The hour long plan has notes and a slide show to accompany it and it takes you through the basics of a platform game, with items to collect, level progression and bad guys. It was great going through it twice as I found a few typos to neaten up, but most importantly it was perfect for the job. It was the right amount of time and depth of information for an introduction to Game Maker. The two girls now understood what was going on behind the scenes of games. It is important to note they only had five minutes max in the session to draw out the characters as this was not Game Design, but game programming. Despite this constraint they managed to make some lovely little characters.

The lesson plan is only an introduction it doesn’t feature sound, backgrounds or animation those things however should become fairly obvious after working your way through the lesson. Many thanks to YoYoGames for sponsoring Creative Computing Club with a copy of their excellent software and thanks to all those who helped fund it, it is going to be an amazing project.

Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Photo by PeriniNetworks used under a Creative Commons License.

It was nice to work with a group of people who are very passionate about the work they do, the GLA staff were helpful, friendly and polite at every stage. Opening up your work place to a group of “hackers” can sound a bit risky but all of the developers/designers brought in by Rewired State soon proved their worth. Tearing through .xls spreadsheets that were too big in some cases to be opened by some software/hardware combinations, the hackers were able to look at the data with a fresh approach, not only to its use but also its possible future collection.

For the event I put one forward one hack on my own and one with Josh Pickett  @lordjawsh on Twitter.

Tree-o-pets

Tree-o-pets was a mobile phone app which allowed users to plant virtual trees using GPS and Augmented Reality. The premise is a simple one you take your phone to a place you want to plant a tree, plant it and return to care for it, you could also share your plants location via Facebook and Twitter. You had to take care of your tree as anyone logging on to the webpage or in to the app could see it’s owner and how well you care for it. The initial data was based on where Mayor Boris Johnson plans to plant his future trees.

Your Journey

I wanted to create a way to explain and to get people to engage with the data the GLA have on various environmental topics.

Your Journey was a 90 second video game on the iPhone which provided as snapshot of the postcode you gave it.

As “Boris” you cycle through the city, collecting rubbish, avoiding potholes and caring for the specially planted “Boris Trees”. The data from the GLA was used to piece together how many trees and how many recycling bins you saw in you 90 second journey. The clouds were coloured and calculated by the air quality data, notable public buildings which the GLA had power consumption date on were also pointed out to you on your journey.

It was lovely to take part it, was also nice to win an award for “Your Journey” for “Most Innovative Use of Environmental Data”. There were some excellent other projects with “100ktrees.com” coming up top trumps literally in the overall best prize. “Got Wood?” was also great social app helping you locate your nearest tree and “check in”. It was a long two days for me commuting from Ipswich and working til very late but it was worth it.

Well done Adam McGreggor @adamamyl and Emma Mulqueeny @hubmum for organising another great and successful event and well done for GLA for taking those bold first steps to opening up the vast amounts of data they have. There were some interesting and useful points very raised by the “hackers” which will hopefully benefit GLA further in their future work.

It was also very nice to work at City Hall.

It was also nice to see some of my former students and see how they are progressing as designers and their keeness to point out their use of sound in their new creations. More info on the event can be found here and here with details of the winners.

I wish them all the best and look forward to working with them in the future.

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.

The Young Rewired State team was fantastic and Microsoft was wonderful to visit.

The second half of the lecture broke down three Xbox 360 games, their use of music and sound as part of the narrative and  game play.

The session ended with a small bit of Foley work showing them how simple it can be to make sound effects for their films and video games using everyday household items, I look forward to hearing the feedback from the other tutors and to see if some of them take up the challenge to make their own sounds for their games. A big thanks to Steven Harris at Anglia Ruskin for organising the sessions.

Good fun was had by all very pleased the are turning up on time and “return in greater numbers” to quote Obi-wan.

Next week it is al about zombies, video games and the history of video game music.