*not because I was late, I’m just a really bad driver.
It’s 11pm. 12 hours ago I handed in my final VisCom coursework and drove like a madman* to catch a ferry to Stranraer, then a train to Glasgow, and now, finally, I’m on a train to London. However there’s a good chance that FOWD will be worth it all.
Also, it’s just occurred to me that since I am no longer really a student, I no longer have an excuse for not having a job…
Eep.
For my latest uni project, we had to come up with a fake conference to be held in Belfast, brand it, and design promotional material for it. Inspired by Build, I created Tick Talk: A Web Conference About Time. So my tutors could access it easily to mark it, I hosted it in a random folder on my website.
Then, just around lunchtime today, somebody somehow came across it (presumably through Google, though what they would have been searching for I have no idea). Thinking it was real (and impressed by the unlikely line-up of speakers), they tweeted about it. Then somebody else tweeted about it. Then Andy Good (organiser of Build) tweeted about it, and the stuff hit the fan.
Turns out that this wasn’t the usual kind of ‘wannabe’ conference we get in Northern Ireland… this was the real deal, with Eric Meyer heading a lineup of big names whose work I’ve been admiring for the past year or so. Wilson Miner in particular was a big draw for me, and his talk on being a ‘hybrid designer’ really gave me confidence that I’m on the right career track.
It was absolutely fantastic to have something like this right on our doorstep here in Northern Ireland, so fair play to Mr Goodonpaper for organising it, and also for putting the talks online… gotta love the sharing nature of the web community.
Guy Moorhouse of Airside and Matt from WithAssociates discussed some lovely work including these websites for Vitsoe (who make iconic modular shelves, apparently) and the London Transport Museum. I found it really encouraging to hear them talking about how the days of “take a brochure, make it into a website” are over, and how websites can and should be a real extension of the company; living, growing and evolving.
They also showed their pitch for an exhibition project, V&A Decode, which they didn’t win. The work they produced for it was beautiful, and tied in some lovely new tech like dynamically generated artwork and augmented reality invites, but they lost because they had forgotten about one of the very key goals: increasing footfall to the exhibition. This was a timely warning considering my final uni project this semester is creating branding and marketing for a fictional ‘sustainability’ exhibition.
The talk was part of the Build Conference being held here in Belfast, and organised by this guy. Looking forward to the big day tomorrow.
Ok, so it does have an end, but it is pretty long.
Whats happening here is basically every time the player shape crosses the halfway point of one segment, the next segment is drawn ahead of it (along with a few shapes). Currently this is completely random, but eventually the path will get narrower the more sides the player gets (to push up the difficulty a bit).
I’ve turned on the Box2D Debug Draw for this one, and will probably keep it on while I’m still ironing out the basic gameplay. It shows that my shapes are all currently circles as far as the physics engine is concerned, something which will probably be good enough for any shapes over 8 sides, but below that I should refine this to make the hit detection more accurate.
I’ve also played about with a bit of optimisation here, and any objects which are more than a screen-height below the player get put to sleep (not quite so sinister as it sounds) so the engine will ignore them and save on some CPU.