The creative director from Lovers (London) really wanted rich, textured, organic and layered animation - ideally suited to video. Unfourtunatly we didn't have video banners spots available, so I had to use all the tricks in the book to get the CD's lush vision squeezed into serveral formats at very small filesizes. It worked out well in the end and the files don't waste a single byte!

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I seem to have an X'mas tradition of making some fun little "cracker pull" games for 3 popular restaurants in the Mitchells & Butlers' stable: Toby Carvery, Harvester, and Stonehouse.

Working for the 3rd Christmas in a row with the loverly people at One/Fifty Consultancy to bring a little X'mas cheer to all the customers in the form of a little cracker game that gives them a new restaurant voucher each week and also an unlimited amount of cheesy festive jokes!

As this is the third year running these games (and I love making analytics KPIs) we can get some insight in the user habits when playing the games. Each year the games surpass 2 million vouchers claimed which obviously make the user and the client very happy. I’m not as happy as I can see most people are there for the vouchers and no where near enough come purely for the X’mas jokes! …although I may have skewed the analytics on this one 😉

The games are embedded in the restaurants’ app from where the user gets to play against their friend to win the voucher …or just sneakily play it alone to make sure you get the bonus! I developed the game play, animation and also the backend API that saves which users have won that week to make sure no one gets too greedy.

The game also then jumps off to a holiday competition from Jet2 Holidays and also branded filters for Insta and TikTok.

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The Vulcans need to recolonise the planet, you are put at the helm in charge of selecting the perfect place for the construction and surveying that needs to be done on the planet's surface. Once again working with people at Harkable and this time with a great illustrator called Guy Warley, I used my developer skills to create the game application and good old fashioned animations (I'd almost forgot all about character walk cycles and smoke effects! It is a refreshing change to be utilised as a freelance animator as well as a freelance developer). A new mission was released each day of the month. My application build was nice and dynamic so handled every new day easily thanks to a nice back-end that talked nicely with the game. As play progressed over the days the landscape built up as the levels progressed - remember that mine we built on level 15, well it is now up and running and looks great. The user can drag around the map or just use the mini-map to click to that position. As the terrain develops my code takes into account the areas where you can and can't build or prospect anymore - there is no point trying to land your ship in the water or on the side of a mountain!

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What could be better for Christmas than a personal video from Michael Bublé? How about two videos!
I worked with Harkable on this video mapping Facebook app. The user gets to give Michael a present to unwrap; a photo of themselves or a friend. Then a 'good' ending or a 'bad' ending is chosen depending what reaction you would like from Mr Bublé. The good ending will make every Michael Bublé fan happy as he kisses your chosen photo which I (after brushing off my video motion tracking skills) magically motion tracked into the picture frame on the video in real time.
A nice little twist, which is a testament to Bublé's humour, is that you can also have an 'unhappy' ending. I won't give it away but needless to say Michael is not happy with his photo present, but it a great way to tease a non-Bublé fan, ...if you can find one.

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Working once again with very nice people at Yomego design agency I created this Facebook app for Tesco. The player gets to play the part of unsung heroes that pack your online delivery by grabbing the items from a conveyor belt of products for 4 customers at the same time.

Each level gets faster and harder which would be OK if it wasn't for the random punctures and heavy traffic! Strangely addictive and I'm still not sure why, but then again I don't understand shopping either ;) Statistics time:
-100k plays in (just over) the first month
- the average user playing 16 times
- nearly 200 players playing the game for over 6 hours (100+ times)
- 1 player has played over 1200 times, that is nearly 3 days worth of game play!

With so many people playing such a 'sticky' game it is a good job we tested thoroughly before turning it out into the wild.

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I coded 2 in banner games for the launch of GI Joe the movie. In HALO dropzone you take control of our hero as he jumps high altitude and avoids the sky mines and flak on the way down. In Tank Commander you get a tank to fight your way through the village and out to safety.

A few cool extra touches on these games are the smoke fumes that change colour and opacity based on the revs of the diesel engine and the real physics of the drive tracks. No one asked for them, and it's a bit geeky, but I like it.

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