A.L.I., the grant funded department at UNT where I work, missed a grant cycle, which basically means we were shutting down. Things a went a little crazy, people freaked, the boss man left,meanwhile I made this with no supervision or direction.

The edugame centers around the idea making an educational card game, but tries to leverage the computer interfaces strengths – an interactive board, and card control. and complex score keeping among others. Each card adds or subtracts points from states and, as states points reach zero or 10, the points recursively trickle down to the neighboring states.

This was months ago, but I remember what a breath of fresh air is was to get to be involved in a  project form inception to creation, something which was part of our standards when the department began, but had become increasingly hard to do as project quantity increased and development cycles decreased. This took two weeks to make, the idea being create it as a two person game sharing a  keyboard, but take it to the edge where we could put an AI in it or make it a network game.

I strongly recommend choosing the “cards sorted by date” option then playing the second card “stamp act”

EXAMPLE : augmented reality in flash, augmented reality in c++, 3d (modeling, texturing animation), exhibition/kiosk

A work of art entitled “Revision” that I created has been on display in an exhibit called Materials and Meanings since June 2009 and will remain so until early January 2010. The prototypes were created using flartoolkit for flash, while the final installation piece was created using ARtoolkit in openframeworks (c++). The majority of the models, texturing and animation were created by me as well, with additional work done by Brett Bullion, who was generous enough to help.

My primary goals were to create a rock solid installation that a) applied some theories from art history b) showed disparities in cultural product and c) was fun and age appropriate.

I achieved this by using augmented reality to overlay 3d models and animations that further defined the graphic symbols on each plastic marker.

During the creation of this work, I worked closely with the other artists involved and helped organize and maintain schedules and communication. My home and garage became a sort of hub for meetings and general merriment that go with these events.

Working with the DMA and the other artists of this project has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life thus far.

EXAMPLE : AS3, physics (APE)

On of the main goals of our partnership with the Irving School District is make learning fun. There are some apparent easy ways to do this. Make a animation or video, make a video game, or board game out of the content.

Most of these things are very well traveled and researched, some feel more like trickery than creating a good user experience, so I often try to step outside of the normal established way of doing things and come at a problem from a different angle.

What I tried to do here is make the process of learning entertaining, not by making the content entertaining (like a play or children’s video) but by using physics to give the interface a good, fun feel. The information is simple, the quiz based feedback ads reinforcement, and the physics make the exploratory learning process fun and rewarding.

The foundation files created while working on TANK! allowed this experiment to be created in a couple of hours.

[UPDATE: TO SEE A BETA VERSION OF A MORE ADVANCED VERSION OF THIS PROJECT SEE THE BETA I'M CURRENTLY DEBUGGING CLICK THIS LINK AND GO TO THE BLOG POST]

Wanting to branch out into games and extend my skill set, I created these mini games as part of A.L.I.’s contract with Irving ISD. Using the Actionscript Physics Engine (APE) was a joy and provided a quick learning path for more feature rich and advanced physics engines like BOX2D, which I now currently use as often as I can.

Since these mini-games were much larger in scope than we usually spent on flash learning examples for Irving, I had to first clearly define the features, and identify reusable parts of each game to speed up the next game. The first game (TANK!) took just under two weeks, included learning time, planning and cleaning up the structure. The second (SHOOT!) took a couple of days. Particle generators with attached physics were created to be flexible enough to be an explosion from a bomb, bullets from a gun, or even gas emitters and flame thrower particles.

The base file, and objects created serve as our standard structure in all APE base flash projects, allowing physics in projects like Presheads to be created in a few hours.

Obviously, the art was kept simple, lightweight and symbolic. Trees and water are generated on the fly as are most obstacles.

Monday 10AM :
The boss gives a new assignment. Recoding of existing web design, but in database form. He also wants a full functioning shopping site. The catch is the payment process must be custom built in PHP, of which I know nothing… yet. There’s also a list of secondary features we’d like, but are optional, like a newsletter feature, flash gallery etc.

11AM
We’ve decided to push up the deadline a bit. It should be ready for the next conference… in two weeks.

11:01AM
I panic

Two weeks later:
All deadlines are met, including the optional ones. What happened in between? Hard work and good time management, aka magic.

six weeks after completion:
ALI comes up 2nd or 3rd in all searches related to our market.
The content is updated daily, with fewer staff
The newsletter goes out monthly and reaches 15,000 subscribers
We have a 6% return on advertisement and 10% repeat visitation
Site statistics have risen %600 and are holding steady.

10 weeks later:
The custom PHP classes built for Nelnet are in their 2nd revision, and have become the standard for the entire university. For security reasons, I can’t show the code, but believe me, it’ even easier than paypal.

The only regret:
Would liked to have done a complete redesign of the whole site. I never thought the existing one fit our market or our personality.

EXAMPLE : PAGE DESIGN, INFORMATION GRAPHICS

I’ve been project manager at A.L.I. for a year and a half. Filling both the art director and programmer roles means that I often do all the coding and very little of the finished design, usually overseeing the other outstanding artists we have and feeling secretly jealous.

Funny thing is, an artist had secretly wanted to do some coding in flash, so we switched roles for a project. I got to brush up on the graphic design skills and she got to do a nice flash timeline interactive.

This was done entirely in Illustrator, using an excel to illustrator graph to 3d filter workflow, the data displayed here was changed, edited and replaced several times with the completion of entirely new charts taking minutes to finish.

EXAMPLE : AS3, XML, ANIMATION, ART

Here’s a few examples bundled up to save time. Each features coding, art and animation done by me. All projects took less than two days and all were done while doing various other projects.

As a project manager at A.L.I. I spend a surprising amount of time helping others and organizing.

Recently, it occurred to me that it’s difficult to show managerial experience in a portfolio. And, really, I want to show work I physically had my hands in, so, here’s a bundle of little products created for work. These are more of an example of day to day normal work effort than some of the other projects, which had more time, more people involved, and were a higher priority.

EXAMPLE : AS3 PROGRAMMING

At the Active Learning Initiative, we make educational games. Or, we have since I made Lewis Hine, our first attempt at an actual educational game, vs a simple flash interface to download PDFs or demonstrate some concept.

It started with a question, can we make something like the Pokemon picture taking game educational and useful? It turns out, if the topic is right, yes.

Continuing with my XML based workflow, and working with an illustrator to produce the scenes, we created a educational game that involves taking pictures. This works by using direct capture of the bitmapData of each image and creating a new movieclip that knows whether or not it is similar to the original photographs the drawings are based one. It does this through a simple coordinate system. These images then get put in to a virtual muckraker magazine that can get filled in then printed for further study or as reward for the students.

We’ve had great success with this product through early junior high,
with interest picking up again through high school. One of the more interesting things that has arisen is the interest in high schoolers to make something similar, or their own version of it. It gave rise to the concept of students making their own “products” using flash made tools to demonstrate their learning of materials and as a way of exploring higher level learning concepts.

EXAMPLE : AS3 programming, flash art, video production and motion graphics

I used this project as  jumping off point for AS3. It had become apparent that manual animation, and pre-rendered 3D alone would not suffice and I knew that if I really wanted to produce games, becoming an AS3 developer was the direction I needed to move.

This particular project, essentially a flash website containing lots of downloadable PDFs, was the perfect spring board. Taking the simple
concept of organizing PDFs into a newspaper and expanding upon it using AS3 gave us a much improved workflow and enhanced capabilities that we simply didn’t have before.

Capitalizing on the 48hr turnaround, zero budget workflow I created at the NTDaily (see the NTDAILY WEBMASTER POSITION for more details) I created a simple, yet effective green screened video introduction.

To summarize, this used animation libraries (tweener), external xml files ( to speed up development) and flash video to produce a very nice feeling virtual newspaper.

As web master and web designer of the North Texas Daily’s daily updated website, I had the rare joy of experimentation on a large scale during a very unsure time in news.

As a result of my time there, we created video advertising, harnessed the resources of the alumni, and created a website that quadrupled our daily steady visitation, not to mention our spikes when multimedia features went online.

WHY VIDEO ADS?

One of the concerns of papers making a switch into “convergence” is that, if they pay for video equipment and websites, they have the expense of these items in a medium that is largely considered “free” with no real way to pay for them. My idea was this : micro production video advertising. Essentially, 48 hour turn around, generally for small-local businesses at way less than the cost of a more professional crew. Students would get more experience ( no money), the community would get a benefit, and, at our rates, the equipment would start making a profit in 6 months (10 projects).

What Else?

I trained the first staff on the NTDaily’s video department. They consisted of 4 students (3 photographers and 1 reporter) who were interested. Our equipment consisted of a JVC prosumer HD camera, a wireless mic, a handheld and some custom stabilizers (monopod, shoulder mount and tripod) that I built specifically for these run n gun scenarios. They staff started with one week deadlines, including shooting, editing and titling, that eventually became 24-48 hr deadlines.

I also recorded interviews of NTDAILY Alumni.
The Apple style infinite white backdrops where very popular at the time, so that’s the style we went with. Of course, our budget was twenty dollars and, since we mostly shot on location video, we had no light kit. If you don’t already know, a camera with zebras helps a ton.

Anything else to say?
I could go on for days about this. I learned great teaching strategies and field production techniques. Production timelines and workflows. Lighting techniques. Differences between no-budget workflow and thinking and those with budgets. (Having done most things no-budget, I’m currently most suited to this.) I even made the switch from Adobe Premiere and After Effects to Final Cut Studio, and I’ll never look back.