The Los Angeles ADDY Awards announced local winners a couple of weeks ago, and BLITZ received awards for our work with Activision Guitar Hero and Gatorade Tiger Moonshot Game. We’re happy and humbled. Thanks to the great talents who worked on these projects and our awesome clients for letting us do what we do best!
We had the extreme pleasure of launching the site for the latest edition in the Guitar Hero franchise: Guitar Hero Metallica!
Like all projects,this one resulted in some fun antedotes: designers consuming as much of Metallica’s discography as possible (many of our playlists consist of artists like Air, Daft Punk, and the like…ok, maybe some hip hop); and hours spent doing “research” (aka rockin’ out on our set of GH Metallica).
For fans of the game, you get your product information, which includes a :30 preview of each track included in the game, as well as the Metallifact (a brief explanation as to why Metallica chose certain artists to include in the game).
But what’s really cool about the site is that we had access to official Metallica artwork. For any Metallica fans, if you look really closely throughout the site you’ll notice elements from all kinds of Metallica memorabilia, including album artwork, posters, backstage passes, etc. And the main nav typeface is actually James Hatfield’s handwriting!
One of the challenges we faced with this project was creating a full Flash site (complete with animation and sound) that was the size of an HTML site. We had to fully optimize in order to keep the file size as low as possible.
Another thing that makes us grin about this site: Lars Ulrich reviewed our designs and approved them without any change requests!
We continue to add to our Papervision portfolio. The latest was a project for ESPN and NASCAR aimed at building awareness around the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. The Wieden and Kennedy folks chose BLITZ to help execute on the design and development of the ESPN NASCAR Results Simulator web application.
With this, NASCAR fans were able to predict race outcomes and season standings by dragging and dropping racers onto a standings grid. Depending on where you placed the racers, you’d either receive praise and a thanks, or a not so thankful comment from the drivers. Once you completed your placements, the application generated a simulated outcome of the race. You could then print or save your results to compare to actual race results, and share your predictions with friends.
The technique used to combine Flash video, Papervision and physics simulation and achieve the quality performance we did is an accomplishment we’re proud of. Even if you’re not a fan of NASCAR, it’s a fun application to check out and see what we’re doing with Papervision.
We love our clients, especially ones who send us toys. GP Toys, Inc. is a European toy company who recently launched their popular Gormiti toys here in the US, and BLITZ was chosen to build the online destination.
The challenge: reaching an audience of boys aged 4-9. We had to make sure the site contained all the basic product information. At the same time, it had to be entertaining enough so that kids would want to engage with the brand and explore the site.
The experience is not only immersive, but extremely visual with lots of imagery, videos and games.
Everything takes place on the Island of Gorm. Kids can learn about the Gormiti lore and characters, learn how to play the game by watching a video tutorial, and create a wishlist of the toys they want.
There are plenty of fun downloadables and hidden content as well to discover. And of course, what kind of an experience would it be for kids if we didn’t include games? Currently, there are three games that let you test your Gormiti skills, including Leap of Fire, Dangers of the Deep, and Memory Gorm.
Think you’ve got what it takes to be a Gormiti hero? Check out the site and find out. Also, be sure to visit their YouTube channel to watch more Gormiti videos.
One of our recent launches was for Microsoft’s “Elevate America” initiative. In short, the program will offer free and low cost resources to help people gain the skills, training and certifications needed for success in today’s job market.
Visitors to the site can learn about the program, and how it can benefit them based on their skill level and needs.
The site, which is another major Silverlight launch for us, received lots of press coverage and was even plugged on C-Span!
Future site updates and enhancements are on the way to make the site an even more valuable resource and tool for individuals and organizations. BLITZ is proud and excited to be part of this program, and help realize its success.
BLITZ is excited to announce a new open-source project called LocalConnectionService which effectively eliminates common issues encountered when using LocalConnection for Flash Player runtime collaboration.
Give it a try!
Tip: Firefox is the fastest browser to use. You can see as much as 15-20 MB/s!
Click to launch pop-up, and then move your mouse around it to see a ~300KB, 400×400px bitmap screen shot below sent through LocalConnectionService.
About LocalConnection The LocalConnection class was introduced in 2002 as a feature of Flash Player 6 which allows two .SWF files running on the same computer to send instructions to eachother. (See the LocalConnection for more info).
Intrinsic limitations of LocalConnection
LocalConnectionService resolves those limitations:
The project has been carefully constructed to operate just like any native Flex WebService or RemoteObject. Use it in an Actionscript-only project or drop it into any MVC architected Flash Platform application.
Neat use case ideas:
To get started, visit our Google Code page at http://code.google.com/p/flashlcs/.
When a few examples of the ported jiglib physics engine were released, I wanted to see what this engine was capable of. Here are a few of those experiments.
Please Download the Zip files to try each one of these out. They run much more smoothly when not running in a browser.
The Basketball example:
File: basketball.zip
How to play:
When you start, the basketball follows the mouse - click to shoot the ball forward and try to make a basket. If you get it in, the hoop will move somewhere randomly. The ball won’t come back to the mouse, but click again to shoot the ball from the position of the mouse.
About it:
By messing around with the weight and bounce, I got a nice basketball effect. One problem was creating the hoop; since making odd shapes to work with jiglib is near impossible - the hoop was just constructed out of 5 boxes.
The Bowling Example:
File:bowling.zip
How to play:
Move the mouse to position the bowling ball and then click to throw it. You get 2 shots to see if you can knock down all the pins - then it will restart the simulation. You start off with a 2lb ball at a pretty low speed, move the sliders to increase the weight, speed, and the spin of the ball.
About it:
Cool to see a bunch of things knocked out by a bowling ball weighing 50lbs… One of the major problems I’ve encountered with the jiglib engine is that objects moving too fast will go right through another object instead of colliding with it.
The Ball Drop Example:
File: ball_drop.zip
How to play:
Move the mouse to tilt the wooden board. You have to collect all the gold on the board to continue on to the next level. The weird angry thing following you will eat you if it catches up to you. Higher levels will increase the gravity on the ball and the speed that the weird angry thing follows you.
About it:
One of the major problems that had to be overcome in this example is detecting collision while moving the board. If you moved the board too fast - the ball would fall through. Although this is now almost fixed, other problems came up; if the gravity gets too strong, the ball begins to act oddly (happens around level 3).
The Dominos (The Coolest) Example:
File: dominos.zip
File: dominos_sample.xml
How to play:
Click “Play” to begin. Click anywhere on the board and hold the mouse button down. You will start dragging a domino. Let go of the mouse button to drop the domino and moving the mouse now will rotate the domino. Click again to finish placing the domino. Click “Look Around” to take a look around… you cannot place dominos while you’re looking around, to continue placing dominos click “Resume”. Once you’re done placing the dominos, click “Start” to drop the golden domino that will begin the chain drop. You can also click “Save” to see an xml with all the positions of the dominos you placed. If you want to load an xml layout, click “Load” and paste the xml there (you have to overwrite the existing text in the box).
About it:
As you can see, if you place too many dominos, the performance begins to slow down. I was able to increase the performance by setting a domino to immovable once it fell low enough. You can see how the domino freezes by dropping one outside the board.
And just remember BLITZ is still looking for another Senior Flash Developer with experience in papervision.
