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.

Well that was a bizarre day.

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.

By the time somebody told me to check Twitter an hour or so later, a few hundred people had visited the site, 88 of whom had ‘signed up’ (there may have been more if the form hadn’t kept crashing, thanks to some glitch with Typekit), and big-name designers who I follow were talking about my site… including Andy Budd, who was rightly miffed that some poxy web conference was advertising him as a speaker without even asking him. Thankfully when I explained the situation he took it in good humour, as did most of the people who were accidentally fooled, although there were one or two individuals who were less than amused (one guy had suffered Safari crashing on him three or four times when he tried to sign up, yet he persevered… only to discover that it was just a student project).

“Yes, Tick Talk is rather nice.” -Elliott Jay Stocks

Despite the irony that a conference which was supposed to be about saving time on the web ended up wasting a LOT of people’s time, the outcome seems to be mostly good. Even when they found out it was fake, people were still talking about the design of it on Twitter (even Elliott Jay Stocks conceded tweeted that “Yes, http://chris-armstrong.com/ticktalk/ is rather nice.”).

The bizarre experience has highlighted a few things to me:

• Web standards work. I hadn’t intended anyone to come across the site, but because it was standards-compliant, Google could see it.
• All it takes for something to ‘go viral’ on the web is for the right person (in this case Andy) to tweet about it.
• People put a lot of faith in the appearance of websites, perhaps too much. Because it looked legit, people happily signed up and handed over their contact details (which I won’t be abusing, don’t worry). It’s just as well that internet scammers don’t tend to have great design skills!

So… I guess all’s well that ends well. Thanks to all those who have been complimenting the site and passing it on, and apologies to anyone who was accidentally duped by the site. If you signed up by mistake leave a comment and I’ll send you a link to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

Update 25/02/10: The TickTalk site has been featured on Styleboost! Seeing as it’s the main gallery site I visit, I’m pretty chuffed.

Last month I attended Build, the new web conference held here in Belfast

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.

Andy Budd: Seductive Design

Andy Budd of Clearleft talked about how to design seductive interfaces, starting with a striptease…

Ryan Sims: Practice Makes Pixel Perfect

Ryan Sims talked about how none of us are really ‘born’ to do anything; no matter what natural ability we have, it takes practice to be good.

Wilson Miner: Design/Build

Wilson Miner talked about our ‘identity crisis’, and the benefits of a hybrid approach to web design.

He also has a surprisingly deep voice.

Thanks to a kind stranger who gave me a spare ticket, I managed to get into the Airside talk in Uni tonight.

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.

I thought adding camera control would be a lot harder than it turned out to be. Turns out the basic principle is pretty simple; create a container sprite (‘camera’) for all the objects in the game world, then modify it’s position/scale etc to give the impression of panning and zooming.

I’ve created a seperate ‘Camera’ class for this, with ‘pan’ and ‘zoom’ as public functions, giving me a bit more flexibility as to where I can manipulate the camera.

Thanks to this video for explaining the concept.

Time to make these colours mean something. And also… outlines!

Experimenting with using a gravitational pull on the cursor to control the player (triangle).

Also improved the collision detection a little so the shapes don’t overlap, however it’s still pretty sloppy.

Hmm… not really what I was hoping for.

The idea here is for each shape to have its own attraction/repulsion system, being attracted to shapes with more sides, and repulsed from shapes with less sides… I was hoping it would create a dynamic system of constantly moving shapes, chasing each other and being chased, but so far it’s just resulting in shapes being clumped together.

I think its a case of messing around with each shape’s impulse formula till I get the effect I want.

Using the ApplyImpulse function in Box2D to create a magnetic field around the cursor.

Leave a comment if you’re interested in seeing some of the code behind this.