December 13th, 2010
By Brenda Brathwaite
[Editor's note: Brenda Brathwaite is a game designer with over 20 years of experience and credits on classic titles like Jagged Alliance and the Wizardry series. She is currently creative director at social game developer LOLapps.]
The most exclusive game on Facebook is also the most lucrative and intense: the game design of the games themselves. For designers in the space, particularly those from the traditional game industry, game design has become its own game, complete with a leaderboard.
“Every night at midnight, I check AppData,” says John Romero, a veteran video game designer, consultant and lead designer of Ravenwood Fair. The site has become a de facto leaderboard for many developers, backed up by weekly top games lists.
Imbued by a deep love of game play, many designers view social game design, and the competition it creates with other designers, as a real-time strategy game, complete with in-depth stats and armies composed of coders, artists, animators and product managers. Indeed, our ability to respond to the current state of the game — both the actual game on Facebook and the larger meta game of game design — is critical.
Don Daglow, another veteran game designer, watches the numbers like a general. “Social game design is unique,” he says, “because you get a score for every facet of your performance every day. It’s like SEO on speed. How many first-time players came back the next day after the latest tutorial tweaks? What’s our DAU? How is monetization changing since we adjusted item prices? Did the test players like the new gorilla suit costume? All of business is a game, but the social games business has 24-hour scoreboards on every corner.”
As much as we respond to the player behavior in our games, game designers also must respond to the other “players” in the meta game of design, too. If one player makes a move, invents a particularly clever tactic or introduces a new mechanic or theme, the other “players” respond accordingly by trying out the move themselves, watching their ARPU or doing recon behind enemy lines. The mass proliferation of games about farming, cooking, and running resorts serve as perfect examples.
The idea of game design as a game in itself first occurred to me in an active, front-of-the-brain kind of way when I was on stage at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco with fellow game designers Steve Meretzky, VP of game design at Playdom, Brian Reynolds, chief game designer at Zynga, and Noah Falstein, president of The Inspiracy. We were there to talk as video game veterans who had entered the social game space. As the room began to fill, we talked of the things we’ve talked of for the decades we’ve known one another, but there was something else there, too: a new gamestate between us.
Brian was the obvious current leader at Zynga, and every day, his numbers just kept rising. As we talked of the games we were working on, our numbers and, in a veiled way, our future plans, it quickly became apparent that our conversation had all the earmarks of hardcore board game players yapping about their current gamestate while keeping their next move carefully guarded. That we four actually do regularly play board games together made the comparison all the more obvious, amusing and interesting. “Finally, game design is a game,” I said to the audience. It was promptly tweeted and retweeted dozens of times.
Says Falstein, “I look at my design job partly as a social status issue with my fellow designers. I want to improve the best of their games’ features while adding my own innovations, thereby earning status points at our next board game party, as well as earning RMT equivalents for my client – and therefore, me too.” Meretzky even jokingly alluded to the resource management that happens behind closed doors. “I beg my co-workers for resources. After asking four or five times, I often have everything I need to complete a task!” The rush and instant feedback is particularly exciting for game designers entering the space after years in the traditional AAA console game industry.
“Good games have regular feedback loops and social game development has these in spades,” says John Passfield, creative director at 3 Blokes Studios. “The majority of time in traditional game development is spent building a game behind closed doors which is more like training for the Olympics. Whereas social game development puts you smack in the middle of a full season where you’re constantly adjusting your game by listening to your coach (product manager), watching the other team and playing to the fans. It’s about being in the moment, not preparing for the moment.”
That moment, that hour and that day, each allows for iteration and tweaking of the meta-game state and a hopeful resultant climb in DAU. Quick to compare it to his own game, Reynolds said, “Every week I harvest my features and plant some more, and then we run around collecting all the doobers!”
From a game designer’s perspective, it is a wonderful, exciting time to be a “player” in the game of game design. The play space feels wide open, like a game of Civilization Revolution only a few minutes in, with lots of room to explore and many things to discover. Games are being made with small teams about unique topics for new audiences, and in many ways, say the game industry vets, it feels like 1981 again. It is good, too, that we remember 1983, the year of the North American video game crash, and can adjust our strategy accordingly.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Lead a project to success and avoid the pitfalls; an actual tangible formula for success http://bit.ly/9hvwr8
Friday, August 20, 2010
GameSalad iPhone game released - what we learned along the way
Well, I believe I am officially at the end of my first mobile game building experience. What a journey it has been. I started the project in January and now nearing the end of August, Bucky Challenge version 1.4 is out and ready for download in the iTunes App Store.
You may have noticed that I wrote version 1.4. It is true we did have corrections and it lead to four versions of our app being released. Much of it because we had great difficulty loading the game in an external device for testing. I have made the point of testing in the previous entry and I do know better than to release a game before testing it. However, we were under a time crunch because we had a news article about the game approaching publication.
Now as I look back over the eight months, I have some final thoughts regarding the things we learned while building the game.
1. We did choose to use command buttons to control actor actions in three of our levels. I believe this to be a less effective use of the iPhone environment. I would not recommend placing command buttons within a game for iPhone for several reasons. (a) Buttons eat into the screen real estate. The size of the buttons need to be large enough to accomodate fingertips of all sizes. (b) Buttons are a bit difficult to navigate on the device. (c) iPhone uses touch and accelerometer features that do work best on the iPhone, thus buttons seem antiquated. (d) The use of the buttons did cause in one case the iTouch device to turn off because of the location of the power button on the device being where the user places her hands. While holding the device, the player can accidentally click into a black screen saver mode, thus interfering with the game play. We never considered the possibility when we made the app and it didn't show up during the testing of the game. Fortunately, it is rare.
2. It is extremely important that all PNGs be "save for web" to reduce their size. Actors and elements should be less than 100kb with backgrounds no more than 300kb.
3. DO NOT build the game on several computers. We hade five team members each building a level on their own computer believing we could migrate to one computer and stitch the game together, but that does not work. GS provides original actor ID numbers for each element individually dedicated to one project. These do not copy over into a new project. We had to REBUILD each level and import all images into a new game to stitch them together.
4. GameSalad has its quirks and acts much like a beta, so do plan to experience some delays, crashes, and frustration. It takes a while to understand the game building psychology behind the program. Whereas, the GS forums do provide fairly quick responses to questions, the forums are not organized in a concise way by topic, issue, problem or error. It's time consuming navigating the forums for answers addressing specific problems. GS does have a number of tutorials (print and video), but there is no book on the software and many issues are difficult to find answers for. Beware, some answers provided in the forums are obsolete due to GS upgrades and may no longer be relevant or accurate, but they are still listed among the entries.
5. Do test your game on a device before publishing it because the game will not necessarily work according to the computer simulator generated version. It may work perfectly on the simulator, but not on the external device during testing. Furthermore, we experienced tremendous difficulty getting our game to play on an external device. Initially, we thought it was due to the Mac OS and Xcode versions not agreeing with each other, however, after considerable time installing Snow Leopard and the latest version of Xcode we were still unable to get the game to play. As a work-around we uninstalled Xcode and reinstalled Xcode several times. Eventually, it worked, but we never understood how it corrected itself or what was truly the problem.
Ultimately, we are very pleased with our game. It is the first of it's kind (sports game)for our University. Each team member can take pride in the knowledge they have contributed to the great iTunes App Store. There is a true sense of accomplishment seeing the game on display in the store, watching other people playing it, and learning from people we don't know that they downloaded it. That's so exciting. I believe it was a successful project, well worth the effort, and GameSalad was a good program choice.
In addition, we want to thank the people at GamesSalad, especially Jonanthan Samm, for helping us through some tricky issues.
We encourage and do hope that you, the reader, will download our game and provide feedback at iTunes or here on this blog. Just plug in Bucky Challenge in the search bar and Viola!. Please, cull through this blog's past entries when building your GS game for some troubleshooting advice and examples of challenges we faced. I truly hope this blog is of use to others.
As I turn my attention to the future, I have decided to build another app. I am looking at building a social network game for Facebook. Yep, you read that right. Initially, I spent some time looking for a SDK program specifically designed for or by Facebook, however, it is woefully sparse. That came as a shocker. Let's not forget, I am not a programmer by trade and the primary point of this blog is to document my experience as a Novice App Builder, using turnkey programs to build apps.
I have found one program. The Appainter program at http://www.appainter.com looks promising. If I choose to use that program it will become the next focus of this blog. I believe Facebook apps are extremely interesting to people and there doesn't seem to be a lot of straightforward information. (I could be wrong.)
So, onward and upward.
You may have noticed that I wrote version 1.4. It is true we did have corrections and it lead to four versions of our app being released. Much of it because we had great difficulty loading the game in an external device for testing. I have made the point of testing in the previous entry and I do know better than to release a game before testing it. However, we were under a time crunch because we had a news article about the game approaching publication.
Now as I look back over the eight months, I have some final thoughts regarding the things we learned while building the game.
1. We did choose to use command buttons to control actor actions in three of our levels. I believe this to be a less effective use of the iPhone environment. I would not recommend placing command buttons within a game for iPhone for several reasons. (a) Buttons eat into the screen real estate. The size of the buttons need to be large enough to accomodate fingertips of all sizes. (b) Buttons are a bit difficult to navigate on the device. (c) iPhone uses touch and accelerometer features that do work best on the iPhone, thus buttons seem antiquated. (d) The use of the buttons did cause in one case the iTouch device to turn off because of the location of the power button on the device being where the user places her hands. While holding the device, the player can accidentally click into a black screen saver mode, thus interfering with the game play. We never considered the possibility when we made the app and it didn't show up during the testing of the game. Fortunately, it is rare.
2. It is extremely important that all PNGs be "save for web" to reduce their size. Actors and elements should be less than 100kb with backgrounds no more than 300kb.
3. DO NOT build the game on several computers. We hade five team members each building a level on their own computer believing we could migrate to one computer and stitch the game together, but that does not work. GS provides original actor ID numbers for each element individually dedicated to one project. These do not copy over into a new project. We had to REBUILD each level and import all images into a new game to stitch them together.
4. GameSalad has its quirks and acts much like a beta, so do plan to experience some delays, crashes, and frustration. It takes a while to understand the game building psychology behind the program. Whereas, the GS forums do provide fairly quick responses to questions, the forums are not organized in a concise way by topic, issue, problem or error. It's time consuming navigating the forums for answers addressing specific problems. GS does have a number of tutorials (print and video), but there is no book on the software and many issues are difficult to find answers for. Beware, some answers provided in the forums are obsolete due to GS upgrades and may no longer be relevant or accurate, but they are still listed among the entries.
5. Do test your game on a device before publishing it because the game will not necessarily work according to the computer simulator generated version. It may work perfectly on the simulator, but not on the external device during testing. Furthermore, we experienced tremendous difficulty getting our game to play on an external device. Initially, we thought it was due to the Mac OS and Xcode versions not agreeing with each other, however, after considerable time installing Snow Leopard and the latest version of Xcode we were still unable to get the game to play. As a work-around we uninstalled Xcode and reinstalled Xcode several times. Eventually, it worked, but we never understood how it corrected itself or what was truly the problem.
Ultimately, we are very pleased with our game. It is the first of it's kind (sports game)for our University. Each team member can take pride in the knowledge they have contributed to the great iTunes App Store. There is a true sense of accomplishment seeing the game on display in the store, watching other people playing it, and learning from people we don't know that they downloaded it. That's so exciting. I believe it was a successful project, well worth the effort, and GameSalad was a good program choice.
In addition, we want to thank the people at GamesSalad, especially Jonanthan Samm, for helping us through some tricky issues.
We encourage and do hope that you, the reader, will download our game and provide feedback at iTunes or here on this blog. Just plug in Bucky Challenge in the search bar and Viola!. Please, cull through this blog's past entries when building your GS game for some troubleshooting advice and examples of challenges we faced. I truly hope this blog is of use to others.
As I turn my attention to the future, I have decided to build another app. I am looking at building a social network game for Facebook. Yep, you read that right. Initially, I spent some time looking for a SDK program specifically designed for or by Facebook, however, it is woefully sparse. That came as a shocker. Let's not forget, I am not a programmer by trade and the primary point of this blog is to document my experience as a Novice App Builder, using turnkey programs to build apps.
I have found one program. The Appainter program at http://www.appainter.com looks promising. If I choose to use that program it will become the next focus of this blog. I believe Facebook apps are extremely interesting to people and there doesn't seem to be a lot of straightforward information. (I could be wrong.)
So, onward and upward.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Boom! It works! GameSalad success.
Our previous entry addresses the difficulty we had, and our conclusion that we would not be able to test our game on an external device. It was so frustrating. We had installed and reinstalled Xcode, but to no avail. James Hernandez, our technical engineer, picks up the thread from here...
With some help from Jonathan Samm at GS, today was a new day and another attempt at getting Gamesalad's viewer to install on our iPhone device and get it to talk with the GS creator.
I consulted with John about our issues. He wanted to make sure all our software and devices were updated. I assured him that Xcode had been reinstalled numerous times, new networks created, and no luck. After confirming that everything was updated, the next step was to once again build and go to see if anything had changed.
The GS viewer installed onto our device but, once again, the device could not locate the GS creator on the network. We confirmed that our device and computer were recieving Wi-Fi from the same campus network, but the two machines would not talk to each other. We tried to get the simulator to work, but some errors were found. NOTE: The simulator had been working fine the day before, so these errors were odd.
Jonathan then suggested we install Xcode again. The next step was to delete all Xcode and the GamesaladViewer.xcodeproj files and re-install them. This is important, I can't stress it enough to reinstall Xcode when the device reads, "Waiting for Connection" for a while then displays the following error: "Gamesalad Creator not located on network."
After this was completed, our provisioning profile was re-downloaded and installed into Xcode. I clicked "build and go" and the simulator was up and running. Now it was time to try the device again. After the Xcode drop-down menu was changed to device from simulator I pressed build and go and the viewer was installing onto our device. After the viewer was "waiting for connection" for a few seconds the "GS creator was not located on the network" error displayed again!
John then asked if I tried creating a network within the computer for the device to connect to. As you all recall from yesterday's post, we tried unsuccessfully to create a network which I let John know. I tried once again to create a new network. BOOM! the network connection worked! A new day brings new surprises.
NOTE: It is important to note that nothing had changed about the process from one day to the next. These were all the same steps taken previously, but for some reason they worked today whereas they had not before.
I pressed build and go and the viewer on our device located the GS creator and we were off playing our game on the device.
Our game played through with minor issues that we could not see in the simulator, but showed up on the device. This is important: The game you build in GS will not behave perfectly in the device. There are subtle differences that affect the game in the device.
The lessons of the story would be, if all else fails clean the slate and start fresh.
With some help from Jonathan Samm at GS, today was a new day and another attempt at getting Gamesalad's viewer to install on our iPhone device and get it to talk with the GS creator.
I consulted with John about our issues. He wanted to make sure all our software and devices were updated. I assured him that Xcode had been reinstalled numerous times, new networks created, and no luck. After confirming that everything was updated, the next step was to once again build and go to see if anything had changed.
The GS viewer installed onto our device but, once again, the device could not locate the GS creator on the network. We confirmed that our device and computer were recieving Wi-Fi from the same campus network, but the two machines would not talk to each other. We tried to get the simulator to work, but some errors were found. NOTE: The simulator had been working fine the day before, so these errors were odd.
Jonathan then suggested we install Xcode again. The next step was to delete all Xcode and the GamesaladViewer.xcodeproj files and re-install them. This is important, I can't stress it enough to reinstall Xcode when the device reads, "Waiting for Connection" for a while then displays the following error: "Gamesalad Creator not located on network."
After this was completed, our provisioning profile was re-downloaded and installed into Xcode. I clicked "build and go" and the simulator was up and running. Now it was time to try the device again. After the Xcode drop-down menu was changed to device from simulator I pressed build and go and the viewer was installing onto our device. After the viewer was "waiting for connection" for a few seconds the "GS creator was not located on the network" error displayed again!
John then asked if I tried creating a network within the computer for the device to connect to. As you all recall from yesterday's post, we tried unsuccessfully to create a network which I let John know. I tried once again to create a new network. BOOM! the network connection worked! A new day brings new surprises.
NOTE: It is important to note that nothing had changed about the process from one day to the next. These were all the same steps taken previously, but for some reason they worked today whereas they had not before.
I pressed build and go and the viewer on our device located the GS creator and we were off playing our game on the device.
Our game played through with minor issues that we could not see in the simulator, but showed up on the device. This is important: The game you build in GS will not behave perfectly in the device. There are subtle differences that affect the game in the device.
The lessons of the story would be, if all else fails clean the slate and start fresh.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Impossible for us to test our GameSalad game before releasing it
We are still in throes of publishing our game without errors. In my last entry, I fully acknowledged the need to test a game before its release to avoid issues, but despite our best efforts we have not successfully tested our game before releasing it. Below is our account of our efforts and the surprising conclusion we arrived at for why we have been unsuccessful. The following post was written by our Technical Engineer, James Hernandez, recounting the trials and tribulations of our efforts to test the game before its release...
After our second publish to the App store, and after Apple's OS 4.0 migration, our Gamesalad game once again had issues. Some of our images were replaced by white blocks (later we attributed the problem to an image sizing issue). We knew we had to get our game tested on a device and not just the simulator, but Xcode Base SDK did not support our iPod Touch version 3.1.3.
To solve this problem we purchased the Snow Leopard upgrade and installed it along with Xcode 3.2.3 and IOS SDK 4.0.1. After all this was completed and our iPod Touch was connected, Xcode did recognize the device and had no options for version 3.1.3 device support. We made sure that Xcode was properly installed and was located in the MAC HD/Developer/Applications.
We then knew that we needed to get a hold of an iPhone with OS 4.0 installed. Once an iPhone was obtained, we registered it in our iPhone Provisioning Portal under DEVICES. Once this was completed, we then navigated to PROVISIONING and clicked on the Development tab. We modified the provisioning profile we created for testing to include the new device. The profile was then downloaded onto our computer. We double-clicked the downloaded profile which opened in Xcode.
Once Xcode opened, our new iPhone device was recognized and displayed in the Xcode Organizer window. We clicked on the button asking us if we wanted to use the device for developing and then selected the provisioning profile we just downloaded. We closed the Organizer window and opened the GamesaladViewer.xcodeproj file we downloaded from Gamesalad.com. The GS viewer opened within Xcode where we then had to make a few changes in the Info.plist category listed in the Gamesalad Viewer folder.
Note: The Bundle identifier within Info.plist needs to match the Bundle identifier that was created in the provisioning profile in the iPhone Provisioning Portal.
We right-clicked Gamesalad Viewer listed in the left column of Xcode and selected Get Info. Once in the project info window, we made sure that the Base SDK listed matched that of the device or simulator we were testing our game with. We scrolled down to Code Signing/Code Signing Identity/Any iPhone OS Device and selected the developer profile we created in the iPhone Provisioning Portal.
Once back into the main window of Xcode, we made sure that the Overview drop down menu showed that Device - 4.0 was selected and clicked Build and Run. The GS viewer was then successfully installed on our device and was waiting to connect with the GS creator.
However, after al of this preparation to connect the device to the computer for testing, our game couldn't be tested. It opened within the GS creator, but our device never connected with it. Our device stayed at "Waiting for Connection" for a while then displayed the following error: "Gamesalad Creator not located on network." WHA?!
We were so close yet so far from getting our game tested on a device. After upgrading the Mac OS to Snow Leopard, after locating an iPhone with 4.0 installed, after connecting the device and setting up the requirements to "Build and Go", we achieved nothing.
We searched the net and GS forums for help, but ultimately we concluded that the issue might be with our University's wireless network. Our computer and device were both connected to the same wireless connection, but somehow the GS viewer did not recognize the GS creator on the network. The device did not have phone service, but could still access the internet through Wi-Fi.
We tried a numerous options. We created a network from our computer, which the device recognized, but could not connect to the internet. We tried to connect the device through the Bluetooth function, but the device refused to be "discovered." After reading a few more GS forum posts, we concluded that the issue might be with the University's router and/or firewall settings.
In the end, our game is awaiting its third review for the App Store without it being tested on a device despite our best efforts.
After our second publish to the App store, and after Apple's OS 4.0 migration, our Gamesalad game once again had issues. Some of our images were replaced by white blocks (later we attributed the problem to an image sizing issue). We knew we had to get our game tested on a device and not just the simulator, but Xcode Base SDK did not support our iPod Touch version 3.1.3.
To solve this problem we purchased the Snow Leopard upgrade and installed it along with Xcode 3.2.3 and IOS SDK 4.0.1. After all this was completed and our iPod Touch was connected, Xcode did recognize the device and had no options for version 3.1.3 device support. We made sure that Xcode was properly installed and was located in the MAC HD/Developer/Applications.
We then knew that we needed to get a hold of an iPhone with OS 4.0 installed. Once an iPhone was obtained, we registered it in our iPhone Provisioning Portal under DEVICES. Once this was completed, we then navigated to PROVISIONING and clicked on the Development tab. We modified the provisioning profile we created for testing to include the new device. The profile was then downloaded onto our computer. We double-clicked the downloaded profile which opened in Xcode.
Once Xcode opened, our new iPhone device was recognized and displayed in the Xcode Organizer window. We clicked on the button asking us if we wanted to use the device for developing and then selected the provisioning profile we just downloaded. We closed the Organizer window and opened the GamesaladViewer.xcodeproj file we downloaded from Gamesalad.com. The GS viewer opened within Xcode where we then had to make a few changes in the Info.plist category listed in the Gamesalad Viewer folder.
Note: The Bundle identifier within Info.plist needs to match the Bundle identifier that was created in the provisioning profile in the iPhone Provisioning Portal.
We right-clicked Gamesalad Viewer listed in the left column of Xcode and selected Get Info. Once in the project info window, we made sure that the Base SDK listed matched that of the device or simulator we were testing our game with. We scrolled down to Code Signing/Code Signing Identity/Any iPhone OS Device and selected the developer profile we created in the iPhone Provisioning Portal.
Once back into the main window of Xcode, we made sure that the Overview drop down menu showed that Device - 4.0 was selected and clicked Build and Run. The GS viewer was then successfully installed on our device and was waiting to connect with the GS creator.
However, after al of this preparation to connect the device to the computer for testing, our game couldn't be tested. It opened within the GS creator, but our device never connected with it. Our device stayed at "Waiting for Connection" for a while then displayed the following error: "Gamesalad Creator not located on network." WHA?!
We were so close yet so far from getting our game tested on a device. After upgrading the Mac OS to Snow Leopard, after locating an iPhone with 4.0 installed, after connecting the device and setting up the requirements to "Build and Go", we achieved nothing.
We searched the net and GS forums for help, but ultimately we concluded that the issue might be with our University's wireless network. Our computer and device were both connected to the same wireless connection, but somehow the GS viewer did not recognize the GS creator on the network. The device did not have phone service, but could still access the internet through Wi-Fi.
We tried a numerous options. We created a network from our computer, which the device recognized, but could not connect to the internet. We tried to connect the device through the Bluetooth function, but the device refused to be "discovered." After reading a few more GS forum posts, we concluded that the issue might be with the University's router and/or firewall settings.
In the end, our game is awaiting its third review for the App Store without it being tested on a device despite our best efforts.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
New iPhone, iPod Touch game features mascot
http://www.panamericanonline.com/new-iphone-ipod-touch-game-features-mascot-1.2283873http://www.panamericanonline.com/new-iphone-ipod-touch-game-features-mascot-1.2283873
Ever wonder what it would be like to suit up as a school mascot? Now, anyone with access to an iPhone or iPod Touch can take on the role of Bucky, The University of Texas-Pan American’s mascot, when they download the UTPA-themed application from the iTunes app store.
The application, which was created by Reel to Red Productions, is a sports-themed game called “Bucky Challenge,” in which the user guides Bucky through a series of athletic challenges by using the touch screen.
Chelse Benham, the director of Reel to Red and the game’s creative director, led five Reel to Red team members along the journey of creating the game.
“It’s actually a marketing tool to expose the youth to the University,” Benham said. “The idea of doing a game app became interesting because The University of Texas at Austin had a utility app that was popular. It was number seven on the most popular free apps in the iTunes App store. I wanted an iTunes game that could be used to market UTPA.”
The idea behind the app is to expose the public to the University behind the mask of a fun game free to download.
What is novel about “Bucky Challenge” is the entire game takes place on the UTPA campus.
“‘Bucky Challenge’ is a multi-level sports game where we literally took photos of the campus and incorporated those into the game,” Benham explained. “We figure that if it takes someone anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to play the game, what they’re seeing are the real University buildings and signage all that time. At the end of the game, the University’s website is displayed. It’s a new way to market to the youth on their terms.”
Not only are users exposed to images of the campus. A few familiar faces will be present in the game as well.
“The game has humor. It’s meant to be funny. I and our other graphic designer, Hilda Del Rio, made the Reel to Red team into bubblehead characters that can be seen in the game,” said Alexis Carranza, graphic designer and assistant director for Reel to Red. “We also arranged a photo shoot with Ricardo Gonzalez of the Visitors Center who plays Bucky. We did a one-hour photo shoot with him dressed in costume and posing in different sport poses. That was a lot of fun.”
Designing the game was no easy task. The group had no coding or app-building knowledge, and learning the software development kit from Apple to create an app that functions with the iPhone was an enormous undertaking.
“It required learning everything from the human interface guidelines for Apple to trying to learn Xcode, which is C++ and Objective-C-based coding. That’s almost impossible trying to learn overnight and still put a game together,” Benham explained.
After about six weeks of trying to figure out Xcode, Benham’s son assisted the group by informing them of a program called GameSalad, created by Gendai Games. The Austin-based company’s freeware seemed perfect for the team, but it came with software glitches that were almost impossible to solve.
“GameSalad is freeware, but it’s a beta and it’s constantly having problems. It’s hard to work with. There are quirks about it you have to figure out what is causing the problem,” explained James Hernandez, the game’s technical engineer. A beta is software that is in the second stage of testing and is used as a prototype, or preview for potential buyers. It is often free or at a discounted price because it typically contains glitches. “I’m sure it’s much easier on a second game. Mind you, our game is one of the very few being built with GameSalad that’s multi-level.”
Despite the trouble brought on by working with a beta, GameSalad turned out to be a simpler program to work with than Xcode.
“We were kind of discouraged at first working with Xcode, but once GameSalad came along, the game building went from some impossible idea to being a real product in a short period of time,” Del Rio said.
Ultimately, the project was started as a learning curve for the members of Reel to Red.
“There was a lot of trial and error on trying to fix the movements of our characters, especially in the editing portion when we put the levels together and how those levels would interact with each other. It was challenging,” said Hernandez, who initially underestimated the amount of physics that went into the creation of a game.
“It’s just another creative product from Reel to Red where we expand the skill set of the team and showcase the University in a unique way,” Benham said. The group recently won state-wide and international awards for exhibiting the University in a documentary, website, and commercial campaign including a Lone Star Emmy, a Webby People’s Voice Award, and a Telly Award.
Benham documented the entire process of creating the game app in a blog called “The Novice App Builder,” with the hope of aiding others who would like to create a game using GameSalad. The blog can be found at noviceappbuilder.blogspot.com. Screenshots of “Bucky Challenge” are available at www.reeltored.com.Reel to Red Productions website The app is free to download from iTunes.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
UTPA Media Group's Mantle Growing Heavy With Awards
The Monitor.com
by
Click on the editing doors at Reel to Red Productions' Website www.reeltored.com, and you’ll find seven animated commercial spots for the university.
Click on the screening room at the reeltored.com website, and you’ll find trailers for the productions that have won awards for Reel to Red Productions. The program has come a long way since it started in 2004.
“It was an internship program in the office of University relations,” said Chelse Benham, director of Reel to Red Productions and TV specialist V for University Relations at the University of Texas-Pan American.
“It was sort of a student production company inside of the office of university relations,” Benham said. “Really it was an internship program that I kind of set up to give students applicable work experience in TV production. But we have expanded way beyond that. In the last seven months we won a Lone Star Emmy from the state of Texas, a Webby People’s Voice Award, and a Telly.”
The tellyawards.com website says that the Telly Awards “honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the Web.”
Reel to Red Productions won its Telly this year for seven animated commercial spots collectively titled the “Who Knew” campaign behind the editing doors on the organization’s website.
“That’s the one that won in the professional category. We weren’t (competing) against students,” Benham said. “That’s saying a lot because we had zero budget. We didn’t work with any budget. We weren’t competing with other students, so we’re very pleased with the result.”
James Hernandez, 28, worked on the “Who Knew” campaign that won the Telly award.
“All seven campaigns follow certain characters, and there’s a male and female character,” said Hernandez, a public relations and advertising senior at UTPA. He played the male character in the piece Location, Location, Location, which he developed. .
“It’s actually to bring to light a lot of things that maybe some students or potential students knew nothing about the university,” he said. “Hence, Who Knew?”
In the “Location”, students and potential students were shown what was available near campus, such as Mexico and South Padre Island.
“Of course, we have another commercial that was advertising the affordability of Pan-Am compared to other universities,” he said. “Well, Who Knew it was that affordable? And so on and so on. They all follow the same formula, we just emphasize different benefits.”
Numerous students worked on different components of the Who Knew campaign.
“I did the audio,” said Oscar Garza, 28, who just finished his master’s degree in English. He plans to teach but also do free-lance work on the side for video production and media. He’s very proud of his work on the “Who Knew” campaign.
“My feeling toward all that is just an actual sense of accomplishment, kind of like hard does pay off,” Garza said. “It feels like it’s not work. That’s probably the best way I can describe it is, working on these things, it’s not working at all.”
While the Telly award was for the seven commercial spots, the Webby People’s Voice Award this year was for the entire website, Benham said.
“It was global,” she said. “It is the Oscars of the Internet. It awards the best Internet content sites, websites, blogs, globally. And we were in competition with Germany and California and North Carolina and beat them out for the People’s Voice Award and we just returned from New York City on that. And then of course we’ve won two Lone Star Emmy’s for two productions.”
Viewers who click on the screening room will find trailers for the productions that have won Emmys for the organization. The trailer for Dead Letter won an Emmy in 2007.
“It was a trigger film,” Benham said. “A trigger film is what you call a short film dealing with some heavy issues that triggers dialogue with teenagers, or at-risk youth. It’s used as a way of creating conversation and our film was 20 minutes long.”
To make this film, she and some students went to a detention center in Hidalgo County and spoke with 18- and 19-year-old detainees who were fresh in prison or waiting to go into the prison system. There were five issues in the film: teen pregnancy, going to college, substance abuse, teen relationship violence, and drinking and driving.
“Those were the five issues of the film and then with the testimonials we kind of show you what consequences there are if you really make the wrong decision,” Benham said. “And then we created an animated comic book.”
Reel to Red also won an Emmy in 2009 for a documentary called Heart of Experience. In that film, the team from Reel to Red followed a study abroad group that went to Europe.
“That Heart of Experience won a competition in Germany because social media and education was the conference,” Benham said. “It had won because of the shock that our students encountered with things in Europe, especially the Holocaust. And so that documentary is an hour long, and it won the Lone Star Emmy for that. We are very very busy. We do a lot of things.”
The group’s latest project is the Bucky Challenge game that will soon be released on Apple iTunes.
“It’s a 2D five level sports game,” Benham said. “It’s free. It’ll be able to be played by anybody who downloads it. Bucky’s our mascot here at the university, and so we used him and the buildings and various places on campus as our images and created the animation and game aspect in this software program for the iPhone or iTouch, so that once we publish on iTunes, anybody who wants to can download it and they’re gonna play a game that has our mascot and our university and our signage all over it. We’re very excited about that. ”
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
GameSalad - Testing game on external device/Pull app from iTunes
Since I last wrote, we did get our app up, but not running, in iTunes App Store under - Games>Sports>Free> "Bucky Challenge". It was so exciting seeing it listed. I was excited until I read the two comments under the game that rated it poorly because it was too hard to play. Mind you, this app wasn't in the store 12 hours before the reviews were in, so I suspect they came from people at iTunes who tested it. Honestly, that's pure conjecture because I have no way of knowing, but I was shocked to see two reviews first thing in the morning when the app got posted some time in the middle of the night.
Needless to say, it was disheartening to see the app get the low ratings. I immediately tested the game on my iTouch and had each team member try to play the game. Sure enough the first level wasn't working properly. I immediately pulled the game from the iTunes App Store and brought it back into GameSalad to review the rules.
**I need to mention here that we did not test our game on an external device before we published it. Of course, it seems completely reasonable and due diligence to test an application BEFORE releasing it, but it ran well in the program so we thought nothing of it. However, let me say that it is critical to test the game because the functions in GS don't necessarily work according to plan in the application once published and running on a device.
In fact, our game uses directional buttons on at least three of our five levels. Two of the levels require the actor to jump over other actors. Our jumping behavior was too extreme, thus not allowing the actor to move over other actors before falling back down on the actor it was jumping. The player lost a life for each actor it hit. With only three lives, the player would lose the level fairly quickly. The jumping action wasn't moving directionally left or right, just up and down. We eventually fixed this, but for the purposes of this blog, here is a tutorial on jumping http://gamesalad.com/wiki/how_tos:gsc_jump. http://gamesalad.com/wiki/faqs?force_rev=1
We did trace the rules and discovered something missing. We added another rule that allowed the jumping function to work, while the directional keys are pressed and we lessened gravity so that the actor wouldn't fall so quickly. We hope this works. The optional word here is hope.
We still didn't test our game. Why you might ask? Because all of our iTouch devices are updated to the latest version of iTunes, while our Mac OS is Leopard, not Snow Leopard. The newest version of XCode works with Mac OS 4 and the external device needs to have OS 3.1.3 or higher to work with Mac OS4.
Because we don't have the newest version of the MacOS we could not connect with the device to download the test version of our game to the device to test the game. Yep, that's right. Though we know it to be extremely bad practice to release a game without testing, we did republish the game to iTunes again without testing it.
Here's another bit of information you need to know. We tried to republish our game to GS in order to upload it to iTunes, but we encountered an error message. We found out that GS doesn't allow earlier versions of the program (before 0.8.8) to be published. We had refused to upgrade to the newest version of GS because we were nervous that our game would lose some settings and not function properly. It has happened before when we upgraded. Fortunately, that was not the case this time.
**Remember, work with the latest version of GS when you go to publish, otherwise you might run into an error message preventing you from publishing.
I am posting a link here to some tutorials that might help you to publish. The following link shows a video tutorial by Tshirtbooth on how to get your game onto an external device.
http://gamesalad.com/wiki/developing_for_iphone:building_gamesalad_viewer#how_do_i_install_the_gamesalad_viewer_on_my_iphone
http://gamesalad.com/wiki/developing_for_iphone:preparing_for_build
We shall see what the future holds for us. If again our game doesn't function properly we will be upgrading to Snow Leopard and hooking up our device to test. Wish us luck.
Needless to say, it was disheartening to see the app get the low ratings. I immediately tested the game on my iTouch and had each team member try to play the game. Sure enough the first level wasn't working properly. I immediately pulled the game from the iTunes App Store and brought it back into GameSalad to review the rules.
**I need to mention here that we did not test our game on an external device before we published it. Of course, it seems completely reasonable and due diligence to test an application BEFORE releasing it, but it ran well in the program so we thought nothing of it. However, let me say that it is critical to test the game because the functions in GS don't necessarily work according to plan in the application once published and running on a device.
In fact, our game uses directional buttons on at least three of our five levels. Two of the levels require the actor to jump over other actors. Our jumping behavior was too extreme, thus not allowing the actor to move over other actors before falling back down on the actor it was jumping. The player lost a life for each actor it hit. With only three lives, the player would lose the level fairly quickly. The jumping action wasn't moving directionally left or right, just up and down. We eventually fixed this, but for the purposes of this blog, here is a tutorial on jumping http://gamesalad.com/wiki/how_tos:gsc_jump. http://gamesalad.com/wiki/faqs?force_rev=1
We did trace the rules and discovered something missing. We added another rule that allowed the jumping function to work, while the directional keys are pressed and we lessened gravity so that the actor wouldn't fall so quickly. We hope this works. The optional word here is hope.
We still didn't test our game. Why you might ask? Because all of our iTouch devices are updated to the latest version of iTunes, while our Mac OS is Leopard, not Snow Leopard. The newest version of XCode works with Mac OS 4 and the external device needs to have OS 3.1.3 or higher to work with Mac OS4.
Because we don't have the newest version of the MacOS we could not connect with the device to download the test version of our game to the device to test the game. Yep, that's right. Though we know it to be extremely bad practice to release a game without testing, we did republish the game to iTunes again without testing it.
Here's another bit of information you need to know. We tried to republish our game to GS in order to upload it to iTunes, but we encountered an error message. We found out that GS doesn't allow earlier versions of the program (before 0.8.8) to be published. We had refused to upgrade to the newest version of GS because we were nervous that our game would lose some settings and not function properly. It has happened before when we upgraded. Fortunately, that was not the case this time.
**Remember, work with the latest version of GS when you go to publish, otherwise you might run into an error message preventing you from publishing.
I am posting a link here to some tutorials that might help you to publish. The following link shows a video tutorial by Tshirtbooth on how to get your game onto an external device.
http://gamesalad.com/wiki/developing_for_iphone:building_gamesalad_viewer#how_do_i_install_the_gamesalad_viewer_on_my_iphone
http://gamesalad.com/wiki/developing_for_iphone:preparing_for_build
We shall see what the future holds for us. If again our game doesn't function properly we will be upgrading to Snow Leopard and hooking up our device to test. Wish us luck.
Friday, July 23, 2010
"Bucky Challenge" is in the iTunes App Store!
The Pan American
by Victor Ituarte
After recently winning a Webby, an Emmy, and a Telly, Reel to Red Productions continues to raise the bar with its release of a UTPA-themed mobile game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
The app is a sports-themed game called “Bucky Challenge” in which the user guides Bucky, the UTPA mascot, through a series of athletic challenges by using the touch screen.
Chelse Benham, the Director of Reel to Red and the game’s Creative Director, led five Reel to Red team members along the journey of creating the app.
“It’s actually a marketing tool to expose the youth to the University,” says Benham. “The idea of doing a game app became interesting because The University of Texas at Austin had a utility app that was popular. It was number seven on the most popular free apps in the iTunes App store. I wanted an iTunes game that could be used to market UTPA.”
The idea behind the app is to expose the public to the university behind the mask of a fun game that is free to download.
What is novel about “Bucky Challenge” is the entire game takes place on the UTPA campus.
“’Bucky Challenge” is a multi-level sports game where we literally took photos of the campus and incorporated those into the game. We figure that if it takes someone anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to play the game, what they’re seeing are the real University buildings and signage all that time. At the end of the game, the University’s website is displayed on the win page. It’s a new way to market to the youth on their terms,” Benham said.
Not only are users exposed to images of the campus, a few familiar faces will be present in the game as well.
“The game has humor. It’s meant to be funny. I and our other graphic designer, Hilda Del Rio, made the Reel to Red team into bubble-head characters that can be seen in the game. We also arranged a photo shoot with Ricardo Gonzalez who plays UTPA’s mascot, Bucky ,” says Alexis Carranza, graphic designer and assistant director for Reel to Red. “We did a one-hour photo shoot with him dressed in costume and posing in different sport poses. That was a lot of fun because Ricardo was patient.”
Designing the game came as no easy task. The group had no coding or app-building knowledge, and learning the software development kit from Apple to create an app that functions with the iPhone was an enormous undertaking.
“It required learning everything from the human interface guidelines (HIG) for Apple to trying to learn Xcode, which is C++ and Objective-C-based coding. That’s almost impossible trying to learn overnight and still put a game together,” Benham explained.
After about six weeks of trying to figure out Apple’s Xcode, Benham’s son assisted the group by informing them of a program called GameSalad. GameSalad is a program created by Gendai Games, a company based in Austin. http://www.gamesalad.com/ It is a beta 2D game design program with software glitches that were difficult to solve.
“GameSalad is freeware, but it’s a beta and it’s constantly having problems. It can be hard to work with. There are quirks about it you have to figure out what is causing the problem,” explained James Hernandez, the game’s technical engineer. “I’m sure it’s much easier on a second game. Mind you, our game is one of the very few being built with GameSalad that’s multi-level.”
Despite the trouble brought on by working with a beta, Game Salad turned out to be a simpler program to work with than Xcode.
“We were kinda discouraged at first working with Xcode, but once GameSalad came along the game building went from some impossible idea to being a real product in a short period of time,” says Hilda Del Rio.
Ultimately, the project was started as a learning curve for the members of Reel to Red.
“There was a lot of trial and error on trying to fix the movements of our characters. Especially in the editing portion when we put the levels together, and how those levels would interact with each other. It was challenging,” says Hernandez who initially underestimated the amount of physics that went into the creation of a game.
“It’s just another creative product from Reel to Red, where we expand the skill set of the team and showcase the University in a unique way,” says Benham.
People can see the screenshots of the “Bucky Challenge” at http://www.reeltored.com/ or download it for free from iTunes.
by Victor Ituarte
After recently winning a Webby, an Emmy, and a Telly, Reel to Red Productions continues to raise the bar with its release of a UTPA-themed mobile game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
The app is a sports-themed game called “Bucky Challenge” in which the user guides Bucky, the UTPA mascot, through a series of athletic challenges by using the touch screen.
Chelse Benham, the Director of Reel to Red and the game’s Creative Director, led five Reel to Red team members along the journey of creating the app.
“It’s actually a marketing tool to expose the youth to the University,” says Benham. “The idea of doing a game app became interesting because The University of Texas at Austin had a utility app that was popular. It was number seven on the most popular free apps in the iTunes App store. I wanted an iTunes game that could be used to market UTPA.”
The idea behind the app is to expose the public to the university behind the mask of a fun game that is free to download.
What is novel about “Bucky Challenge” is the entire game takes place on the UTPA campus.
“’Bucky Challenge” is a multi-level sports game where we literally took photos of the campus and incorporated those into the game. We figure that if it takes someone anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to play the game, what they’re seeing are the real University buildings and signage all that time. At the end of the game, the University’s website is displayed on the win page. It’s a new way to market to the youth on their terms,” Benham said.
Not only are users exposed to images of the campus, a few familiar faces will be present in the game as well.
“The game has humor. It’s meant to be funny. I and our other graphic designer, Hilda Del Rio, made the Reel to Red team into bubble-head characters that can be seen in the game. We also arranged a photo shoot with Ricardo Gonzalez who plays UTPA’s mascot, Bucky ,” says Alexis Carranza, graphic designer and assistant director for Reel to Red. “We did a one-hour photo shoot with him dressed in costume and posing in different sport poses. That was a lot of fun because Ricardo was patient.”
Designing the game came as no easy task. The group had no coding or app-building knowledge, and learning the software development kit from Apple to create an app that functions with the iPhone was an enormous undertaking.
“It required learning everything from the human interface guidelines (HIG) for Apple to trying to learn Xcode, which is C++ and Objective-C-based coding. That’s almost impossible trying to learn overnight and still put a game together,” Benham explained.
After about six weeks of trying to figure out Apple’s Xcode, Benham’s son assisted the group by informing them of a program called GameSalad. GameSalad is a program created by Gendai Games, a company based in Austin. http://www.gamesalad.com/ It is a beta 2D game design program with software glitches that were difficult to solve.
“GameSalad is freeware, but it’s a beta and it’s constantly having problems. It can be hard to work with. There are quirks about it you have to figure out what is causing the problem,” explained James Hernandez, the game’s technical engineer. “I’m sure it’s much easier on a second game. Mind you, our game is one of the very few being built with GameSalad that’s multi-level.”
Despite the trouble brought on by working with a beta, Game Salad turned out to be a simpler program to work with than Xcode.
“We were kinda discouraged at first working with Xcode, but once GameSalad came along the game building went from some impossible idea to being a real product in a short period of time,” says Hilda Del Rio.
Ultimately, the project was started as a learning curve for the members of Reel to Red.
“There was a lot of trial and error on trying to fix the movements of our characters. Especially in the editing portion when we put the levels together, and how those levels would interact with each other. It was challenging,” says Hernandez who initially underestimated the amount of physics that went into the creation of a game.
“It’s just another creative product from Reel to Red, where we expand the skill set of the team and showcase the University in a unique way,” says Benham.
People can see the screenshots of the “Bucky Challenge” at http://www.reeltored.com/ or download it for free from iTunes.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Publishing GameSalad Game into Apple iTunes Connect - The Learning Curve
It's been a while since I last blogged because the process of publishing our game has been monumentally difficult. When we were ready to publish we ran into issues in buying the GameSalad license. Apparently, the GS server wasn't working properly at the time and I was sent around in circles trying to purchase the license directly from GS or from Amazon. Eventually I gifted it to myself because it wouldn't work any other way. That proved a mess because I couldn't find straight answers on how to redeem the gift and was charged again when I accessed the gift account on Amazon. It was a mess. Things just aren't straight forward. There seems to be a lot of unnecessary hunting on GS.
Even within the forum, you can not simply plug in a phrase or word and call up entries that deal with the specific issue you are searching. I hope over time Gendai Games will work to improve user navigation and word search on the GameSalad site.
I did mange to get the license and move past that part, only to encounter another frustration when we tried to publish the game to GS.
Initially, we received an error message "No provisioning profiles found..."
Of course, we needed to go to the Apple Developer Center and download our Developer Certificate, Distribution Certificate and our Provisioning -> Distribution tab. Aslo, we needed a WWDR (intermediate certificate) from Apple. Once we had filled out and downloaded these certifications, we put in them into the KEYCHAIN (on the computer ->applications->utilities->Keychain Access).
Then we went back into the GameSalad Program, into our actual game and clicked the orange Publish arrow to upload our game to GameSalad.
When we first tried this (and many subsequent times before speaking with GS) we received an error message. Eventually, we discovered with the help from the guys at GS that our project file was enormous because our images were huge.
HINT: When you build your game save the images you will use as "Save for Web and devices" from Photoshop. It will bring down the image size greatly. It is suggested that actors are below 100KB and backgrounds at 300KB or lower. We knew this going in, but by the time we published the game we had forgotten this golden rule. We believe the size of the file was creating the error message.
We had to go back and re-save ALL our images for Web, which reduced the project size from 198MB to 27MB! That was a huge savings. When we uploaded the file to GS it worked!
Initially, we had problems getting the file sent to Apple because of the file was rejected with an error message saying "The binary being uploaded does not contain an .app bundle". This ate our lunch for about five days because we didn't know what it meant and where to get the .app bundle it wanted.
Apparently, after we published in GS, we received a pop up window with three choices, "View in folder", "Manage portfolio", "What now?". We clicked on "Manage portfolio" and "downloaded" the published .gameproj file GS provided from the "Manage pportfolio" window, we zipped this file and this was the file we kept trying to publish to the Apple iTunes Connect site.
BIG MISTAKE! Mind you the window "Manage Portfolio" has a big "Download here" sign, which has you believing that's what should happen. There aren't more straightforward directions on GS telling you that this isn't the window you want.
You do not want this .gameproj file when uploading to Apple. This .gameproj file DOES NOT contain any of the .app bundle documents needed to publish to Apple, thus the reason for the error message from Apple when we tried to publish it.
Instead, we needed to click on the "View in Folder" window, which directed us to our designated folder - we had selected - to save the GS binary file when we clicked the "Publish" button. In that folder, we found a .app file that we had to compress into a .zip file. It is this .zip file we uploaded to Apple iTunes Connect. It went through.
Just remember: You do not need to use Xcode in any way to publish your GS.app file. Gendai Games has provided everything you would need to publish to Apple iTunes Connect in that .app file. Now we are just waiting for Apple to approve our game and send us the notification that it is available in the iTunes App Store!
At the time of this writing, Google just released its new App Inventor Software for free. It too boasts no coding required when building apps for the Android. I see the possibility of a new project just ahead. Thanks Gendai Games for the GameSalad software that helped us build our first app. It was truly an adventurous journey.
Even within the forum, you can not simply plug in a phrase or word and call up entries that deal with the specific issue you are searching. I hope over time Gendai Games will work to improve user navigation and word search on the GameSalad site.
I did mange to get the license and move past that part, only to encounter another frustration when we tried to publish the game to GS.
Initially, we received an error message "No provisioning profiles found..."
Of course, we needed to go to the Apple Developer Center and download our Developer Certificate, Distribution Certificate and our Provisioning -> Distribution tab. Aslo, we needed a WWDR (intermediate certificate) from Apple. Once we had filled out and downloaded these certifications, we put in them into the KEYCHAIN (on the computer ->applications->utilities->Keychain Access).
Then we went back into the GameSalad Program, into our actual game and clicked the orange Publish arrow to upload our game to GameSalad.
When we first tried this (and many subsequent times before speaking with GS) we received an error message. Eventually, we discovered with the help from the guys at GS that our project file was enormous because our images were huge.
HINT: When you build your game save the images you will use as "Save for Web and devices" from Photoshop. It will bring down the image size greatly. It is suggested that actors are below 100KB and backgrounds at 300KB or lower. We knew this going in, but by the time we published the game we had forgotten this golden rule. We believe the size of the file was creating the error message.
We had to go back and re-save ALL our images for Web, which reduced the project size from 198MB to 27MB! That was a huge savings. When we uploaded the file to GS it worked!
Initially, we had problems getting the file sent to Apple because of the file was rejected with an error message saying "The binary being uploaded does not contain an .app bundle". This ate our lunch for about five days because we didn't know what it meant and where to get the .app bundle it wanted.
Apparently, after we published in GS, we received a pop up window with three choices, "View in folder", "Manage portfolio", "What now?". We clicked on "Manage portfolio" and "downloaded" the published .gameproj file GS provided from the "Manage pportfolio" window, we zipped this file and this was the file we kept trying to publish to the Apple iTunes Connect site.
BIG MISTAKE! Mind you the window "Manage Portfolio" has a big "Download here" sign, which has you believing that's what should happen. There aren't more straightforward directions on GS telling you that this isn't the window you want.
You do not want this .gameproj file when uploading to Apple. This .gameproj file DOES NOT contain any of the .app bundle documents needed to publish to Apple, thus the reason for the error message from Apple when we tried to publish it.
Instead, we needed to click on the "View in Folder" window, which directed us to our designated folder - we had selected - to save the GS binary file when we clicked the "Publish" button. In that folder, we found a .app file that we had to compress into a .zip file. It is this .zip file we uploaded to Apple iTunes Connect. It went through.
Just remember: You do not need to use Xcode in any way to publish your GS.app file. Gendai Games has provided everything you would need to publish to Apple iTunes Connect in that .app file. Now we are just waiting for Apple to approve our game and send us the notification that it is available in the iTunes App Store!
At the time of this writing, Google just released its new App Inventor Software for free. It too boasts no coding required when building apps for the Android. I see the possibility of a new project just ahead. Thanks Gendai Games for the GameSalad software that helped us build our first app. It was truly an adventurous journey.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
GameSalad: Merging Levels and Quirky Nuances to Remember
Well, things are moving smoothly enough in the final stage of building "Bucky's Challenge", our multi-level sports game and first-time app building experience. Our journey began nearly six months ago, taking twists and turns along the way. Ultimately, we are nearing the end using GameSalad to reach our goal.
In the last blog entry I shared the team's surprise and frustration at learning that GameSalad doesn't encourage merging projects because of the original Actor IDs generated specifically for each project that cannot be transferred over into a new project. This is an important fact because it means that each level built in a different project was rebuilt from scratch inside the new Merged Project Folder.
In the process of merging we have encountered some other issues worth mentioning here. First and foremost, we have chosen NOT to update GameSalad to the newest released version. We have found in the past that attributes lose their settings in the process of updating and we must go into the settings and reset them, by first finding those that reset. One example comes to mind, Image settings seem to get dropped. Gravity or density seem to be affected. We can not say that such things are happening with the latest version because we aren't updating to find out. I believe that as a general rule it's wise not to update during a project build, unless the new version positively addresses a major function of your game.
We have discovered as well that the random spawner rule isn't all that random. For instance the game chooses a number at random initially when the game or level starts, but it sticks with that number consistently so that the spawned object has the same time and space between each spawned object.
However, the most challenging issue we have dealt with has been starting over a level when a person loses and wants to replay that level. The player would lose the level and be redirected back to the game menu. All well and good so far.
The problem was encountered when the player tried to restart their level and the game would take them straight to a win or lose screen. We discovered this happened because scores and lives weren't being reset when the level would start over. HINT: A saving level rule becomes very important here.
As a solution, we created a global (game) attribute integer called "level" set at 0. In addition, we inserted within each level's game controller actor a:
As a last note, don't forget to address your sound. We enabled "Run to Completion" for each of our levels for the "win" and "lose" screens. However, this option caused the sound to bleed over into the other scenes when scene changed. Simple solution: uncheck that option.
In the last blog entry I shared the team's surprise and frustration at learning that GameSalad doesn't encourage merging projects because of the original Actor IDs generated specifically for each project that cannot be transferred over into a new project. This is an important fact because it means that each level built in a different project was rebuilt from scratch inside the new Merged Project Folder.
In the process of merging we have encountered some other issues worth mentioning here. First and foremost, we have chosen NOT to update GameSalad to the newest released version. We have found in the past that attributes lose their settings in the process of updating and we must go into the settings and reset them, by first finding those that reset. One example comes to mind, Image settings seem to get dropped. Gravity or density seem to be affected. We can not say that such things are happening with the latest version because we aren't updating to find out. I believe that as a general rule it's wise not to update during a project build, unless the new version positively addresses a major function of your game.
We have discovered as well that the random spawner rule isn't all that random. For instance the game chooses a number at random initially when the game or level starts, but it sticks with that number consistently so that the spawned object has the same time and space between each spawned object.
However, the most challenging issue we have dealt with has been starting over a level when a person loses and wants to replay that level. The player would lose the level and be redirected back to the game menu. All well and good so far.
The problem was encountered when the player tried to restart their level and the game would take them straight to a win or lose screen. We discovered this happened because scores and lives weren't being reset when the level would start over. HINT: A saving level rule becomes very important here.
As a solution, we created a global (game) attribute integer called "level" set at 0. In addition, we inserted within each level's game controller actor a:
- Change Attribute Rule that changed the integer level to whatever number that level was. Example: Bucky Basketball Level 3 - we would change that integer to 3.
- Right underneath that rule we have a Timer Rule that saves the game.level attribute after 0.1 seconds from the start of the level.
- Added a Touch Rule to the "Continue" button
- When button is touched and game.level = 1
- Then change scene to level 1
- and, reset the scores and lives for that level accordingly.
As a last note, don't forget to address your sound. We enabled "Run to Completion" for each of our levels for the "win" and "lose" screens. However, this option caused the sound to bleed over into the other scenes when scene changed. Simple solution: uncheck that option.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Game Salad: Can't merge scenes from different projects, BEWARE the program crashes!
My last entry dealt with migrating and merging. The team was about to migrate different projects (levels) from several computers into one computer in one main project, but we were having difficulty. We reviewed many times the video clip produced by Victor Leach (iDevices), where he explains the process, however in the end it proved ineffective because Game Salad DOES NOT merge different projects together well.
Why? For starters every project creates each actor with it's own ID tag number. You can't copy the actor into another project with its original tag number. The ID appears to be the number that links the actor to the rules and behaviors within its project and everything in that project. Thus, we've found that the only way to merge the projects is quite literally from scratch, starting over. Here are the steps we took to merge:
I watched the various tutorials numerous times. I mentioned months ago that we were building levels of the game on various computers, yet nowhere was it mentioned that merging projects is next to impossible and that Game Salad does not recommend it. I cannot believe we are the first to encounter this problem or to suggest the idea of merging. Yet, nowhere is it explicitly mentioned that merging is not compatible in Game Salad. This is a huge oversight on the part of the Game Salad makers.
I would think people creating multi-level games would in fact work on different computers or on different projects with intention to merge later because it's efficient. Perhaps, a majority of designers build as one individual on one project at a time. We didn't and now we're learning the hard way.
Clearly, we weren't completely at a disadvantage because the original project does act as a map for the rebuilding process in the main project file. The time was obviously shorter building the level in the main project, but the merging issue wasn't expected thus we did not realize we would be dealing with the time to go through this process.
Another thing we discovered was that the ability to hyperlink comes with the pro version of Game Salad. I can live with putting the Web address at the end without hyperlinking the page, but I felt it should be mentioned here.
Also, since updating the latest version of Game Salad we have had numerous crashes. I had said that the program seemed more stable. Well, I have to eat my words. My first day merging I lost six hours of work when the program just wiped out all the work and left me looking at a white screen. It was so bad in fact that there was no way to recover the project and I had to start over. That day the program unexpectedly quite five times. We did start over and we made 12 renamed versions of the file so that if there was another hard crash we could recover something.
We are making progress merging the files. Jonathan Samn (from Game Salad) has been generous in offering to help us. We are closing in on finishing the game, but I have a small voice going off in my head. The size of our game. What is the size of the game ultimately going to be and is this going to kill our chances as an iPhone game app? We shall see.
Why? For starters every project creates each actor with it's own ID tag number. You can't copy the actor into another project with its original tag number. The ID appears to be the number that links the actor to the rules and behaviors within its project and everything in that project. Thus, we've found that the only way to merge the projects is quite literally from scratch, starting over. Here are the steps we took to merge:
- We ultimately opened the two projects up side by side (the original next to the new main project).
- We created the number of scenes for each original project in the main project.
- We entered into the new scene in the main project and imported all the images we needed for the original project including audio clips. (HINT: Think Identical - Everything must be identical between the original project and its copy in the main project)
- We created each new actor in the main project and named it exactly as it was named in the original file. NOTE: It's very important that all actors be specifically named in relation to the particular project. By this I mean, say every level has a spawner. You can't just use the generic name "Spawner" if each level spawner does something different. So we named one Spawner - Baseball Spawner, while another spawner was named Basketball Spawner etc. What this means is that there cannot be the same names used in different scenes, UNLESS it acts the same way for every scene.
- We dragged each actor into the scene according to the way it was laid out in the original project.
- In each actor (not its prototype we didn't work with prototypes) we were able to copy and paste the rules and behaviors from one project into the main project. REMEMBER: You're building from scratch so you have to check all the actor attributes and make sure they are identical.
- Your project needs to work just like the original so don't leave anything to chance. You'll have to add all the game attributes and check your layers as well. MAKE IT IDENTICAL.
- Each scene in the original must also be in proper order in the main project.
- Create intro page to the game
- Create the touch to start level over on the loser page.
- Touch to save when leaving the game.
I watched the various tutorials numerous times. I mentioned months ago that we were building levels of the game on various computers, yet nowhere was it mentioned that merging projects is next to impossible and that Game Salad does not recommend it. I cannot believe we are the first to encounter this problem or to suggest the idea of merging. Yet, nowhere is it explicitly mentioned that merging is not compatible in Game Salad. This is a huge oversight on the part of the Game Salad makers.
I would think people creating multi-level games would in fact work on different computers or on different projects with intention to merge later because it's efficient. Perhaps, a majority of designers build as one individual on one project at a time. We didn't and now we're learning the hard way.
Clearly, we weren't completely at a disadvantage because the original project does act as a map for the rebuilding process in the main project file. The time was obviously shorter building the level in the main project, but the merging issue wasn't expected thus we did not realize we would be dealing with the time to go through this process.
Another thing we discovered was that the ability to hyperlink comes with the pro version of Game Salad. I can live with putting the Web address at the end without hyperlinking the page, but I felt it should be mentioned here.
Also, since updating the latest version of Game Salad we have had numerous crashes. I had said that the program seemed more stable. Well, I have to eat my words. My first day merging I lost six hours of work when the program just wiped out all the work and left me looking at a white screen. It was so bad in fact that there was no way to recover the project and I had to start over. That day the program unexpectedly quite five times. We did start over and we made 12 renamed versions of the file so that if there was another hard crash we could recover something.
We are making progress merging the files. Jonathan Samn (from Game Salad) has been generous in offering to help us. We are closing in on finishing the game, but I have a small voice going off in my head. The size of our game. What is the size of the game ultimately going to be and is this going to kill our chances as an iPhone game app? We shall see.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Webby People's Voice Award goes to... By Victor Ituarte
The University of Texas-Pan American's Reel to Red Productions is known for its feats in video, which includes two Lone Star Emmy's, a Telly, and an Aurora award to name a few. However, when the group comprised of UTPA students set foot in the digital realm of Web design, one of the last things they expected was for their site, ReeltoRed.com, to be selected as one of five finalists in the Student Web site category for the 14th annual Webby Awards - Internet's highest honor.
The New York Times has deemed the Webby Awards as "the online equivalent of an Oscar." The awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a 650-person group that judges the entries. The 14th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. The academy's picks are based on content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity and overall experience.
What's different about the Webby Awards, aside from the traditional five-word acceptance speeches given at the ceremony in New York City, is the opportunity to win two awards for the same category: the Webby Award, which is selected solely by IADAS, and the Webby People's Voice Award, which is voted upon by the global community.
Reel to Red was in competition with two University of North Carolina schools, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and a student out of Germany. The academy's pick for the Webby Award was andreaslutz.com from Germany, an interactive site that requires the use of a Web cam and a microphone to navigate its depths. However, it was Reel to Red that won the world over and garnered the most votes to take the prize of the Webby People's Voice Award.
"I was surprised and thrilled to find out when we were nominated," said James Hernandez, a Reel to Red team member and a senior journalism-advertising/public relations major at UTPA. "I'm glad our university has more exposure on an international stage."
Attempting to earn votes wasn't a walk in the park. The eight-member group hit the ground running the moment their nomination was announced on Tuesday, April 13. They pushed and campaigned for more than two weeks.
"We didn't waste any time. The morning I found out about our nomination, I sent a mass e-mail to all of the UTPA faculty and staff telling them about our nomination and included instructions on how to vote," said Chelse Benham, the director of Reel to Red.
Part of Reel to Red's proactive campaign included covering the sidewalks of the University with chalk advertisements, home-made T-shirts, balloons with instructions to vote, video pitches that were uploaded to YouTube, a marquee at the historic Cine El Rey theater in downtown McAllen, flyers, and requests to vote on the group's Facebook and Twitter accounts, but, Benham said, the largest portion of the votes probably came from sending e-mails to co-workers, family, and friends asking them to vote and setting up laptops in the Student Union at UTPA to guide people through the voting process.
"What was most memorable was that, after the first couple of days, people that voted knew us by name," said Oscar Garza, a long-time member at Reel to Red and a graduate of the English master's program at UTPA. "We were out there campaigning every day so a real feeling of a community on campus grew out of that."
And that hard work paid off.
On Tuesday, May 4th, the Webby Awards posted the Webby Award and Webby People's Voice Award winners and Reel to Red Productions was one of them.
"Our site is unique and our focus on the young, digital natives," Benham said. "The academy's decision of nominees were based on aesthetics, creativity, interaction, and content and we met all of that. Frankly, some of the other sites were typical CSS-style that you see on most sites. Our Web site devoted more attention on creative user interaction and design."
In their two weeks promoting at the Student Union and around campus, the group garnered great support from people on campus. Reel to Red acknowledges that they could not have accomplished this without the help and support of the UTPA community.
"It was inspiring having students walking up to us and telling us they voted with four e-mail addresses or that they got several of their friends to vote. We're not forgetting any of that. We are forever in their debt," said Alexis Carranza, a graduate of the graphic design program at UTPA and another Reel to Red member.
Even though their time in New York City may seem like a vacation to the Reel to Red team, Benham reminds them their work to represent, promote, and pay back UTPA will continue.
"I've made it mandatory to wake up early to make it to the outside of the Today show or Good Morning America with posters promoting UTPA," Benham explained. "Even at the ceremony with our five-word speech, we want to make a big impression on everyone watching. We're hoping to be featured on the highlight reel. Anything to continue to spread the word about UTPA."
The members of Reel to Red will travel to the Big Apple in early June to be a part of the festivities. They couldn't be more excited.
Saturday Night Live's Amy Poehler and famed film critic Roger Ebert will be among some of the specially recognized attendees at the ceremony. Los Angeles rock group OK Go will receive the Artist of the Year Webby. Winners (and other potential attendees) in other categories include Jim Carrey's official Web site in Celebrity/Fan, The Muppets and Queen for "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Viral Video, and The Associated Press for their live coverage of President Barack Obama's inauguration in Events & Live Webcasts.
Although she may rub elbows with famous folk, Hilda Del Rio, one of the group's designers and a recent graduate graphic design major at UTPA, says she's more excited about mingling and dining with some of the most innovative minds of today's Internet world.
"I'm not so much about the celebrities that are going to be there, but more about the designers that worked on the Web sites," said the self-professed technology geek. "I would love to ask them about what they do differently during their creative process."
Benham said UTPA and Reel to Red will forever be saved in the collection of some of the best Web sites on the Internet.
"What's incredible is that being nominated is an automatic win because for the year of 2010, the only people that will be able to stake 'nominated for a Webby' in the student Web site category are the five of us that were in the running," Benham said. "If you look at the Webby home page, you'll find the names and links of the past 14 years of winners, some of which still get a lot of traffic. There's a sense of pride that we've left our mark on the Internet where, 10, 15, or 20 years from now, people can look back and see the name of our University."
The New York Times has deemed the Webby Awards as "the online equivalent of an Oscar." The awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a 650-person group that judges the entries. The 14th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. The academy's picks are based on content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity and overall experience.
What's different about the Webby Awards, aside from the traditional five-word acceptance speeches given at the ceremony in New York City, is the opportunity to win two awards for the same category: the Webby Award, which is selected solely by IADAS, and the Webby People's Voice Award, which is voted upon by the global community.
Reel to Red was in competition with two University of North Carolina schools, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and a student out of Germany. The academy's pick for the Webby Award was andreaslutz.com from Germany, an interactive site that requires the use of a Web cam and a microphone to navigate its depths. However, it was Reel to Red that won the world over and garnered the most votes to take the prize of the Webby People's Voice Award.
"I was surprised and thrilled to find out when we were nominated," said James Hernandez, a Reel to Red team member and a senior journalism-advertising/public relations major at UTPA. "I'm glad our university has more exposure on an international stage."
Attempting to earn votes wasn't a walk in the park. The eight-member group hit the ground running the moment their nomination was announced on Tuesday, April 13. They pushed and campaigned for more than two weeks.
"We didn't waste any time. The morning I found out about our nomination, I sent a mass e-mail to all of the UTPA faculty and staff telling them about our nomination and included instructions on how to vote," said Chelse Benham, the director of Reel to Red.
Part of Reel to Red's proactive campaign included covering the sidewalks of the University with chalk advertisements, home-made T-shirts, balloons with instructions to vote, video pitches that were uploaded to YouTube, a marquee at the historic Cine El Rey theater in downtown McAllen, flyers, and requests to vote on the group's Facebook and Twitter accounts, but, Benham said, the largest portion of the votes probably came from sending e-mails to co-workers, family, and friends asking them to vote and setting up laptops in the Student Union at UTPA to guide people through the voting process.
"What was most memorable was that, after the first couple of days, people that voted knew us by name," said Oscar Garza, a long-time member at Reel to Red and a graduate of the English master's program at UTPA. "We were out there campaigning every day so a real feeling of a community on campus grew out of that."
And that hard work paid off.
On Tuesday, May 4th, the Webby Awards posted the Webby Award and Webby People's Voice Award winners and Reel to Red Productions was one of them.
"Our site is unique and our focus on the young, digital natives," Benham said. "The academy's decision of nominees were based on aesthetics, creativity, interaction, and content and we met all of that. Frankly, some of the other sites were typical CSS-style that you see on most sites. Our Web site devoted more attention on creative user interaction and design."
In their two weeks promoting at the Student Union and around campus, the group garnered great support from people on campus. Reel to Red acknowledges that they could not have accomplished this without the help and support of the UTPA community.
"It was inspiring having students walking up to us and telling us they voted with four e-mail addresses or that they got several of their friends to vote. We're not forgetting any of that. We are forever in their debt," said Alexis Carranza, a graduate of the graphic design program at UTPA and another Reel to Red member.
Even though their time in New York City may seem like a vacation to the Reel to Red team, Benham reminds them their work to represent, promote, and pay back UTPA will continue.
"I've made it mandatory to wake up early to make it to the outside of the Today show or Good Morning America with posters promoting UTPA," Benham explained. "Even at the ceremony with our five-word speech, we want to make a big impression on everyone watching. We're hoping to be featured on the highlight reel. Anything to continue to spread the word about UTPA."
The members of Reel to Red will travel to the Big Apple in early June to be a part of the festivities. They couldn't be more excited.
Saturday Night Live's Amy Poehler and famed film critic Roger Ebert will be among some of the specially recognized attendees at the ceremony. Los Angeles rock group OK Go will receive the Artist of the Year Webby. Winners (and other potential attendees) in other categories include Jim Carrey's official Web site in Celebrity/Fan, The Muppets and Queen for "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Viral Video, and The Associated Press for their live coverage of President Barack Obama's inauguration in Events & Live Webcasts.
Although she may rub elbows with famous folk, Hilda Del Rio, one of the group's designers and a recent graduate graphic design major at UTPA, says she's more excited about mingling and dining with some of the most innovative minds of today's Internet world.
"I'm not so much about the celebrities that are going to be there, but more about the designers that worked on the Web sites," said the self-professed technology geek. "I would love to ask them about what they do differently during their creative process."
Benham said UTPA and Reel to Red will forever be saved in the collection of some of the best Web sites on the Internet.
"What's incredible is that being nominated is an automatic win because for the year of 2010, the only people that will be able to stake 'nominated for a Webby' in the student Web site category are the five of us that were in the running," Benham said. "If you look at the Webby home page, you'll find the names and links of the past 14 years of winners, some of which still get a lot of traffic. There's a sense of pride that we've left our mark on the Internet where, 10, 15, or 20 years from now, people can look back and see the name of our University."
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Game Salad - Repeatable errors & Glitches; Stitching Levels - iDevices creator comes to the rescue
It has been a month since my last entry about the game app process using Game Salad. We have been busy promoting our WEBBY People's Voice Award nomination and I'm super happy to report we won! Hard work pays off. During that time, Game Salad has released two updates to its program. Clearly, they are diligently working on fixing the problems with their software. But to that end, I'll do as I have done before and comment on some problems we have had. I know people don't enjoy criticism, but this isn't that. We're reporting our issues as beta testers in the hopes the Game Salad developers can identify the problems. It's a feedback thing.
We have found:
Now we're ready to go to the next phase of building our game . Four of our five levels have been completed and we are ready to begin "stitching" (my term) the levels together.
I'd like to send a shout-out of thanks to my new friend Victor Leach of iDevices. I've said how much I appreciated his app iDevices because it helps you find coordinates on the screen of the iPhone. Well, he put together a little video to help us stitch, and as of this week it was still on SendSpace at
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ax4nqe
Stitching looks a little tricky, so I'm especially grateful to Victor for putting the video together. We keep playing it over and over at our end. I highly recommend people to check it out if they too are having difficulty combining levels that have been built on multiple computers.
Dare I say it, this next phase will prove interesting and I will likely have much to write about migrating levels onto one computer and putting the levels together in my next entry. "Onward and upward."
We have found:
- That if you update to the latest version of Game Salad, actors lose some of their settings. Restitution to be exact. Be sure to check it if you discover a problem.
- Sometimes when opening the game, it would regress to the previous session before the game was saved, which means it's not opening up on the latest saved version of your game.
- Some of the attributes within an actor will not engage until the actor is deleted from the scene and dragged back in, and yet some attributes do engage. Example: An actor with a display text rule that has already been put into the scene will still display "Hello World" even after the new text has been entered. So the actor had to be deleted from the scene and brought back in for the new text to show up.
- (Here's a big problem) Some actors who have a collide rule, say with a ceiling or platform actor, will ignore it and jump right through it and either (1) continue to zoom off screen into the ether or (2) come back down and land on top of the actor they were to be colliding with.
- We suspect it has something to do with the PNG. - More specifically, if an actor box is created and a PNG is placed in it (a picture of a building) and that building actor is dragged to the scene and a collide rule is added to that actor, THEN another actor CAN NOT move through the newly built actor with the PNG.
- However, if you create an actor box and DON'T place a PNG into that actor box, and you drag the actor box into the scene and give it a collide rule, the other actors CAN pass through the newly created actor with no PNG. Perhaps, the issue is centered around the PNG aspect of an actor.
- We just tested this and it doesn't seem to hold. PNGs may make no difference to the actor moving through a collide rule.
- Resizing an actor in a scene causes glitches to the game play in preview.
- The "touch" rule didn't work until shutting down the system completely, once I quit out of Game Salad and relaunched it, the program reset and my "touch" command started working in preview mode.
- (Another big problem) After we updated to the latest version of Game Salad, the program restarts and the latest version of GS opens - BUT the sound it is gone. Before we discovered that it is best to shut down the system AGAIN and relaunch to try and reset GS, we lost 3 hours trying to fix the sound. We when relaunched GB the sound came back on but we don't know why.
- IMPORTANT NOTE: When things aren't working correctly close down Game Salad and relaunch it. It seems to clear up some of the disfunction.
Now we're ready to go to the next phase of building our game . Four of our five levels have been completed and we are ready to begin "stitching" (my term) the levels together.
I'd like to send a shout-out of thanks to my new friend Victor Leach of iDevices. I've said how much I appreciated his app iDevices because it helps you find coordinates on the screen of the iPhone. Well, he put together a little video to help us stitch, and as of this week it was still on SendSpace at
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ax4nqe
Stitching looks a little tricky, so I'm especially grateful to Victor for putting the video together. We keep playing it over and over at our end. I highly recommend people to check it out if they too are having difficulty combining levels that have been built on multiple computers.
Dare I say it, this next phase will prove interesting and I will likely have much to write about migrating levels onto one computer and putting the levels together in my next entry. "Onward and upward."
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Reel to Red Productions at The University of Texas-Pan American wins the WEBBY People's Voice Award!
Reel to Red Productions gets to wine & dine Hollywood style in NYC June 12 -14 for the 14th annual WEBBY Awards! We're extremely excited and proud to be representing our school in this prestigous, global Web competition. We heartedly thank all the wonderful supporters who voted for us and helped us to win the award. We most especially want to thank Dr. SJ Sethi, Eva Hernandez, Sandra Quintanilla, Janice Odom, Dr. Tim Mottet, Dr. Robert Nelsen, and all our Facebook fans for their support.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Webby Awards nominates UTPA group for Web work
Posted 04/19/2010
The University of Texas-Pan American's Reel to Red Productions has done it again. Less than a year after nabbing its second Lone Star EMMY for their work on the study abroad documentary "The Heart of Experience," they have scored a nomination for The WEBBY Awards for their work on http://www.reeltored.com/.
The New York Times has dubbed the WEBBYs "the online equivalent of an OSCAR." The awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a 650-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, musicians Beck and David Bowie, "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening, Martha Stewart and American film producer Harvey Weinstein.
The 14th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. Reel to Red is one of five nominees in the student category. Visit www.webby.aol.com.
Voting is based on content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity and overall user experience.
Plans for a Web site began in April 2009 when the group's creative director, Chelse Benham, wanted a place on the Internet to showcase the program's best work. After brainstorming, the group settled on building an interactive, virtual studio.
"I wanted it to have a look and feel of a diorama," Benham said. "The site has a cutout feeling, as if floating in space."
The Reel To Red Production Team has been nominated for a WEBBY Award for their work on www.reeltored.com. Pictured from left to right are Israel Rojas, Nicole Velasco, Hilda Del Rio, Chelse Benham, Alexis Carranza, Oscar Garza, James Hernandez. Not shown are Victor Ituarte and Alina Ortega.
Each team member was assigned a different portion of the studio to build. Once the pages were built, Alexis Carranza, one of the team's graphic designers, was charged with the task of stitching all the pages together.
"Everyone on the team designed a page in Photoshop. They gave me their files and I built the site in Dreamweaver," Carranza said. "I had a steep learning curve to go by. I had taken a Web design class and I remember most of it was in Dreamweaver, but my biggest issue was understanding and writing HTML code."
The Web site was finally completed and uploaded by October 2009, six months after initial talks.
Despite the amount of effort put into its aesthetics, Benham said she feels the Web site wasn't being recognized solely for its interactive appeal, but for its content.
"This is a culmination of the program's six years of work, some of which has earned us four Lone Star EMMY nominations and two EMMY wins, two Auroras, and a Telly," she said. She suggests using Safari when viewing the site for the best result.
Visit http://webby.aol.com/connections/student to vote on the student ballot. Registration to the Webby site is required. Voting ends April 29.
More news about this year's WEBBY
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/tech/2010/04/13/intv.webby.barnett.cnn.html
Reuters
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=10363959
Wired
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/04/webby-nominations/
People
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20360435,00.html
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/13/webby-nominations
Urelsque
http://www.urlesque.com/2010/04/13/webby-awards-nominees-voting-opens-today/
Wall Street Journal/Speakeasy
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/04/13/14th-annual-webby-award-nominees-announced/
Mashable
http://mashable.com/2010/04/13/webby-awards-nominees/
The University of Texas-Pan American's Reel to Red Productions has done it again. Less than a year after nabbing its second Lone Star EMMY for their work on the study abroad documentary "The Heart of Experience," they have scored a nomination for The WEBBY Awards for their work on http://www.reeltored.com/.
The New York Times has dubbed the WEBBYs "the online equivalent of an OSCAR." The awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a 650-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, musicians Beck and David Bowie, "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening, Martha Stewart and American film producer Harvey Weinstein.
The 14th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. Reel to Red is one of five nominees in the student category. Visit www.webby.aol.com.
Voting is based on content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity and overall user experience.
Plans for a Web site began in April 2009 when the group's creative director, Chelse Benham, wanted a place on the Internet to showcase the program's best work. After brainstorming, the group settled on building an interactive, virtual studio.
"I wanted it to have a look and feel of a diorama," Benham said. "The site has a cutout feeling, as if floating in space."
The Reel To Red Production Team has been nominated for a WEBBY Award for their work on www.reeltored.com. Pictured from left to right are Israel Rojas, Nicole Velasco, Hilda Del Rio, Chelse Benham, Alexis Carranza, Oscar Garza, James Hernandez. Not shown are Victor Ituarte and Alina Ortega.
Each team member was assigned a different portion of the studio to build. Once the pages were built, Alexis Carranza, one of the team's graphic designers, was charged with the task of stitching all the pages together.
"Everyone on the team designed a page in Photoshop. They gave me their files and I built the site in Dreamweaver," Carranza said. "I had a steep learning curve to go by. I had taken a Web design class and I remember most of it was in Dreamweaver, but my biggest issue was understanding and writing HTML code."
The Web site was finally completed and uploaded by October 2009, six months after initial talks.
Despite the amount of effort put into its aesthetics, Benham said she feels the Web site wasn't being recognized solely for its interactive appeal, but for its content.
"This is a culmination of the program's six years of work, some of which has earned us four Lone Star EMMY nominations and two EMMY wins, two Auroras, and a Telly," she said. She suggests using Safari when viewing the site for the best result.
Visit http://webby.aol.com/connections/student to vote on the student ballot. Registration to the Webby site is required. Voting ends April 29.
More news about this year's WEBBY
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/tech/2010/04/13/intv.webby.barnett.cnn.html
Reuters
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=10363959
Wired
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/04/webby-nominations/
People
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20360435,00.html
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/13/webby-nominations
Urelsque
http://www.urlesque.com/2010/04/13/webby-awards-nominees-voting-opens-today/
Wall Street Journal/Speakeasy
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/04/13/14th-annual-webby-award-nominees-announced/
Mashable
http://mashable.com/2010/04/13/webby-awards-nominees/
Friday, April 16, 2010
Reel to Red requests votes to secure Webby win
Reel to Red requests votes to secure Webby win
By Kristen Cabrera
Published: Thursday, April 15, 2010
The WEBBYs are to the Internet as the Oscars are to the movies. And Reel to Red Productions on campus has garnered two Webby nominations; what the group needs now is for students, staff and anyone with an e-mail address --or multiple e-mail addresses-- to help it win. The winners will be announced May 4 and the ceremony will be held in New York City on June 14.
“What’s incredible,” said Chelse Benham the director of Reel to Red, “is that being nominated is an automatic win because for the year 2010 the only people that will be able to stake ‘Nominated for a Webby’ are the five of us in the running.”
Reel to Red Productions is up for Best Student Web site http://www.reeltored.com/ (best viewed in Safari) and The People’s Voice award for Best Student Web site. The latter is where R2R needs the help of its fans.
“We are going to set up computers for the next two weeks in the Student Union so that students can vote,” Benham said. “Our focus right now is the voting. We are going to make a video on YouTube to suggest they vote for us and to show how them how to do it.”
From now until April 29 voters can go online to webby.aol.com and vote for their favorite sites. R2R is in first place with 33 percent of the tally, but with the quick and ever-changing pace of the Internet, that can vary at any moment.
Voters must first register at the Webby site webby.aol.com with their e-mail and create a username and password. Then a verification e-mail is sent to their inbox (sometimes spam folder, beware, check your spam if you don't see your confirmation email from the WEBBY's) and a link is provided to verify the new account. From there the new user can click ‘VOTE’ on the top navigation bar and it will send them to the People’s Voice Webby nominations categories. Reeltored.com is under the ‘Student’ category listing.
The Web site is relatively new and has only been up and operational since October 2009. The eight members responsible for constructing reeltored.com, including Benham, have been involved with the program from anywhere from one to six years. She attributes the nomination to the dedication and skills of the student team that created the site.
“I have the best students,” Benham said. “They are exceptionally trained and are not the average student. That’s how you build a winning team: you need the best people and to you need to support them…I have the best students, that’s all there is to it.”
The inspiration for the Web site’s look and feel was generated from a tiny working space: despite being the university’s campus-wide television network, R2R does not have an actual television studio. The 30-foot by 40-foot (that’s shared with University Relations) was the reason the student team that crafted the project wanted a virtual studio.
Alexis Carranza, the 22-year-old assistant program director, was the one who pieced together all the individual page composites once they were made by the team.
“It took about seven months to make,” she said. “Everyone on the team designed a page in Photoshop. They gave me their files and I built the site in Dreamweaver.” Carranza, also a designer for The Pan American and Panorama during her career at UTPA, doesn’t consider herself a Web designer because most of her graphic design background is in print. Having never created a Web site before, she had to do some research.
“I had a steep learning curve to go by,” she admitted. “I had taken a web design class and I remember most of it was in Dreamweaver. But my biggest issue was understanding and writing HTML code.”
To register to vote click here webby.aol.com/student/connections/ and create a new user account. To go directly to the Webby's Best Student Website category page click here.
By Kristen Cabrera
Published: Thursday, April 15, 2010
The WEBBYs are to the Internet as the Oscars are to the movies. And Reel to Red Productions on campus has garnered two Webby nominations; what the group needs now is for students, staff and anyone with an e-mail address --or multiple e-mail addresses-- to help it win. The winners will be announced May 4 and the ceremony will be held in New York City on June 14.
“What’s incredible,” said Chelse Benham the director of Reel to Red, “is that being nominated is an automatic win because for the year 2010 the only people that will be able to stake ‘Nominated for a Webby’ are the five of us in the running.”
Reel to Red Productions is up for Best Student Web site http://www.reeltored.com/ (best viewed in Safari) and The People’s Voice award for Best Student Web site. The latter is where R2R needs the help of its fans.
“We are going to set up computers for the next two weeks in the Student Union so that students can vote,” Benham said. “Our focus right now is the voting. We are going to make a video on YouTube to suggest they vote for us and to show how them how to do it.”
From now until April 29 voters can go online to webby.aol.com and vote for their favorite sites. R2R is in first place with 33 percent of the tally, but with the quick and ever-changing pace of the Internet, that can vary at any moment.
Voters must first register at the Webby site webby.aol.com with their e-mail and create a username and password. Then a verification e-mail is sent to their inbox (sometimes spam folder, beware, check your spam if you don't see your confirmation email from the WEBBY's) and a link is provided to verify the new account. From there the new user can click ‘VOTE’ on the top navigation bar and it will send them to the People’s Voice Webby nominations categories. Reeltored.com is under the ‘Student’ category listing.
The Web site is relatively new and has only been up and operational since October 2009. The eight members responsible for constructing reeltored.com, including Benham, have been involved with the program from anywhere from one to six years. She attributes the nomination to the dedication and skills of the student team that created the site.
“I have the best students,” Benham said. “They are exceptionally trained and are not the average student. That’s how you build a winning team: you need the best people and to you need to support them…I have the best students, that’s all there is to it.”
The inspiration for the Web site’s look and feel was generated from a tiny working space: despite being the university’s campus-wide television network, R2R does not have an actual television studio. The 30-foot by 40-foot (that’s shared with University Relations) was the reason the student team that crafted the project wanted a virtual studio.
Alexis Carranza, the 22-year-old assistant program director, was the one who pieced together all the individual page composites once they were made by the team.
“It took about seven months to make,” she said. “Everyone on the team designed a page in Photoshop. They gave me their files and I built the site in Dreamweaver.” Carranza, also a designer for The Pan American and Panorama during her career at UTPA, doesn’t consider herself a Web designer because most of her graphic design background is in print. Having never created a Web site before, she had to do some research.
“I had a steep learning curve to go by,” she admitted. “I had taken a web design class and I remember most of it was in Dreamweaver. But my biggest issue was understanding and writing HTML code.”
To register to vote click here webby.aol.com/student/connections/ and create a new user account. To go directly to the Webby's Best Student Website category page click here.
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