Flash Coders Brighton @ Skills Lab City College

I'd like to have a go at teaching; anything with a focus on creativity really - but I have specific knowledge applicable to the web industry, so I went along to the Skills Lab launch to find out a bit about the courses they run.

--[ The Skills Lab are hosting the Flash Coders Brighton group starting on 6th June @ 6:30, which should be cool. It's just a big room with a bunch of computers in it - but that's all we need! ]--

I got chatting to some interesting people, particularly the course programming director - he seems to have his focus in the right areas; making strong connections between the college courses and the digital media industry - getting access to the full Skint Discography for the students to cut music videos to was a good move I thought...

Rock on Skills Lab!

Creative Partner

There's a lot of creative people in Brighton - there's also a lot of lethargy. I'm often hearing something along the lines of 'if I just knew someone that could help me do...'

I've been looking for a creative partner myself for a few months - someone skilled with design and illustration who could benefit from my skills in return. I had the idea of developing a non-commercial directory online for people to meet each other based on skills and goals for this reason.

For example a 3D modelling artist could find an animator to work on a project, or someone wanting to learn C++ could find someone else on the same learning curve. It would be a cross between the free-ads and a dating site, but for ongoing projects.

Being too busy to make this site, I threw it on the ideas pile and forgot about it. Then I was asked by a community focused organisation to generate some ideas for an upcoming festival, and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to put the ideas forward, and develop it with funding from the festival. They really liked the idea, so it's now in the planning stages, and looks like it will get the backing it will need to be useful.

It's really exciting to think I may be able to use the site sometime soon to find my own creative partner!

Musical Style and Creativity

I've been learning how to play the piano in my spare time, and I've practiced using SuperCollider and other cool technologies to make some interesting music. A background in Fine Art has given me a certain analytical perspective on creativity - and since I'm particularly interested in making music, I've tried to study what makes it all tick, so I can produce something super cool and become a cult hero...

I won't pretend to have done that yet, so don't expect any links to great music I've made - but I do think I've learnt some fundamental things about creativity that other people might find interesting to read, as it's from a fine art perspective of analysis, rather than from a musician that might just go with the flow.

I'm pretty confident that I've nailed some important concepts, so I wrote an essay to explain it all. Have a read and let me know what you think!

You can find it here: Musical Style

Don't hold back if you completely disagree!



P.S I can recommend a great piano teacher in Brighton if anyone is looking for one: Megan Stuart

Prism - A concept-rich Flash Game!

As far as I'm concerned, a really good game needs a really good story. Luckily I've been working on a really good story for about 5 years. Originally inspired by a music video by my friend Andy Galletly, the story has developed with lots of help from some master brains. What started out as a simple concept has developed into a rich web of multilayered narratives.

The ideas are based on the premise of manipulating storytelling mediums, so although our first application of the concepts were for a screenplay, some minor tweaks have made it sit very well as a game concept.

I've focused almost exclusively on this game during my work days at FuturLab. I've also called in favours from some talented friends to help with the design and development.

Now it's looking good, and I owe a lot of that to my good friend Dan Bibby. He's been the kind of creative partner I've longed for, and together I feel we're doing something really special.

Of course it hasn't just been Dan and I making this game - there's been invaluable input from the following people:

Torsten Goodman - Without his initial character model, I'd not have been so inspired to work as hard as I have. He's continuing to develop the hero character as I write.

Ben Pester - A superbly talented writer and thinker. Ben is currently working on the game script in his spare time; writing the cut scenes and locking down the story.

Jade Tidy - Always willing to tussle with difficult concepts, Jade has helped push the story and characters around to make the whole thing more captivating. She's also incredibly 'particular', and has helped us identify little issues that less 'particular' people would let slide... :p

Rich Oglesby - Another great thinker; he's given us lots of ideas for the game. I hope he keeps dishing them out, so I don't have to think so much, and can continue coding the damn thing!

Check out the current demo version online here: Prism Flash Game

Flash Game Development

Doing it at last!

I've enjoyed the Flash work I've done over the last few years, but there's always been a wish to make a game. People don't come along and give you great game projects to make if you don't have a fat portfolio of Flash games already - so I've realised the only thing to do is create a fat portfolio of Flash games myself... Call me slow if you like.

Having been hit with this realisation sat watching bad TV at Christmas, I practically teleported back to Brighton and spent the first week of the year learning how to make a scrolling platform game by studying Tonypa's excellent Flash game tutorials.

Once that was up, I found it a bit limiting, and it wasn't quite fast enough (at no fault of the tutorials, just that Flash has moved on a bit since it was written - it's still a fine place to start).

I spent the rest of the month studying and rewriting Strille's Flash Platform Engine Demo for ActionScript 2.0, which given Strille's penchant for optimisation, was one of the most daunting tasks I've ever faced as a programmer. It has some of the most cryptic code I've ever seen. It is a marvellous design though, so I thoroughly recommend mastering it if you're looking for the best scrolling engine in Flash.

Once that was all OOP'd, I needed to learn about collision detection...

... cue two months of extremely hard 90 degree learning curves, which led to me actually giving up and borrowing three seasons of CSI to get my mind off it.

Then about three weeks/seasons of CSI later I found another of Tonypa's offerings in the form of Vector based collision detection in Flash.

After those two months of stress and soul searching, to find such a well written tutorial online for everyone to use seemed like a miracle; a rather embarassing miracle considering it was right next door to where I started...


So I was on my way to making a platform game. Little did I realise that it would completely take over my life...

Late starter

My first blog post, on my first blog, several years after most web people started using blogs...

Maybe it's because I can't enjoy the word Blog or Blogging - they're repulsive words. Actually I've been too busy working and learning, but now that I've learnt a fair bit, and worked a fair bit, I'm giving it a bash.

As of now I shall be writing, not blogging...