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ROAR 2010 edition

roar_2We just launched an update to one of the children’s BBC’s most successful online games ever: ROAR.

ROAR is an Endemol (Remarkable) show shot on location in a UK wildlife park, it follows the lives and exploits of animals and keepers over a series of weeks. The game of the show takes a similar premise by providing kids with their own park to manage. To play the game you must set up a park, choose what kind of habitat you’d like for your enclosure (types include African Savanha, Indian Jungle etc), animals and their food and feeding schedule. The aim of the game is to successfully set up your park and keep your animals for several days, at which point they breed, the enclosures are cleared out (the animals are moved to another park) and you get the chance to try your hand at looking after a different kind of animal.

As a game for 6-12 year olds the gameplay is light with an emphasis on returning to the park daily to modify the settings chosen for each animal, things are spiced up with questions and conundrums posed to the park keepers upon their return.

The success of this game is largely due to the ‘cheat code’ mechanic that provides a direct call to action from the show to the game – every episode of ROAR contains a segment where a new cheat code for the game is revealed, players can enter these codes into the game to reveal new features: animals, treats enclosures etc. It has proved to be wildly popular and a testament to how powerful TV can still be at stimulating online activity. The game needs to run on BBC designed technology designed to handle as many as 150 thousand concurrent users – the peak they can expect following broadcast.

The new game update provides a general rebuild of the UI and is one of the first projects to be built on the BBC’s new FORGE platform. The game provides new content and some new features, whilst still allowing players of the existing game to continue playing their parks.

To play the game you’ll need to set up an under 12’s account with the BBC, you can find the game here: ROAR 2010 Edition

electrelane website

This project involved the design build of a website for upcoming indie band ‘electrelane’. The site presented a flash front-end with dynamic database driven content. This project was unusual as I was responsible for all aspects of its creation, from graphic design, flash programming to database design and implementation.

Client: Too Pure
Launch: November 2001
URL: No longer live

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Wacko Munky Pacman

This small project was to develop a viral marketing game to promote American rock band Alien Ant Farm’s unusual take on Michael Jackson’s ‘Smooth Criminal’ single. The game was made using Flash5 and featured an online scoreboard where players could register their hi-scores.

Client: Universal Music
Launch: March 2001
URL: No longer live

attheraces

atheraces was a joint venture television channel originally formed between Channel 4, B sky B, Arena Leisure and a number of UK racecourses. We developed the channels interactive TV live betting portal. This was a major project for tentendigital and was the first ever deployment of a real time betting application on the Sky platform; it formed an integral part of the attheraces TV channels business.

I was involved with interface design, in particular the betting and registration processes. I was  also involved in preparing and seeing the application through Sky’s SSSL testing procedure.

We developed and iterated the project over a couple of years and as part of this I investigated bringing the attheraces to a number of different devices including mobile and PDAs, however whilst prototypes were built sadly they were never deployed.. good fun though!

Client: attheraces
Launch: 2002
URL: No longer live

NUS website

NUS online was the first project I worked on at tentendigital. I was responsible for the designing the hefty administration site that all members of the NUS would have access to, the intention of this site was to enable thousands of users could update NUS online with fresh content. This was achieved by creating a very open back-end architecture incorporating Mediasurface content management system, and a multi-tiered concept of site administration.

Client: NUS

Launch: December 2000
URL: No longer live

Channel 4 ISM Builder

This project was a spin-off from tenten’s project to design Channel4‘s Interactive Service Manager – an application that allowed to C4 editors to manage red button interactive content on Telewest digital services (C4 and E4) and was developed in time to be used on the 4th series of Big Brother.The ISM builder application was made using FlashMX for the front-end and a SQL database back-end. The app allowed content editors at Channel 4 to create new ISM structures and content and then schedule their deployment to live broadcast from one place.

I worked on the interface design, functionality alongside a team of programmers and liaised with C4’s ‘4 Interactive’ team.

Client: Channel 4
Launch: November 2003
URL: No longer live

tentenedit

Client: tentendigital
Launch: 2003
URL: No longer live

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tentenedit – course editor

tentenedit was a content management system developed for producers of flash based e-learning content. It enabled speedy management, creation and localisation of e-learning modules whilst ensuring compliancy with e-learning standards such as SCORM. I was involved in designing the interface and workflow mechanisms of the application.

Dreamarena

The design of the first Dreamarena (exclusive web-portal for Dreamcast owners) presented many new challenges; it had to work on a brand new platform; the Dreamcast, the UI had to work on a TV and with a new browser; Dreamkey (which was still in development). It also had to be localised into five languages and reflect a pan-european marketing campaign that was also in development at the time.

As well as working on some of the design my main role was to coordinate the various teams working on the production as well as becoming an expert in dealing with the numerous technical challenges this new medium presented

The Dreamcast project involved the localisation of the Dreamcast browser software from its native Japanese into five European languages. This involved working closely with games developers at SEGA as this a very different process to the creation of web-based content.

The project required an understanding of sofware development and a good head for version control as the browser itself was still very much in development at the time.

Client: SEGA Europe
Launch: September 1999
URL: No longer live

Dreamcast Europe website

This was the main promotional site for the Dreamcast and contained all the consumer facing information about the product, games etc. With the main priority being development of Dreamarena we contracted the design and build of this site to agency State Design, with me in the role of project manager.

Client: SEGA Europe
Launch: 1999
URL: No longer live

Sega Europe website

This was the corporate site for Sega Europe, the intention was to keep the promotional aspects of Dreamcast separate from the business end of the company. I produced this site with in-house design and programmers.Like other areas of the Dreamcast project this site needed to be localised into five languages.
Client: SEGA Europe
Launch: 1999
URL: No longer live
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