Let me take a moment of your time and tell you about the site we recently developed for the new Honda Accord.
What started as a prototype that saw 3D dots swarm from location to location, has evolved into an interesting microsite that shows off the Accord’s most revolutionary features.
For those that don’t religiously check the FWA Site of the Day (SOTD) for inspiration, let me draw your attention to something that popped up a few days ago…
Asimo.com.au got site of the day - and what makes that particularly noteworthy is that it was made by a few of the guys here at work! Huge congrats go to the lads involved! I’m stoked to be embedded in an office that produces such great work.
For those unfamiliar with the concepts, Asimo is an advanced humaniod robot created by Honda and The FWA is a site that awards excellence in web development.
Here’s a little more about the project:
On behalf of my new employer, DTDigital, and their client, Cascade, here’s a quick plug for our latest project… TheNaturalOrder.com.au
I wont go into too much detail here (as I really think you should just visit the site!), but I will say that I was lucky enough to be responsible for ~95% of the coding with Eric Fitzgerald responsible for the design.
An article on news.com.au today got me thinking (which is quite embarrassing as most of the time it’s little more than an online tabloid). Sporting the title “Why Bosses Hate Gen-Y”, I cursed News’ editors as I took the bait, clicked through and read the article. Surprisingly, once I managed to drag myself through the pap, I was rewarded with something quite insightful.
According to News, those of us that were born between 1977 and 1992 fall into this category. Being a ‘78 baby, I find myself on the Gen X side of the Y’ers, but as most of my life is digital, I really identify with much of the stereotype.
From the article: Margaret Kirby, the MD of iGroup (a recruitment company) gives us a top 10 list of how to work with Gen Y’ers and I totally agree with it. Have a read and let me know where you sit.
Well, Remix07 Day 1 is in the bag and I’ve come away with a few good hours of Silverlight exposure… so what have I learned so far?
Let me start by saying that I was fortunate enough to meet and chat with some of the Microsoft Silverlight heavyweights - which was great - and the evening of free beer evolved into a series of funny moments. If you didn’t come then you should have!
I ventured in knowing very little about Silverlight, the ‘threat’ it posed to me as a Flash developer and how it was going to fit in to the scheme of things. During the course of the day, two magical secrets were revealed to me.
Here’s the info on the Remix session that will be presented by Lucas Sherwood, of Lightmaker fame.
After recently completing two real world application builds in Silverlight and WPF, we will talk about the real challenges that we faced during the development process. Our aim is to address the issue facing developers as they begin to tackle these technologies and to dispel some of the myths surrounding them.
WPF and Sliverlight are still fairly new technologies and it does help to know what you are getting yourself in to, so that your development will be relatively pain free. In this session, we will share our thoughts on how we would try different approaches next time and avoid some of the pitfalls.
Lightmaker (Australia) will unveil two major new Silverlight enabled experiences currently under development.
Time: 2-3pm Monday
See you there.
Well friends, I’ve got some big news… just when you think life is comfortably heading in a defined direction, a single email changes everything.
I’m very happy to announce that I’ve just accepted a position as Technical Developer at Lightmaker, Melbourne. As much as I love online games and the respective road I was heading down, the opportunity to join the “Lightmaker family” was simply to good to pass up.
Please welcome the newest addition to the footloosemoose stable of fine online gaming, BigFooty Rules.
BigFooty.com is Australia’s premiere Australian Rules Football (Aussie Rules) forum and they felt that a viral game would give the already competitive members something to play with and would help to bring in new subscribers. They were after something simple, addictive and fun and generally based on the token-looping concept found in games such as BusySanta - this is what I came up with…
Business Week has an interesting article that talks about my neck of the woods… here’s an excerpt regarding what it takes to make a good “Advergame”:
It’s a fine line, because the company doing the game has to understand branding and be able to sit down with a company like Pepsi and talk their language, but they also have to build a state of the art game. Then, in building the game, they have to keep the game within the stated goals: If it’s fun but the users don’t have the ‘brand experience’ then the client has wasted their money. On the other hand, if you listen too much to a brand management about the message, savvy gamers will take one look and pass. So fundamentally it’s all about the integrity of the game experience.”
It’s worth a read - check it out.
Announcing the launch of a new Flash Game, Wenger’s Beach Watch.
Izaac from Komiti Creative looked after all of the design and project management and passed the programming and game animation to me.
On behalf of my colleagues at Verigo Business Systems, Angus and Travis, I’d like to take a moment to announce the launch of our latest project: wYse bodywear.
Verigo handled the client liaison and project management and passed concept, design and development to me. I wanted to create an interface that focused on the content, that encouraged exploration and that was intuitive whilst still being novel. The budget and deadline were quite humble… so we had to figure out what was achievable whilst exceeding the clients expectations and building our portfolios.
Here’s a quick overview of what I came up with:
Well, Flash CS3 gets released today… at least it does for our siblings in code that reside in the USofA. Aussies will have to wait a little while before we get to taste the new candy.
I’ve been eagerly waiting for this new version of Flash since I first dipped my toe into AS3. My stuff generally has too much going on in the actual MovieClip timeline for me to be willing to migrate fully without the IDE - regardless of how much I loathe the current version. It looks like the aquisition by Adobe is paying off for us as the new interface and features are going to push Flash Development up a few notches.
On behalf of our beloved client, ANZ, and my beloved employer, M&C Saatchi… drum roll please, I’d like to introduce you to our new game… PigsAhoy!
Rob (the designer) and I (the programmer) are really pleased with how our new game turned out… make sure you check it out and pass it around.
Amongst finishing up at M&C and getting ready for Samantha’s folks to visit next week, I’ve been trying to organise the new look for FootlooseMoose. As the loyal visitors will know, I’m starting up my own Flash Games business and pursuing a number of other projects.
First things first, I needed to come up with a new logo. Keywords I used were fun, funny, bold, carefree, innocent, magical and zany. I really liked the moose (who’s name is Bruce, by the way) in the previous version of the logo (which still can been seen on the holding page at www.footloosemoose.com) but this time I needed something that was easier to animate - and also, importantly, something that could easily be the main character in a game.
This is what I came up with…
Apologies for the tumbleweeds… I’ve been a little preoccupied over the last week or so. However, I submit to you that there is very good reason for my tardiness - you see, I decided to resign from my job on the weekend! You heard correctly, Michael Battle is a free agent.
The little animation above (totally tongue-in-cheek, by the way) is meant to reflect the moment of nirvana that was revealed to me when I had finally reached the decision to go solo. My time at M&C Saatchi was extremely valuable and I leave behind some excellent colleagues and, moreover, some excellent friends. We are currently discussing an option of some ongoing contract-esque work… we’ll see what eventuates.
As for what’s coming up for me, I’m glad you asked!
