I haven’t blogged about this group because I blogged about the first group in detail, but these guy are certainly worth mentioning as they are a group of 12 7-year-old game designers and they have been spot on with their work.

When making games with students I let them use a bit of custom graphics software that I have coded (in Processing) it doesn’t have a name, but it does a lot. Firstly, I give each student a number, they put that in and it automatically saves all files with that number in the title i.e. good1.PNG for the good guy so I know it belongs to student number 1. It is extremely useful when dealing with so many graphics from so many games. Secondly it saves everything for them,  generates a background colour and crops the images for compositing later when put into the game engine. Thirdly it limits the graphic size 64×64 pixels maximum keeping the game retro in style and finally it only allows the use of 16 colours again for making it all very retro. Very simply you click a colour and click where you want it to go, one pixel at a time, sound laborious but it make the students really think about each one of their pixels when transferring their paper sketches into a computer.

But there is one thing it doesn’t do.

A lot of the games in this group for some reason or another feature doughnuts, subconsciously it entered the minds of around five of the twelve game designers and now we have them in the games. Repeatedly throughout the session I was asked “How do you draw a circle?” which struck me as odd. Odd because I grew up in pixels, I have been sketching out characters on graph paper since the 80′s (I spent most of my school days drawing sprites btw). So I had to stop the lesson and explain how to draw circle one pixel at a time. It turns out that the students are very fluent in Microsoft Paint which is great and some of them have even ventured in to Adobe Photoshop which is fantastic, the more varied software the better. The one thing these wonderful pieces of software feature is pre-made shapes that you can re-size. It was a wonderful “digital” moment, but is this a skill that has been lost? Drawing the doughnuts was tricky because they were circles with smaller circles in them, but we got through it. The question is are “hand-made” graphics becoming a lost skill?

I am certainly not about to add circles and squares to the software, because I really want them to think about how each pixel effects the overall sprite design, but this was an unintended bonus in terms of preserving a “old school” way of doing things.

I always like to have a plan, in fact most of my 2012 is already planned out and I have some cool things coming up.

A lot of you may have noticed I have moved away from being “Pixelh8″, I still am “Pixelh8″ I am just more interested in promoting, facilitating and helping others be creative, I have always done this, it is just my main focus now. Whether it be making or performing music, designing or programming games or creating stop frame animation. 2012 is going to be about helping others create. There are two reasons for this;

1) I have had five years of fun, making and promoting myself as Pixelh8 it would be nice to now help others.

2) I am starting my PhD in “Educational Music Technology” all my research will be focused on helping to get others involved in music performance and creation.

There are already some great events I am booked for in 2012, Games Britania a game making festival in Rotherham which is building year on year, HESFES home educating festival where i’ll be designing games in a field, BACON a two day technology conference, British Museum workshops, St. Albans game design week, Young Rewired State 2012 and working with IP1 and The Mix to deliver so unique music making workshops. Don’t panic if I have missed anything. The full list albeit amazing is quite long indeed.

This doesn’t include the two patents, several conferences, maybe another published paper, being in a book about music, making all of my existing iPhone Apps HD for the iPad, “OCARBOT 2″ and “Cross-side” for iPhone, helping my ex-degree students publish some XBOX 360 games, jumping out an airplane and sending something else into space. 2012 will be busy.

Of course this is just the “plan” things will change. “OCARBOT EDU” has been slightly delayed to fix a few things here and there; try and trim the 134MB distribution size, allow myself a chance to recharge my batteries and to play on some new games and software over christmas.

Hopefully I’ll bump in to you in 2012 either in real life or on twitter, @pixelh8. Either way I hope 2011 was good for you and that 2012 will be even better. If you need me for anything just drop me a line.

Today was the last of this groups game design sessions, with the group of  “future game designers”.

I have to say this first before I move on to the rest of the blog, they were an excellent group and it was a real privilege to work with them over a extended period of time.

Today was just inputting the rest of the level designs in to the game engine and finishing the game boxes (see picture), although they didn’t get to play on the game, they did get to see what it looks like on a huge screen. The game will be presented to them on CD tomorrow morning in assembly and I hope they feel proud of what they have acheived when they collect them.

We also had a long discussion about the project as a whole; what they liked, what they didn’t, what could be improved over time. I explained to them, that the only difference between what they did in these sessions and what professional game makers do, is have more time. They had 10 hours in total to create a concept, design it and create it as well as consider the marketing behind it.  I then went on to explain that 10 hours is something that a professional game maker may spend on creating a tiny element in a game like a layout of an options screen. The other factor I got them to consider was they were working alone on this project (except for one pair), in some major games there are hundreds of  people involved, designers programmers, designers, musicians, marketing. They were year 6 students and they made a whole game in 10 hours.

I hope more than anything, they have gained confidence from these sessions, this is another thing they “can do”, this “is” an option for them in their future. There are so many great game companies in the UK I know some of these students are destined to be their future designers.

Another good session with the students from Springfield Junior School today. It was the day they got to see their game come to life inside the games engine and input the level design. One by one they took turns inputting the objects into the game map while the others designed their DVD case for their games (see picture, “Spark World”) just one of twelve platform games made during these sessions.

It was probably a combination of seeing their game characters move around and it drawing ever closer to christmas that had them all excited, but still they all maintained their ability to focus and pull off some amazing work.

One student remarked that these sessions were unlike normal ICT sessions and were “cooler and more fun” and as a class we reflected on this noting that all the skills we were using in these sessions were actually “borrowed” from other lessons; Physics to control the character and the gravity, English to write the story and keep a diary, Art to design the characters, Physical Education even helped in establishing rules of play. It goes on, and it turns out the things they learned in the other ICT lessons were just as important as it allowed them to know how save things in the correct format and to be confident in using a computer. I am very pleased how much they are learning and how much they are able to vocalise what they have learned and even disect it like we did today.

The other discussion that followed was another one about skills with some students suggesting they are better at ideas or art or using computers, so we discussed if they would like to do the sessions again in the future but all as one group working on the same game. Running the sessions like a big game studio with each student in a specific role. Again it was interesting to see them jump at the chance of delegating and discussing what roles they could have in the new game company as well as suggesting ideas like doing research in the playground to help decide what kind of games should be made.

I always end the session with them writing in their “Game Design Diary” and reiterating what we’ve done and what we are going to do next week.

Next week we are simply going to play on the game and review the whole process. I am hopefully gonna do some audio recordings next week  of their experiences and edit it together with footage of their games and pictures of their work, so they also have a video to remind them of just how much they have achieved over these five sessions.

Session 3 of the Game project was all about the graphics, taking them from the sketches and drawing them into the graphics software I have developed for retro style games. Drawing out the “Good Guy”, “Bad Guy”,” Item” and “Platform” as well as the background  in a separate editor all ready to be put in and tested in the game engine next week.

The students began to realise the value of making them draw several sketches of their characters and their respective worlds when they began “reducing them” in to 64X64 pixel sprites. It is really good doing a project over several weeks with a group of students, seeing how the develop their ideas over time instead of within a short one day session.

As always the students were friendly, polite and most important inquisitive, I think they are beginning to look at the games they play and think, “I can do that”.

I was very fortunate to be asked to be one of the “cutting edge” developers at the Power of Minds Hack with Honda, organised by Rewired State, in one word it was” excellent”. The concept was simple get 23 developers of various talents (art, music, coders and designers) and 10 of Hondas impressive “Cultural Engineers” and explore Hondas well documented ethos. We had approximately 48hours to think up and demonstrate an idea/product/piece of art inspired by these philosophies.

I was involved in two projects, both inrelation to it deployment on the iPhone “bikeAlert” alongside Emily Christie, Sym Roe and Kevin Fong a system allowing HGVs to become aware of cyclists. You can read all about it here.

My pet project was “SonarCycle” a simple app that transmits a Bluetooth signal to cars alerting them of cyclist being near. You can read more about it here.

There were loads of truly amazing ideas and you can read them about them all here. Do look at the outcomes they are fantastic. Today we presented our ideas to a panel to compete for a prize fund to develop the idea further, fortunately “bikeAlert” won best Design! and will go before a public vote shortly against three very worthy ideas.

I really enjoyed myself it is the first of this type of event which just allowed us to get on with the work, food, accomodation and wi-fi were all sorted out for us, we just had to think and create. It was amusing for me being a Guardian reader to use the Guardian Newspapers office as a kind of hack-space and we certainly made it our home for the two days. I got to meet loads of lovely and talented people most of which can be found on Twitter. @thehodge (inspirational work, excellent bloke)  @rainycat (cool wearable technology, lovely lady) @Yummity (fellow designer, who shared several ideas on music making which was spooky),  @symroe (coder and fellow beard master),  @Kevin_Fong  (“our” cultural engineer and excellent converstionalist),  @lawrencejob (brilliant ideas, will undoubtedly do well), @1jh (made me feel old, but very hopeful for technology).

My only regret is I didn’t get to speak to more of them more, but in all fairness we all had excellent ideas to work on.

Thanks to @rainycat for the picture.

I am pleased to announce the free download of the “OCARBOT Soundtrack”, only for a week though. The seven track soundtrack follows “OCARBOT” on his adventures after his escape from the factory and also includes one out-take not used in the game. No longer available for download.

The game will be released soon on the iPhone® and XBOX 360 (others TBC).

Please note this is the soundtrack for the handheld version of the game and not the console versions. Hope you enjoy it, tell us what you think on @pixelh8. This music is Copyright 2011 Hidden Youth Records UK /Room 1 Studios (DO NOT UPLOAD OR FILESHARE)

I was fortunate to run not one, but two Retro Game Design Workshops at The British Museum in London yesterday. Using specially created software using processing. I was able to limit the designers to 16 colours and sprites of 64X64 to give it that authentic retro feel. The game designs were varied and wacky as always.

MicroSynth for the Apple iPhone® is exactly that, a tiny synth based on a wonderful the BBC Micro Computer which is now on the verge of being 30 years old! All of the sounds you hear are actual samples taken from one of my real Micros and all of the sounds were also programmed by me. I hope you you enjoy making music with this MicroSynth.

The App is avaiolable now from the app store here,  you can also download all of the sounds that are included in the App for use in your own music or whatever here. BBCMICROSOUNDS ZIP FILE (6.13 MB) release under Creative Commons License

Pixelh8 BBC Micro Sounds by Pixelh8 / Matthew C. Applegate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Closer to September 30th, 2011 the BBC Micros 30th Birthday I will be releasing my archive of several hundred almost a thousand retro sounds made with my BBC Micro free for you to use.

Make Music, make friends, have fun.

Pixelh8

Machine #69 is a ‘fractured digital experience’ created from the pages of a novel in process. It half-tells the story of a time-traveling salesman who is trying to save the world in the 1960s, but the machine he’s using, Machine #69, is malfunctioning.

Using photography, narration, music, animation and design, Machine #69 tumbles you into the confusing flood of events that the narrator is trying make sense of, with splinters of time and fragmented events building into larger picture of violence, 1960s counter-culture and confused air-conditioning salesmen.

The app was conceived and put together by novelist Mark Wernham, whose first novel, Martin Martin’s On The Other Side was published in 2008 and shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. The app features original music by Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, and was coded by chip tune legend and multidisciplinary artist Matthew C Applegate, aka Pixelh8.