Kablamo

Well, we have had a few hiccups with submitting the app, various things that apple didnt like, small things like it not working blah blah David Hasselhoff being stabbed blaah.

Anyway, there are a few screenshots of the game as it is. It all works now and so its just a case of tinkering with it so that apple approve us.

These are the screenshots that accompany the app in the app store.

BE AMAZED!

All looks pretty slick eh? Works and reacts well too, especially the iPhone features like accelerometer and mic.

Dont you just want to hire us to make you pretty apps ay?

For our trade stand, we wanted an authentic looking bus stop in lui of not having a bus shelter as our stand. So, I took inspiration from the bus stop signs that we see in our area. These are usually made by travel line.

First off, Gary went and took some photos.

Bus stops in our general area all look the same. They have that kind of green and that layout. Oddly enough, I started creating the sign before I had seen this photo and was basing my creating off of a google image search for Bus stop. The sign was from cambridge and had a yellow stripe on it. This looked odd when I presented it to the others.

We discussed over facebook about the general look. They didnt like the yellow.

After this discussion, I went away and made the required changes. We ended up with a sign we were all proud with.

We then ended up with this graphic on our sign post.

Didn’t win us any awards though…

The main artwork for Triff of the Davids is the poster, or what most people will see, the main game screen.

I should point out that even though Luke is the art director of the group, I was tasked with creating some art pieces, mainly when he was too busy doing other work or found it too difficult. In these rare circumstances, I stepped in and took over. All in all, I created three pieces really. This, the bus stop sign and David Bowie in Carbonite.

This is one that I created and I think it needs a run through. It is created as a homage to movie posters. The larger, A0 poster that we printed up for our trade stand, is definitely a movie poster. That was the whole look and feel that we were trying to express when advertising and promoting the game.

Initially, lets look at the movie posters for labyrinth.

This poster focuses hugely on David Bowie. It makes him an icon, and also takes a very light hearted view of him. Just from your first look of this poster, you can tell its an odd film that is in no way serious.

We wanted this kind of imagery for our poster and main screen. We make an icon out of David Bowie and idolise him through out the entire game so we thought that his image should be represented as such in our poster. He should be represented as this grand figure overlooking a city. This lead us to think of Godzilla.

But, our game doesnt focus David Bowie as the bad guy, so destruction should be left out of our imagery. This grand, overpowering view of godzilla trampling through a city scape is iconic of grand characters in movies. So essentially, we wanted a huge image of David Bowie in a very iconic, idolized pose.

Also, there are the standard movie poster attributes that make a movie poster instantly recognisable as a movie poster. The title and the credits. Making those look the part is also an essential part of the whole movie experience. So for this I chose the obvious, movie poster font, trajan pro. For the title, I went with a very b-movie esque font choice and styled the whole poster to make it look very much like a b-movie poster.

As you can see, the poster that I created for us pretty much encapsulates all the classic movie poster elements and also how we wanted to portray David Bowie in grandeur sense.

I probably should have posted about this first, but i’m gonna do it now instead.

Fungineers do more than just silly iPhone apps, we also do interactive art and other nonsense. We were asked to help with a method of interaction for an animation piece. A senior lecturer in animation, Leonie, is animating a short film about a girl in a light house. The story pivots around phone calls and she wanted people to come in and select their own endings. Her initial idea was to have people use their own phone to call into the art piece. We persuaded her that this was a silly idea as no one would want to use their own phone and that it would be very, very expensive. So instead we came up with the idea of using a rotary phone and have people dial one of three numbers to select one of three endings.

We just needed to get a rotary phone to interface with a pc and have the pc know what number was dialed. For that we used a combination of an arudino and flash. Luckily, someone had already done the ground work for us and produced a tutorial on how to get an arduino to know and display a number just dialed on a rotary phone. Fantastic, we just needed to get it working with flash and have flash know when a specific string of numbers has been dialed so it can show the correct frame. For that we used some strings and arrays. Every time a number was dialed, flash would push that number into a string and then we check if that string matches up to a set telephone number.

Okay, so that all works. Now we needed the phone to cancel the call when you hang up. Well, we just took the output from the switch inside the phone and directed that straight into the arduino. We could then tell flash that when that was pressed to clear the array and send the frame back to the first frame. Genius.

Well that was the bigger part of what she wanted done, she also wanted a microphone input on another piece so that when you shout at it, it displays an animation. Well thats simple, thats just a few lines of AS3 and you check to see if it has hit a certain value or not. How fantastic is that ay?