Posts Tagged ‘Flash’

Papibirint

Friday, February 13th, 2004

PapiOne of my favourite projects at Renderspace was this sequel to the ill-fated Papilonija game. Papibirint was done entirely in Flash 6 and its concept, design and gameplay was defined clearly from the start. It was also the project where Matevž as a designer, Marko as web programmer and I as Flash developer really hit it off as a team.

The objective was to make a fun and cute game that would also be somewhat educational. Based on Pac-Man, it’s a top-view maze game, where you have to collect coins and avoid traffic and bullies that steal your money. Since you can only carry around so much money, it’s necessary to deposit it at the cash machines regularly. That way, your money is also protected from the bullies, who can only steal what’s in your pockets. The pink piggy-bank carries bonus points if you answer a random question that tests your knowledge about banking. This has proven to be an effective way to motivate children to read through Papi’s website. When you have enough money at the bank, you can enter the store and buy the bike you’ve always wanted.

The game has 3 different environments, each with a different set of parameters. There’s the sunny environment, the night environment, where the visibility is low, but the bullies walk slower, and the winter room, where the visibility is high, but the ground is slippery.

For this game, I also created a level editor that exported a custom 2D map of codes and other information such as trajectories, character speed, friction, etc., which was then parsed by the game engine to dynamically draw the environment and characters.

Launch game

URL:

http://papi.skb.si

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SiOL TV animated instructions

Monday, September 29th, 2003

SiOL TVSiOL TV is a service that provides “cable TV” over an ADSL connection. The installation can be a bit tricky, especially if you also use ADSL to connect to the internet. That’s where my animated instructons come in, showing you just how many cables you need to set the thing up.

At first, I thought of doing it with photos, so Saša P. and I did a photo session with all the components, but the photos really weren’t good enough, so I decided to do illustrations. Since the deadline was really tight, I had to do the illustrations and the whole animation over night. I used some heavy masking voodoo with all those plugs.

Later, my illustrations were also used by Pristop for the printed manual.

Launch

URL:

http://www.siol.si/index.php?id=153

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Papilonija

Thursday, August 28th, 2003

PapilonijaThis is a 3D maze game that uses Renderspace’s nice 3D engine and it’s basically a first person non-shooter. You play the part of Papi, SKB’s mascot in the form of a piglet with wings, trying to collect enough money to buy a ball, a skate-board or a bicycle, while avoiding the city traffic.

I was just supposed to provide a simple Flash to count points, but in the end I had to handle the whole logic of the game based on the 3D engine’s collision messages.

At first, it was meant to be a CD-ROM and web based game, but there were so many problems with the 3D plugin and ultimately because Renderspace never renewed the plugin’s certificate, it was only done as a credit card size CD-ROM that was handed out as a present at the bank.

URL:

http://papi.skb.si/papijeve_igrice/

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Damijan Kracina: Proteusfont.org

Friday, July 25th, 2003

Description

Proteusfont.orgProteusfont.org is a guestbook that displays its entries using Damijan Kracina’s Proteusfont typography.

The very nice and simple design, done by Ajdin, was rather easy to implement. The guestbook entries are parsed character by character, dynamically attaching Proteusfont glyphs to the display area.

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Scandinavian crossword puzzle

Tuesday, July 1st, 2003

Skandinavska križankaIt’s very hard to make a good Scandinavian-style crossword in Flash.

In this attempt, there are a few nifty features. The clues can be enlarged by hovering over them with the mouse pointer. Clicking on an empty field sets the starting point for filling the blank spaces. Clicking on the same field repeatedly toggles the solving direction. The solution can be posted and eventually saved in a database for a prize draw.

The puzzle is entirely configurable through an external file, including the position and size of the picture.

URL:

http://icarus.dzs.si/igre/krizanka/

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Agencija 41

Sunday, April 20th, 2003

Agencija 41Agencija 41 is one of the better and more successful advertising agencies in Slovenia. This is why, they felt no need to present themselves online with anything else than their work. No introduction, no explanation, just their latest projects and clients. While the interface was very minimalistic, graphically, the site structure has many levels. The site features also a video player for TV ads and an MP3 player for radio ads.

While it looks simple enough to produce, the project is a classic example of how too many cooks spoil the broth. There was a lot of power-play and politics involved during production, we had the site almost finished when it was trashed and completely redesigned. But eventually the situation cooled down and Matevž and I started communicating directly to creative and technical teams of Agencija 41 and finished the site so that everybody was pleased. The best thing is to cut out the middle man where creative and technical work is involved.

Since it wasn’t going to be hosted at Renderspace and Agencija 41 wanted full control over the site administration, I had to come up with a cheap and not overly complicated solution for producing video and audio conversion. This meant creating small stand-alone applications for batch processing using mostly open-source. And of course teaching the site administrator to use all the software.

URL:

http://www.agencija41.si

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Cliniporator Electronic Forms

Wednesday, April 16th, 2003

CliniporatorAfter I started working at Renderspace, I had more time to do other projects, because the schedule was not as hectic as Parsek’s. My web programmer friend Ivan, who I’d worked with closely at Parsek for quite some time, asked me if I’d be interested in creating electronic forms for the Cliniporator database.

The Cliniporator is an electroporation device used for research in effective DNA transfer in gene therapy. When cells are exposed to electrical fields of sufficient intensity, their membranes become more permeable, allowing large molecules such as some drugs or nucleic acids to enter the cell.

The electronic forms that I created enabled visually adding points where the patient’s tumors are located and entering attributes and details about the therapy for each one. The information is then stored in a database and can be retrieved and analyzed statistically or otherwise.

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MTV Journal

Tuesday, March 11th, 2003

MTV JournalMTV Journal was supposed to be an online community for MTV viewers. The user gets their own journal, which they can personalize and vote for videos on each of the four MTV charts.

However, the site wasn’t done with the right enthusiasm from any of the involved parties, so it kind of died down before it even started.

URL:

http://www.mtvjournal.net

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Moderna Galerija Ljubljana / Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana

Monday, January 13th, 2003

My involvement in the production of this website was rather low. I did was a calendar application for the programme section, but apparently, they don’t use it at all, so it’s empty all the time. I believe the rest of the site was done by Fry and Boris.

I think this was Parsek’s first site running on the CP2 architecture.

URL:

http://www.mg-lj.si

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Mégane II

Tuesday, November 26th, 2002

Megane IIA minisite that I don’t really like that much. I wasn’t really on the same page with the new designer on this one, so the result was a bit questionable. The TV spot featured the new Mégane driving across the landscape on the Moon, trying to show how well it stuck to the road. So the minisite was set in something that was supposed to be a collosal empty space station with a floating thing, which was a bit of a Lenny Kravitz video rip-off, serving as a projector. In the background, there were a few silhouettes exported from Walk Designer kind of jumping around and stuff.

Anyway, I had a hard time doing this, because using 3D renders in Flash is really tricky if you want to keep the Flash small, and especially if you don’t have the whole thing completely worked out in advance. I had a hard time explaining this to the designer and I ultimately failed. He basically just handed me the pre-rendered elements and I had to figure out how to use them. Not to mention that the design didn’t provide any way to include the content at first.

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