“What’s all that mean?” I expect you’re crying at your screens in eager interest. Well for us it meant the chance to create a fancy-schmancy mini-game using the fun and intuitive Wii-Fit board. For some time now there’s been libraries such as WiiFlash made for handling inputs from Wii controllers, which are just fancy bluetooth devices. Combine this with an agency whose client who is trying to sell a drug to help post-transplant patients balance their body levels and what do you get?

… A Wii board marble maze! Made in a tight turnaround of a fortnight with all hands on pump we cranked out a fun, innovative, robust and most of all addictive game. I should know, I saw the doctors come back time and again to try for the high score, the Japanese, Turkish and German delegations being the top scorers. Using nothing but the balance board and a Wii-Mote for the menus, so no ungainly wires, players had to balance themselves to roll balls through our 3D mazes, racing the clock.

I was great fun to make (including lots of jokes about balls!) and kudos due to Kyle for making the game work using Papervision for the 3D screens and Jiglib for the physics, and to Simon for sorting Wii-Mote connectivity. It’s a great fusion of several technologies blended for fun.

For the end client the game meant a great way to increase booth activity, which of course raises brand awareness. This was previously done through give-aways such as branded pens, key-rings, USB sticks etc. However regulatory bodies now frown upon the practice leaving companies, and their agencies, looking for other incentives. This is where the game excels, by raising peoples curiosity with the temptation of a challenge, especially when they see others having a go.

My experience at the congress was a great one. The agency we work for, who created and ran the booth were great fun to be with; I ended up in direct competition with Toby and Claire for the high score.  It was great to get out of the office and see people directly playing our game, and I learnt a lot about what the audience needs and expects which will be good for future projects of this kind and games in general. It is so rare to actually see our work in the real world, normally it’s only online, direct contact with the audience obscured through the mystical interweb. The Vancouver convention centre is absolutely massive, situated right on the coast overlooking the harbour, fantastic to watch the float planes coming and going. I was in Vancouver over last Christmas and was blown away by how much warmer it was! Thanks to Tina, the booth hostess for showing Toby and me some hidden gems of the area.

All in all, I’d say it was a fantastic opportunity and a great experience that worked well. Here’s to more of this for Team Cooper in the future!

Russell

The keynote speech by Henry Winkler blew me away. I had no idea about his struggles with dyslexia or being accepted by his parents. I didn’t know about his advocacy work for children and I certainly didn’t know that he was a children’s author. His speech was monumentally uplifting and truly heart felt and in no way schmaltzy which I have to admit I was kind of expecting. He’s is completely endearing, funny, down to earth and very inspirational.

The session titled ‘Development 101′ came as a bit of a surprise to me as development in TV media is more about development of character and story rather than actual creation of projects like it would be in the digital world. That didn’t stop it from being interesting though. Carl Draper was part of the panel and he was talking about his role as a TV-Digital interpreter. I really liked what he was saying about how digital media can be used to galvanise the audiences emotional connection to a brand through interactivity. That’s the main reason we at Team Cooper are interested in getting involved in the industry; we love the power of interactivity.

There was little if no tweeting which is a new experience for me (being a confirmed addict) but it had a positive effect on my ability to pay attention. The only time we were encouraged to tweet was through the very interactive and enjoyable session produced by Juliet Tzabar. ‘Get Smart with your Brand’ focused on how children’s brands could make effective use of their licensable content in the games and digital markets. As a moderately shy type *cough* I often find it intimidating to stick my hand up and ask questions or contribute in sessions. Being able to tweet diminished that issue for me so I could join in which had brilliant results as I won a magical prize for my input (which our 3yr old was extremely appreciative of).

We were only able to attend thanks to lovely people at Screen Yorkshire. In addition to getting us in they also provided us the amazing opportunity to be mentored, guided and introduced to this new world by the wonderful Sarah Muller.

The one uniting theme of the conference for me seemed to be trains. There was lots of talk about children’s obsessions with trains. This obsession was defined as being a result of a magical combination of factors it’s a vehicle with all of the elements of mastery that go along with that, a puzzle element in putting the track together and the brilliant opportunity to play at deity. Someone in the audience derailed this discussion by questioning if boy’s were interested in trains directly because of the tunnels…

So lots of new friends, great contacts made, practical skills gained thanks to Mel Norman and lots of great possibilities moving forward – woot!

Children’s Media Conference; What’s the future of children’s media? from Bold Creative Work-in-Progress on Vimeo.

I’m Simon, the other new developer.

It’s been a few of weeks now since I started my placement here at Team Cooper and a demanding few of weeks it has been. I have spent the last two years on a game programming course at Sheffield Hallam studying C++, DirectX and OpenGL and because of this, it’s been a task converting to Actionscript and adopting the MVC method of thinking. It’s all experience though and I enjoy a challenge. I think the effort has paid off and now, rather than just accepting that things work, I am recognising how different sections of code play their part and why this approach leads to a cleaner coding practice.

As I’m aiming myself towards a career in the games industry I think any experience earned in my year here will benefit me; working with Flash, which is famous for creating interactive and good looking experiences, will definitely help. I’ve been involved in various projects from Flex applications to Flash games and I’m also developing my own project in the “20%” free time which will be a suite of fast paced mini-games. I’ve mainly been working with existing code so far so writing these mini-games from scratch using an MVC approach is going to be fun.

Simon

I’ve been wrapped up with completing our pitch to the BBC for the @North project. The team have been working on consecutive projects for another large broadcasting company which we’re very pleased with. We’re working on an augmented reality project. We won our second contract with the lovely people at Quba. Plus there’s our first FLEX application which is nearing completion, I’ve really been enjoying getting my teeth in to a little bit of development, I say development I’m only working on the CSS but still I haven’t done any FLEX stuff before and I love learning new things. To help us wade through all this work we’ve taken on 2 members of staff Russ has blogged already and I’m going to try and coax Simon in to a small blog intro of himself.

All of this work has led us to question when are we going to get all those game ideas built? So we’ve committed to giving everyone in the team 20% time. Any games produced in this time will launch from our gaming brand Robot / Lizard. Working on similar lines to that of Google (and we understand our neighbours Yoo Mee) everyone will get the opportunity to complete their own self directed project’s one day a week. We had an awesome brain storming session this afternoon. We’ve initially set a timescale of 10 weeks (10 Fridays) but this is a guideline and as it’s the first time of trying this we want to be very flexible and just see how it goes. I think of all the projects I’m most excited about the one Russ is going to be working on. He’s going to start our first Unity 3D project. It’s a departure for us Flash loving developers but it’s a direction we’ve been talking about for a while now – this feels like the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

Then in our ‘free time’ we’ve been enjoying participating in and getting to know the now many and various Sheffield Geek communities springing up care of the good people at GIST. Inspired by them and with Trevor Ward taking the lead we’re setting up Sheffield’s very own Adobe User Group (16^th June, The Old House 7pm – in-case you’ve missed our several tweets on the matter)

I keep talking with people about what I’m planning to do in my ‘free time’ and then I think about what I’m saying…

I’m the new Developer mentioned in the last posting, settling in to the new more spacious offices. I’ve been here a month now, returning from a round-the-world trip to settle back into some good old Actionscript development in the city centre.

I’ve already been set to task working on some quizzes and with some exciting projects on the horizon it’s all looking quite interesting!

Russ

We’ve got a student starting his placement year with us at the end of May and we’re starting recruitment for a Senior Flash Developer so we thought it was about time we had some room to stretch our (in my case very long) legs.

From this…

… to this

It’s not a huge difference, theres room for about 4 more desks but to us it’s a sign of our continuing growth and that makes us very happy.

So I’d have something to write about I actively went out to find (Googled) some female role models working in technology. Even though 2 weeks ago I couldn’t have named any it really wasn’t hard to find lots of women making a big impact in technology. I can now list a number of women who are inspirational figures, the most current on my list being Jane McGonigal. She recently did a TED talk that’s blown me away. She’s a games designer and she works for the Institute for the Future. She’s trying to work out how to make a link between people playing in virtual game worlds and the real world. I’ve been reading a Theory of Fun (by Raph Koster) and it discusses how fun is basically an evolutionary reward from your brain for learning something new, possibly useful. Jane feels that if the we can spend time learning how to fix problems in a fun, rewarding and engaging way in a virtual world then we’d get a lot of problems solved in the real world. The work I do is not exactly world changing, I justify what I do as creating entertainment, making people happy and ultimately I love it (who can say they love their work?) I find what Jane is working on very inspiring. I’m not saying Team Cooper will ever create anything as meaningful as Evoke just that Jane’s ideas are going to affect and inform everything I work on in the future.

Rebecca Jesson (Social Media Manager at Quba) and I have been discussing if it’s a faux pas to blog about yourself today. I think we’re women working in technology and our experiences are as valid as anyone else’s, so that said, for those that don’t know here’s a bit about me. I’m a creative person who has always had a love for science, my Mum was a physics teacher, my Dad a mechanic and I’ve grown up with a constant source of information of how stuff works. I’ve been working in technology since the mid nineties. I started as a web designer, I watched the boom and bust from a safe distance. I’ve worked as a Flash developer in E-Learning, a freelance digital creative, a web design tutor to NEETs and as a team lead in digital marketing. Now I help run Team Cooper with my husband Tim and we create fun Flash things. At the moment we’re going through a period of growth and we’re starting to think of ourselves more as entertainment developers. The public are consuming ‘casual games’ more and more as their chosen form of entertainment – so why not? We’re building on the success of Beastie Burgers by creating a Facebook version and follow up games, taking advantage of this up swell in the social games market.

Being a woman in this environment has never been an issue, ever. Maybe I’ve been lucky? I suspect it’s more to do with the industry being populated by modern thinking people who really aren’t bothered about what you are, just about what you can do. It’s noticeable in the office and at various events that the number of women is in the minority but I don’t think that’s from a lack of trying. I think I’ve probably experienced more positive discrimination than the other way around. The problem is getting young women to make technology a career choice in the first place. So I fully support Ada Lovelace Day and hope that someone reads this blog or one of the others being posted today and that they see positive experiences and role models to help them to make a choice to join in the fun. Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone!

Last Friday I attended We Love Technology which kicked of Sheffield’s lovebytes festival this year and I came away from it all giddy with techno joy. There was lots of talk about a convergence of ideas between the many different fields of design, craft, diy and technology. James B’s talk about social friction has given our ideas around social gaming new life. I love the idea of open hardware and as a big instructables fan I think defining an open source style process for hardware is a great idea. There were a few generative artists, an electronic log and my most loved things of the day were the thought provoking items made by Mr Jones.

Tim had an adventure to the Casual Connect conference in Hamburg and came home with the fire of social gaming burning in his eyes. We’ve generally been moving our gaming ideas in that direction, starting to focus more on social gaming (watch this space for a Beastie Burger Facebook version) and having spent 3 days hearing other developer’s love for social gaming, it’s opportunities and it’s benefits we feel reassured and motivated to move our plans forward.

And then yesterday we found out we’d made the short list of 45 companies to join in the BBC @ North project. It’s a great opportunity for us as one of the smaller companies on the list, being in a group with some of the north’s best digital and creative agencies makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Two things finally kicked us in to gear. The first being that while the business is doing very nicely at the moment we really want to grow and to develop more of our own content. We feel that if we don’t do something pro-active about it now we’ll keep coasting as we are and before we know it another year will have passed with no real change. The second was getting a great advisor from Business Link, we’ve had a few false starts with them but finally we’re dealing with someone who is actually helping us. We keep talking about how we would like to take on another developer and make more of our own games and she has helped us stop talking about it, make an action plan and just get on with it. We’ve bags of ideas for games and after the success of Beastie Burgers we’re really excited about getting on with another project.

It may sound a little stupid but the process of writing the business plan has helped us firm up what the actual plan is. I think the plan has only ever been a discussion, a virtual plan – now it’s a document it feels a lot more tangible. An added bonus is that through the process I’ve learned a lot about the casual games market, as I’ve mentioned before this is a bit of a new world for me personally. Writing the plan has made us do lots of research to back up what we think is a good idea with some hard facts. Until now we’ve had a vague idea of how things are, Tim reads a lot of industry blogs and magazines and I’ve been ‘working hard’ (or playing) absorbing myself in casual games seeing how the portals work, what works, what doesn’t and what’s popular with the audience. Now we feel we’re in an excellent position to get some funding and get our next game into development. We’re all feeling really hopeful and excited about the coming year.

It feels like Christmas and the new year has become our busiest time of year. It’s possible this is beacause of the increased number of businesses sending their clients seasonal greetings digitally rather than the considerably more expensive, less sustainable and pretty old fashioned Christmas card. I’m quite excited about Christmas and in the last few weeks we’ve been creating a few animated cards plus a couple of seasonal games. We’ve made an extremely cute game to help Watford Palace Theatre promote their panto Cinderella. And at the moment we’re putting the finishing touches on a winter rally game which is extremely addictive - it had most of us in the office fighting for the top score during development.

When we get back in the new year we’ve lots of work to get on with for some new clients and a couple of well know brands. Exciting stuff!

A very Merry Christmas to all our clients, suppliers and blog readers – see you in the New Year.