘Does Santa ever do a cool little combat-roll when he’s jumping across roof-tops?’).

Santa can travel the world in a single night. How far can you take him?

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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!!!

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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.

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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.

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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 .

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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

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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?

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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?

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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.

SKY Ashes Tour 2010-11 Skills Game

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.

TRON: Legacy Light Cycle Game

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.

Beazley Broker Dash

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

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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.

Chris Bell - 500 Years of Western Tweeting by Dan Sumption, on Flickr

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.

Tom Armitage "5 Things Rules Do"

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!

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 (16th 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…

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

Kirsty Cooper

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.

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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.

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About Us

Team Cooper was born in 2006, and is full of clever folks, wielding Flash like a big, magnificent, shining wand of creative glory.

We work with lots of nice people, solving their problems for them by building all kinds of clever Flash stuff like games, websites and applications. We give our clients a dedicated, professional service (we’re even on the Recommended Agency Register), and we’re lucky enough to love doing what we do.

So, if you’re looking for Flash savvy, call us for a chat.

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