28 September 2009

FOTB 09

It's been a week since FOTB 09 finished. A great event, better than last year, but for some reason, not as magical as FOTB07, this IMHO.

This year was balanced between design and development from one point of view, and maybe to techie from another. Advantage for techies, which most of them this year presented creative projects, creative coders like: Dr.WooHoo, Joel Gethin Lewis, Jeremy Thorp, Joel Baumann, Karsten Schmidt[Toxi], Craig Swann, Mario Klingemann, Jared Ficklin, Joshua Davis, etc.

Maybe it is just me, but this year the sessions seemed to be resonate more in tune with last year's Jonathan Harris' talk. Less spoken ( yes Joel Gethin Lewis, I heard you loud and clear about that 2001,2002 project done in Director and Havok ), but more proven. The great projects this year weren't necessarily build using flash/actionscript. Even the flash related project proved that you can achieve a lot more by going outside the box. Here are some simple examples that come to mind right now: Keith Peters' game framework, inspired by cocos2d, Chuck Freedman's Stereo Microphone, and of course Joa Ebert's Apparat. Joa basically, pardon the expresion, bitch slapped Adobe with those tools. Well done! While in the last years I heard more about Flash and Flex, this year words like Processing and OpenFrameworks resonated in my ears. Maybe that is what I wanted to hear.
There were quite a few designer sessions, but compared to last years, I seem more attracted to creative computing at the moment. Oh, and I almost forgot, I've met Branden Hall there and he and Joshua Davis are working on a project that sounds pretty cool. Maybe it was too soon for Joshua to talk about their project called Hype, but I wish he did.

Right, I'll keep my opinions short. Sorry, no pictures or videos to share...but I do have something. I kept writting tiny notes in an xml file and during a session I've managed to write a minimal viewer for my notes. There might be a lot of spelling mistakes, unless it gets too frustrating, ignore them.






Maybe there are a few references here and there that might be handy.

I have collected a list of resources (videos, slides) related to Flash On The Beach 09. Here goes:

Julian Dolce

iPhone App Development For Flash Developers - http://deleteaso.com/iphone-workshop/

Lee Brimelow

Down And Dirty With The Low Level Bytes - http://theflashblog.com/?p=1391
As Mike Chambers pointed out some time ago, a lot of videos available on the FITC website. There is a video of Lee talking about ByteArrays.

Keith Peters

Casual Game Architecture: How to finish coding a game without despising it - http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2402

Mike Chambers

Advanced Desktop Development with Adobe AIR - http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2009/09/22/fotb-slides-advanced-desktop-development-with-adobe-air/

Carlos Ulloa

HelloEnjoy - http://www.lfpug.com/we-make-you-enjoy/

Rich Shupe

Lead the Hand and the Arm will Follow: Inverse Kinematics in Flash CS4 - http://www.learningflashcs4.com/2009/09/20/inverse-kinematics-in-flash-cs4-fotb09/

Elevator Pitch
3 Minute Wonders

http://zenbullets.com/blog/?p=423,
http://blog.iainlobb.com/2009/09/3-minute-lesson-in-game-design-my-talk.html
http://www.slideshare.net/micros123/fotb-presentation-2009,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJfy0_M1m2Q&fmt=18,
http://www.everydayflash.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/29/fotb09-3d-bowling-demo/,
http://swingpants.com/2009/09/29/flash-on-the-beach-elevator-pitch-how-to-build-3-games-in-3-minutes-part1/

Grant Skinner

Quick as a Flash - gskiner.com/talks/quick Truth is, Grant Skinner talks quick :) He managed to go through 100 slides in 1 hour.

Peter Elst

The Secret Life of a Flash Freelancer - http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2009/09/22/the-secret-life-of-a-flash-freelancer/

Joa Ebert

Leaving The Sandbox - http://de.sevenload.com/videos/PRm9XUh-Joa-Ebert-FOTB
Live Coding - http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2009/09/28/fotb-recordings/,
http://arton.no/blog/2009/09/25/joa-ebert-flash-on-the-beach-session-and-java-live-coding/

Lisa Larson

NEVER MIND the Buffer! FMS Made Easy - http://www.flashconnections.com/?p=112

Richard Lord

Application Frameworks: The good, the bad, and the ugly - http://www.bigroom.co.uk/blog/application-frameworks-at-fotb

Paul Burnett

More than Bending Pixels - http://www.mad.com.au/blog/?p=579

Hugh Elliott

The 10 Best Excuses to NOT do Amazing Work - http://wheniwas19.com/speaking/fotb/09/10Excuses/fotb09_brighton.html

Colin Moock's Union and MegaPhone and Joshua Davis' Space similar presentations can be found on the Flash In The Can website.

Colin's presentation made it clear that there is an easy option to get started and make things multiplayer in flash. The code written in a few minutes at fotb can be found on the Union site. The Reactor SWC lives here.

You can find out more about Hype on http://hype.joshuadavis.com/ tar. I looks like a good start, but I see at a teacher approach. You know how teachers always tempt you by showing something simple, and bit by bit it all gets complicated ? That's how I see this. Designers can use these snippets/behaviours and have fun. After a while they will want more and more, but it will get slower and slower so in order to have they're ideas work, they will end up getting familiar with the geeky parts of as3. There is an informative post on the FDT blog. So designers, don't believe the Hype ...use it! :)
The Keynote this year had a few sneak peaks of Flash CS5, which in my opinion will bring a few enhancements to CS4 but will not be as different from CS4 as CS3 used to be. Some of the features are Flash-Flex(Flash Builder) integration and TextLayoutFramework integration(imagine inDesign layouts with dynamic content in Flash) I won't go on with this, I'm sure you can find out more on Flash Magazine and other sites/blogs as well. Speaking of resources, I wonder what happened to the videos filmed on the FOTB stages.

Hope you will find these useful. If you have more links to slides from FOTB09 let me know and I will update this post.

The new University year started and things look busy. Until the next post, all the best!

12 September 2009

disturb media launched twigital


I am proud to present a new site we launched at disturb media called Twigital.
It is created to help promote the greatest media events on their way as you read this: London Digital Week and Flash On The Beach.
Twigital populates London with characters who've recently Tweeted about London Digital Week and Flash on the Beach '09. If you Tweet mentioning #ldw or #fotb then you'll appear on the landscape.
You can also search for any other word or topic you fancy.



We are trying to improve twigital so your feedback is greatly appreciated. Be sure to check it out.

In case you are wondering, this project uses Papervision 3D and the graphics are made by the amazing Heaps Awesome Patrol Captain/Designer Chris Phillips.

Chris and Alex are featured in issue 161 of Web Designer Magazine with a full flash gaming tutorial.



Well done!