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.

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.

My last few months at the NT Daily newspaper were pretty intense. Having created a full size advertorial interactive CD, two websites and a video department on top my usual head graphic designer duties, this little gem was thrown at me last minute with the usual ASAP deadline. This took roughly 30 minutes to produce and fit nicely with the alumni site I had recently designed.

Who choked under pressure? Definitely not me. Besides being flattered by the large number of alum who attended the reunion ( almost triple from the last) and asked about it’s creator, this animation feels calm, peaceful and lighthearted, the exact opposite I felt during my very understaffed, overworked last months of work at the NT Daily.

EXAMPLE : FLASH, GRAPHICS DESIGN, ANIMATION, 3D MODELING

Quick warning, the example on this site was extracted from an interactive CD, and as such takes a while to load and function as you’d expect a web product to.

Our goals for this were multi layered. We needed something to win advertisers over with, something to entice more students to join the paper and my manager really wanted to learn Flash. So I drafted up this interactive CD, which won a national student advertising award (Symbam or something – I’m not really into awards). The CD was to be 2/3 created by me and 1/3 by my Boss. She had three tiny sections each showing here basic things in Flash like timeline animation, rollovers and masks. My part, the part that loads on this website, simply used all those techniques to a higher degree of mastery.

I created pre-rendered 3D animations for the recruiting section, shot chopped and exported around 20 video interviews then assembled everything into Flash and created the interactive CD.

It was a great use of my 3 weeks as a then part time employee.