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.
Friday, July 23, 2010
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.
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