The site you’re currently looking at underwent a fairly major update from an old fashioned HTML site (created many years ago) to a whizzy new WordPress powered affair. All done in-house of course, and I’ll be posting any newly completed work here. Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date, or browse through whatever sections you wish.
The Fit4Anything website supplies mental health assessments for urban youngsters at risk of taking the wrong path.
The owners can update the site via a built in CMS and can see the results of the tests taken via secure online reports.
I inherited this website for the small book seller MG Books. It was in a bit of a state, but with a tiny budget made it presentable and editable via a CMS that the owner can use. The site had a geeklog CMS before that only half-worked, and was too complex for the owner to work with reliably.
The In-Gear website was designed and created for a local motorcycle riding school to help them sell courses.
This is the riding school that taught me to ride a motorbike too, and I can thoroughly recommend them for all your rider training needs, from CBT to big-bike courses.
Visit the in-gear.co.uk website
The site’s owner keeps the site fresh and up to date via the flexible CMS, and there are a number of integrated features on the site:
This CMS driven website was designed and built for the owner of a beauty-therapy company. There wasn’t much content last time I checked, but the site design is worth a quick look nonetheless.
Update: The site has since been taken down.
You have just 30 seconds to anticipate your opponent’s thoughts, give your troops orders and move them into position in this multiplayer ballistic fighting game. Then everyone opens fire, and another turn starts.
UPDATE! On playing this recently it seems to have been updated by someone, and broken in the process. The game now crashes often when you’re walking around, which never used to happen. What a shame.
Postmortem:
I could hardly believe it! Not only were we doing a game for the giant Star Wars Clone Wars franchise, but we’d pursuaded them to try something risky and unusual too! A custom-made ultra-light PHP back end would join random players together in an almost anonymous way over the internet so that they could battle each other rather than some shonky AI.
Not only that, but it worked too! In a little over a week, I’d built the game engine and back end and proven the concept. Then the public was unleashed on it. The server coped admirably with the strain of thousands of people playing it over and over. Success!
It could have been better, of course. Just about all things can be improved. In this game, I’d have liked to have spent a little longer getting a few of the interface details working smoother. It’s fiddly to set up shots, which is an area that could do with as little interface-friction as possible. That aside though, I’d really like to have improved the multiplayer features.
I designed the game to put a game together for every two visitors to the site. You get paired off with the next random that comes along, and you’re playing. Minimum fuss, minimum barrier to entry. My experience with lots of multiplayer games is that you get to a daunting room full of 11yo kids who are just waiting for a newbie to kick about the place. I specifically designed against that effect here by removing the ability to pick your opponent, or play them again, or even to know who they are. All you get is a rank – a single number to hint at whether they’ve played before, and whether they were any good or not.
This really works – people dive in and play in generally fair games, which is great. It also means we never have to store user accounts on the server, which is also great. Each player keeps their rank in their shared-object, and it is exchanged at the start of the game. At the end of the game, each player calculates their new rank based on the Elo chess ranking system, and stores it away for next time. Yeah, you could fiddle the number and cheat, but really, who cares? There’s no leaderboard, and no way to shout out how great you are, so there’s very little incentive to cheat. That’s the best cheat-protection system I’ve ever come across!
The downside is that whilst it’s addictive for a while, it won’t hold people for a great length of time. After a while you get bored of there being no further progression. Of not being able to chat with your opponent and of not being able to have a rematch if it was a great game. These features I’d add in another similar game.
I’d give the players a chat box, that they could use at any point especially including whilst waiting for the server to sync up and exchange the moves. I’d also add a ‘play this person again’ checkbox that appears mid-game, so if you both clicked it and left it selected, it’d arrange your next match against each other. I’d also consider an optional match-up room of some sort, so you could meet up with friends. I’d definitely let you enter a name for yourself and exchange that with the other player, so you had some idea who you were playing. Maybe allow a pictorial avatar too. And some sort of earned rankings beyond a simple number. Maybe a veteran’s medal after 10 games, a high-roller medal after they hit a rank of 1600 and so on. You could even allow different things in-game based on what they had earned. Maybe veterans get the ability to pick their fights more carefully. Perhaps high ranked people get access to new weapons when playing against other high ranked people. Giving the player some sort of progression, something to work towards, would go a long way.
Lessons:
The Selenia site was created for University West of England to give teachers and pupils a fun science learning resource. There are lots of beautifully drawn comics available (created by a third party), along with supporting minigames and other stuff.
The site has a simple CMS so that the organisers at UWE can update the content, comics and games. It also has a facility that exports the entire site to static files and zips them up, so they can be used offline in a classroom from a USB flash drive or CD-ROM.
The Hazard Perception Challenge website provides learner drivers an online resource for practicing for their theory and hazard perception tests.
As far as I know, there’s no better way to practice for your hazard perception test online. No other service even comes close to the quality of interractive Wedding Videography we have on this website! If you’ve got your national theory test coming up, you need this site!
Not only can you practice your hazard perception skills in exactly the same way as the real test, but you can also test your theory knowledge with the official DSA question database. There are also car and motorbike driving videos narrated by a top qualified driving-instructor. This really is the best resource out there for learners.
Use cursor keys to drive in this high-speed racing game. Hit spacebar to deploy your car’s weapon, and shift to launch into the air. Can you beat all the other players, which are recordings of other real human drivers?
Postmortem:
Ah, a chance to do a pure arcade racing game, with actual racing cars rather than trollies or reindeer or airport baggage karts! Brilliant. I was determined to make a really good Flash racing game, with arcade but partially realistic handling, fun tracks, weapons and a little bit of a multiplayer twist.
AI in racing games is hard. Even the big name consold games don’t get it right, and have either unrealistically good AI drivers or comically bad ones. In a lot of games, the computer AI just bulldozes through your car sticking to its pre-programmed lines like a limpet. It feels unfair, and it’s not good enough! Rather than build a crappy AI for this game, I came up with the idea of recording people’s gameplay whilst they were racing and storing them on the server (stored by their starting position and overall performance). Then, when a new game is started, the server puts you in a random grid position and sends out 8 replays – one from each remaining grid slot. They are picked at random, but in a skewed way so that you play against a mix of the best, worst and mediocre players out there. That’s self-ballancing – the range of opponents you meet is determined by the actual range of skills out there, from good to bad. There is a par time over which your score isn’t recorded to avoid skewing the results towards people who just leave the game running forever, but other than that it’s a level playing field. This strategy really worked for this game, and everyone gets opponents who play roughly at their level – and some who are faster that they can work towards beating.
The big problem with storing and serving replays is that there’s a lot of data. AS2 doesn’t handle binary data very well except in pre-given formats that are delt with internally like jpegs, sounds or SWFs. So, a replay consists of a great long string of car coordinates etc in a text format. There’s very little encoding, as I found that simply processing the raw strings was enough of a task for Flash, let alone processing an encoding on top of that. I’d have liked to have compressed the strings, or base-64 encoded them or similar, but it just wasn’t feasable. The remaining problem was that each play of the game required about a 1mb download of replay data from the server, which was very bad for bandwidth when the number of plays started to climb dramatically. We had to trim back the number of replays sent to the client to just 4, then 2, then none as the load increased. The URL presented here allows you to have all 8 opponents switched on, as it’s going to be pretty low-load from this website.
Car handling was a major area of improvement in this game over previous racers I’ve built. The cars have a single giant virtual tyre that they run on, which resists sideways motion and promotes forwards motion. When the car turns, this virtual tyre turns with it, causing the car to grip and change direction. This is reasonably analogous to the way a real car turns in many ways, and leads to a decent feel. Rather than programming in effects like sliding if you turn too fast, or if you land a jump facing sideways to the direction of travel, it just naturally falls out of the physics model. Likewise, slow speed turning works better this way too. The model is also very tunable to different car styles, so some are fast but have little grip, some have too much grip and are hard to control, some are ballanced and so on. There is no ‘best’ car, although there tends to be a couple per track that people end up using predominantly over the others.
A big part of the Speed Racer film was the twisting looping jumping corkscrewing tracks. In a 2D game you’re limited to how far you can recreate these effects, but the tracks certainly do have these stunts in them, which is a nice effect. Even better, you can short-cut them in cunning ways using your car’s jump ability, which adds a little depth.
Another requirement from the film is the use of car-to-car weapons. This poses a problem with the replay technology, as a replay is by its nature an asynchronous event. It does not contain data saying how the human player reacted to being hit by a weapon at any random point. The simple rules I adopted were to never fire weapons at the human player (ie, weapon usage is not recorded in the replays), and if a replay car gets hit, to simply spin it around in a straight line along its direction of travel until it falls off the track edge.
The other thing you can’t do with a replay is car-to-car collisions. You can’t purturb the replay car from its course, as that would put you ‘off’ the replay line with no obvious way to get back on it. You can’t just slow or collide the human player either, since that would get recorded in their replay and when played back to another player, would look strange as they randomly react to a collision that didn’t happen. There was nothing better I could think of than simply allowing cars to overlap. Not completely satisfying, but that’s all I could do.
As cheating features quite heavily in the film races, I’ve deliberately allowed for it in the game. If you use your car’s jump facility carefully, there are a number of places you can take shortcuts by jumping sections of track. It’s risky of course – you stand a fair chance of falling off the track instead of saving time, but that’s good for ballance.
There’s an issue with the pace of the game and some of the cars. If the player picks one of the faster cars, it’s hard to see what’s coming and to keep the car on the track whilst cornering. Falling off track is punishing to your time at least, but doesn’t throw you out of the race because it’s really rather easy to do. If you opt for a slower, more controllable car, you stand less chance of keeping up overall.
Performance is vital in a game like this. Keeping the framerate high was always a priority, right from the beginning. There’s a huge amount of stuff bitmap-cached to aid this. The background is a short loop, scrolled around as required and flipped to the other side of the loop when needed. There are a few layers of it, but each is just a series of bitmap cached effects. The track itself is created from segments at the start of the game. The track exists as metadata in the code, as a simple array of segment IDs. The IDs are itterated as the track is created at the start, and each segment is instantiated into its own movieclip from an end-marker clip in the previous segment, then bitmap-cached. This allows for much bigger tracks, as it neatly gets round the 2880px bitmap limits by having lots of smaller ones instead. It does take a while to produce the track at the start though. This is what’s happening behind the silver “creating track” screen before the race. Without the bitmap caching, the length of time that screen appears for (several seconds on most machines) would happen to be the in-game framerate too!
Generating the track in segments gives me a nice convenient way to tell how far through the track each car is. They are hit-tested against the segment they are in and the next one too, and their position is updated when they are in the ‘next’ segment. If they are over no piece of track, their position is hit-tested against all segments as they may be about to perform a shortcut jump. Whilst in the air however, they are considered to be on the piece of track they last touched. That’s where they get reset to if they crash, and where they are positioned in terms of the race order.
Lessons:
I built a PHP gallery for the Blade Runner origami competition. It was a fairly decent online gallery that allows people to upload images, see them as thumbnails, rate pictures and report inappropriate entries.
The competition wasn’t entered by a lot of people (the instructions for the origami were complicated and hard to follow), but the site is still quite a nice piece of work.
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