andy perkins creative development » Work

Beeclip

perks — Thu, 05 May 2011 13:43:39 +0000

I have spent the last few months working with the excellent team at Beeclip as head flash dev on the site, a photo and video scrap-booking application.

Beeclip makes use of a lot of automation, including ‘automagically’ designing scrapbooks for the user, and allows pulling of content from Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, Google Images etc and uploading of the users own images and videos.

Based on PureMVC, using AMF extensively and requiring a lot of different technology to work together, this was a really interesting project to be involved with.

Check it out here.

Summer Releases

perks — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:43:30 +0000

After a hectic couple of months, we’ve just released 2 projects that we are pretty proud of.

The first is Thingdom, an edu-game for the Science Museum to support the new Who Am I? gallery. The project uses some nifty Box2D physics based characters and is designed to teach how genetics works through playing mating games.

Create yourself a Thing here.

You can read a full case study here.

Secondly, we’ve worked on a series of 4 games for Channel4 as part of the SuperMe project. Developing 4 completely different games at the same time proved to be an interesting challenge, and we learnt a lot in the process.

Proximity is a co-operative multi player racing game, and it’s going to be interesting seeing how it goes down out in the wild. Flomo is a simple, yet fiendish platform game with some heavy lifting using the Flash Player 10 drawing API to make it pretty. Swerveball is a physics based puzzler and Linkem is a puzzle game in the vein of Bejewelled / Drop7 involving clearing rows and lines.

All the games are playable here.

Channel 4 – Trafalgar Origins

perks — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:58:56 +0000

A new game developed for Channel 4 and to support the upcoming ‘Bloody Foreigners‘ series. We were commissioned to produce a historically accurate yet fun game to accompany the episode on the Battle of Trafalgar, in particular to highlight the fact that the crew of the British Navy vessels at the time, were likely to be a mixture of men from all over the world.

I was in charge of the GUI and Facebook integration, and overall project structure. The project is built around a custom implementation of PureMVC, with the game engine (developed by the awesome Luke at Preloaded) making use of Red5 and Box2D.

This is the first time we’ve fully integrated Facebook into a Flash application and it was not without it’s headaches. The Facebook API is an unwieldy beast and the implementation forces a long callback chain for simple events like logging in that is liable to fall over fairly frequently. It feels very much like an unfinished product. Still, it will be interesting to compare with 1066 play stats and see if integrating FB is worth the headaches.

Check out Trafalgar – Origins here.

Snake Oil? – Information Is Beautiful

perks — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:06:42 +0000

A collaborative visualisation piece with David over at the always amazing informationisbeautiful.net.

The vis is about the various purported health benefits of the health supplements on offer, their popularity and their effectiveness at actually helping. Hopefully this will be the first of many of these kinds of projects for me, it’s something I really enjoy.

UPDATE: We just released a new version with an all new data set, proper live data loading from Google Docs and some visual tweaks.

Check it out here.

BBC – Myths Storybooks

perks — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:16:13 +0000

Developed a re-usable Storybook engine for the BBC, and the first four stories and supporting games. Each story is defined in XML, and can scale from simple images to full featured interactive swf assets for each page. New stories can be created simply by adding all the assets and editing an xml file.

Update: Myths was singled out by the BBC as one of only 5 projects out of the entire BBC Digital output for the year to be showcased at MiPTV, and has just been nominated for a Welsh Bafta in the ‘Best Interactive’ category.

You can see all 4 stories and games here.

Arts Council England – Wordplay Game

perks — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:21:03 +0000

A database / CMS driven anagram sorting game for Arts Council England. Was actually quite tricky to get the movement right and avoid any sketching out on tile dragging. First time I’d written something that runs on a Django backend. Django seems quite nice.

Unfortunately this app has now been pulled down. Ah well, that’s what you get for making internet things.

Parliament.uk – Race against Chime

perks — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:17:11 +0000

An original game developed to help celebrate Big Ben’s 150th Birthday. Developed in AS3 using Actionscript Physics Engine (APE).

Go check it out here.

Drambuie Den / Pursuit 2009

perks — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:12:17 +0000

Developed most of the flash widgets on the site, including a customisable skinnable VideoPlayer component and some Flex mini-apps.

View the site here.

Footlocker – Tuned 10

perks — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:40:29 +0000

Papervision3D brochure site for Footlocker’s exclusive launch of Nike’s TN10 trainer. Site content is presented via a 3D ‘void’ filled with ‘trixels’. Required writing of custom Papervision code to break a Collada object (in this case a 3D-scan model of the shoe) into its constituent triangles, and then manipulate these individually, allowing us to form the shoe model, planes and other shapes in 3D space at runtime.

View site here.

Mars.com – Is Mars for You?

perks — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:10:05 +0000

Flash widget for Mars global corporate site. Sits in the Careers section and details the core principles of Mars corporate stra….blah blah blah.

It uses APE physics, is based on PureMVC and was the first time I’d used either. I’m pretty pleased with the results.

View it here.