The Great Flu.com

I haven't had a chance to play it because I think the site's servers are dealing with an epidemic of their own, but here's a game that teaches through simulation and play. Pretty great design, too.

via Kotaku

"While it might not actually be Swine Flu: The Video Game, a flash game created by Dutch researches aims to raise the awareness of similar outbreaks by having the player control the deadly Gamers Flu.

The Great Flu casts the player as the head of the fictional World Pandemic Control. Pick a strain of flu based on difficulty level, and use your budget to help stop the spread of a potentially deadly disease. Should you distribute masks to the public, or broadcast public service announcements warning of the potential update? Should you start manufacturing vaccines, improve research facilities, or bring in a group of specialists? Even at the lowest difficulty the game delivers a sense of just how difficult it is to handle and contain the spread of a dangerous virus."

Play here --> The Great Flu.com

also, a write-up on Fast Company.

We Think

Peter just passed this on to me. It's a video/trailer for a book by Charles Leadbeater that puts into perspective the potential of the Web and how it continues to bring like minds together and spread ideas so effectively. That's definitely one of the primary goals of Creative Juices. It begins "Welcome to the world of We Think"...and continues "The Web gets really interesting when people pool their ideas...then they start to be really creative." It proclaims that where the 20th century was about Mass Production, the 21st century will be about Mass Innovation. Also, instead of you are what you own, it becomes you are what you share.

...an interesting way of communicating the message in its own right, too.

Here's a link to We-think where you can download and read the first 3 chapters.

John Martz's IE6 denial message

It has already made it's way around the blogosphere (that word still doesn't sound right), but in case you haven't seen it, here's John Martz's IE6 denial message for Momentile.com. I also thought it was somewhat related to the previous post on the fold, where I griped about IE6. He just released it under the Creative Commons license for use on your own site, too! Also, a bit of process work on his blog.

Where's the fold?

This is gonna be a more tech-specific post (sorry, no pictures). Everyone in web design knows about that little bugger called the "fold." Simply defined: the point at which you need to scroll your browser to see more content on a web page. It's a horizon of sorts, in the vertical dimension of your website. So, where's it hanging out these days? Our designer extraordinaire, Samantha Oliver, pointed me to this great article which places the fold between the 570px-610px range (on a 1024x768 monitor). The author of the post, John Ellis, asks if designing to the fold is even relevant anymore—if it's given more weight in web design than it deserves. It's a good read, no matter which side of the fence you happen to be on.

I also thought I'd check in on the latest browser and screen specs of web-users from w3schools.com:

Screen
As of January 2009, 36% of users are at 1024x768. 57% are at higher resolutions. Last year 1024x768 was at 48%, so i suspect the number will be in the low 20s in 2010—hopefully being phased out a few years from now.

Browser
Firefox currently has the lead at 47.7% as of May 2009, with IE7 at a distant 21.3%. IE6 is stilling hanging in there at 14.5% (oh, how we can't wait to see you go, for .png adoption alone).

I suspect the fold will be around as long as we have a minimum screen resolution to design to. The thing is, solid standards like 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480 don't really exist anymore. A quick survey of my Sitemeter stats shows 16 different screen resolutions, ranging from 320x396 to 2048x1152!

For now, you can pretty safely say the fold exists at around 600px. I guess time will tell.

Scarygirl Game

Scarygirl Game Trailer from Touch My Pixel on Vimeo.

So, the game landed on the web yesterday. I only found about it today (thanks Brian Romero), but I can guarantee you word is spreading. The fact that the site is currently pretty bogged down supports that. Catch the trailer above, then head on over to play the game at:

--> www.scarygirl.com

Where to begin? This is a Flash-game, folks. Not unlike the games we make at FableVision (see Lure of the Labyrinth). The visual impact is probably the most striking. It's practically like dancing around in an illustration. I haven't had a chance to become fully immersed in the game, but Keith dove in and I was impressed with what I've seen so far. Very responsive controls, great sound design...you name it. Load time is a bit cumbersome right now, but I suspect that will improve.

I'm first reminded of Crappy Cat, and then Poptropica. But the presentation here exceeds both of those games. How are they getting this level of performance out of Flash? First off, I measured the gameplay window: only 750 x 480 (give or take a few pixels). When was the last time we designed a game that small? You don't even realize this because they've designed a smart html shell around it with even more beautiful artwork that doesn't distract from the gameplay. Also, they have an impressive parallax working in the sidescroll part of the game. None of this appears to slow anything down. The mixing of vector and pixel is seamless, but definitely intentional for optimization. They've figured out how to pull it off (they being: Touch My Pixel).

I keep posting stuff like this to inspire everyone to think big. I know we can create something this fabulous.

Does dialogue-driven TV animation need animators?

This is the question posed over at Cartoon Brew by Amid Amidi in his latest post Xtranormal: A Glimpse Into the Future of TV Animation Production. The animation below was created using free web software available at Xtranormal.com (honestly, you can try it out right now), where their slogan is:

“If you can type, you can make movies.”



This isn't meant to be a fire-starter (or maybe it is) (edit: a heated debate has indeed sparked). Amid raises several points:

"I’ve long felt that the amount of effort invested into TV animation is disproportionate to the quality of work that appears on the finished screen. Too many production dollars are wasted on menial artistic tasks that could more efficiently be handled by a computer."

and:

"Dialogue-driven shows that are visually formulaic (i.e. Fairly Oddparents, The Simpsons, Family Guy, most pre-school and “Adult Swim” series) could easily be replaced with automated production systems. Crazy talk? Consider South Park, a half-hour show that uses automated systems to deliver finished episodes in as little as two weeks and doesn’t suffer with audiences one bit."

So really, what he's getting at is that so much of the animation on TV amounts to talking characters with repetitive movements (or no movement at all) that could be handled by trained technicians (not necessarily requiring a trained animator's touch). Amid posits that animators would be freed up to create truly unique material that requires an artist's hand, instead of tediously moving arms, choosing from a series of mouth shapes, canned expressions, etc...tasks that could in many ways be orchestrated by an editor/technician trained in the software. I don't believe any of this discussion is meant to slight the animators currently working on the shows (edit: it has). He simply puts the question out there: what is stopping this from coming to fruition?

I encourage everyone to chime in on this. Admit it, we're looking into auto-lipsync apps to handle the brunt of our educational games that feature talking heads because it is tedious and time-consuming to have to do something by hand that is so repetitive. We're always looking to optimize our processes by building organized libraries of characters and their parts. The philosophy built into Flash is all about cutting corners and creating efficiencies, so at what point do you need one artist to get the ball rolling, and then hand over the brunt of the work to smaller teams that know how to work the software?

This doesn't need to be the case. But it goes to show that certain forms of entertainment don't require the unique talents of individual animators. I would argue that there is a growing market for storytelling and animation where the hand-made (human) element is more evident. Both visually, and in the writing. I would argue that we offer it up at FableVision all the time, and it's why people flock to us. It's also what makes Animation-ish what it is—compare our version of the "anyone can animate" mission to that of Xtranormal and the differences are plain to see.

That's where I've landed. Discuss, or just think about it :)

EDIT: So, after an mere afternoon, Amid is definitely drawing criticism and protest from many an animator over at Cartoon Brew. Many of them working on shows targeted in his post, defending that they've been unfairly labeled as technicians when they are in fact animators. Definitely worth checking out the comments in the post. It's also important to note that some of his comments on shows have been labeled inaccurate or over-generalized (South Park is actually made by a small army of animators who work incredibly hard and fast for 2 weeks).

Some have asked if he purposely baited everyone (if he's half joking). I don't think so; this isn't the first time Amid has taken a point of view that has riled people up. But I still think it's a debate happening in the animation field worth highlighting over here at Creative Juices. For me personally, I think the more you give over to the computer, the more likely that processes can and will be automated. I also agree that the technology to do what he suggests is definitely coming, especially in the realm of CG.

Painting on the iPhone

I just saw this on Drawn! and had to pass it along to anyone who might have missed it.

"Disney artist, Stef Kardos, is posting iPhone sketches to his Flickr page. The miniature digital paintings were done on-site using the Brushes iPhone app."

The real kicker is this video. Who would've thought you could legitimately paint on a phone?? Quite impressive.



Oh...and HAPPY NEW YEAR from all of us at Creative Juices!

The Way We'll Watch

via WSJ.com

An article by Sarah McBride of the Wall Street Journal. Things to consider, as we continue to think about how we deliver media and storytelling. Get the FableVision holography pilot program started...

--> The Way We'll Watch

"Get ready for a lot more ways to catch a movie.

Hollywood studios and tech companies are rolling out a host of innovations that will change the way we experience films at home and in theaters. They've already begun to serve up DVDs that let you chat with other people who are watching the same movie. They're also sprucing up theaters with crystal-clear screens and amenities like cozier seats and restaurant-quality food.

Coming soon: kiosks that can burn a copy of a movie while you wait, from a library of thousands of titles. The industry is also working on ways to easily send movies from gadget to gadget -- so you might download a movie on your iPhone and stream it onto your TV.

Down the road, expect new ways to easily store digital movies online, so you can access them from any computer, anytime. We might also get theaters filled with dozens of speakers for super-sharp sound, as well as much more lifelike animated characters."

World of Goo design tour

via Worldfire Blog:



David Rosen has taken the time to do a video walkthrough of World of Goo. He pays special attention to all the little details that put the game over the top:

"Whenever I play a game, I look for design lessons that I can learn and apply to my own games. Recently, I decided to show these lessons in the form of a video tour of games that make interesting design decisions."

We should do the same at FableVision. And World of Goo is exactly the kind of game we should be studying to make our games better.

Thanks for passing it along, Matt!

previously: Word of Goo

Content-Aware Scaling is here

Adobe Photoshop CS4 was released today, and everyone is chattering about what's called content-aware scaling. It's probably the most "everyone gather around the computer and check this out" feature they've added in awhile, allowing you resize an image without distorting key content. The Linda video above demonstrates how easy it is to transform a landscape image into a vertical image, without anyone knowing the wiser. Both scary and cool. It also shows where the technology doesn't work. Here's another video by Russel Brown of Adobe.

World of Goo

For all the hype behind a behemoth of a game like Spore (2+ years of hype and delay!), this little game may come out of nowhere and steal some of the thunder for best game of the year. Enter World of Goo, a new puzzle game due out in a week (October 13) for WiiWare and PC that brings something entirely fun and new to the genre of puzzle games. From what I can gather so far, you basically form bonds to build structures out of blobs of Goo.

Here's an early review delivering a ton of praise.

Here's a link to a handful of video clips from IGN.

And here's the link the official website (check out the blog for info and updates).

There's much to look forward to here! Best of all, it shows how innovative indie-gaming studios have the potential to break through.

Flash CS4

It's the moment that comes every couple of years...yet another version of Flash is soon to be released by Adobe. You can check out the official scoop over at the Flash CS4 Product Page. But for those of you who haven't made it over to Cold Hard Flash yet, Aaron Simpson has posted two fabulous demos/previews of the new "bone" or "inverse kinematics" feature. Which will be a godsend to all you tweeners out there and familiar to anyone who's been using ToonBoom or any 3D program for that matter. In a nutshell, you'll be able to rig a skeleton to your character's body parts, allowing for joints to make rotating and bending a snap.


Other new features include object based animation, a supposedly more intuitive form of motion-tweening, and 3D transformation of 2D objects. Possibly even bigger news is something called XFL file support, which means you'll be able to open content from After Affects and InDesign in Flash. All sorts of fancy new stuff. I'm mainly hoping we see a speed boost, less glitchyness, and smoother pen performance.

UPDATE: Matt passed around an even more detailed video. Watch it here.

Google Chrome Comic

Google hired Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame) to introduce the concept of their new "Chrome" browser to the world. McCloud is great at explaining ideas in the comic format, so he was obviously the perfect artist for the job. Here's the link to the comic.

Meet Emily

"Emily - the woman in the above animation - was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness."

Here's a link to the Times Online article.

I found her mouth to look a little strange (wide?) in parts. I think it could have interesting applications for video games, but I still have a hard time seeing this widely used in film or television. Actors, for the most part, already look fabulous! And it seems like a lot of work when you can just point a camera at someone to get genuine human expression.

UPDATE: more discussion over at Cartoon Brew

via Slashdot

And for something still looming in the "uncanny valley," try this video on for size:



via BoingBoing

Sports, in 3-D!

via Wired


Having a hard time getting into Fenway Park? Have you always wanted to see the Superbowl or World Cup? TV not quite cutting it for you? Why not try watching...in 3-D?

"Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban gave a presentation to the FCC about the future of digital media, and his number one point ...was that people will be able to go to a movie theater and watch a major sporting event in 3-D...It truly is a different experience from seeing a game on 2-D television. It's not like seeing it live, either, but something different and interesting. As the Pace folks explained, for instance, they discovered that constant cutting to different shots -- a TV staple -- isn't necessary in 3-D. It seems better to let the camera take in the full-court action. Viewers feel a little like they're watching from halfway up the arena seats."

Apparently the technology is almost there...we're likely to see experiments in the next couple of years. Cool, huh?

ZAC Browser: For Autistic Children

I just read about this via Monkey Bites.

A little info from the ZAC website:

"ZAC is the first web browser developed specifically for children with autism, and autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorders (PDD), and PDD-NOS. We have made this browser for the children - for their enjoyment, enrichment, and freedom. Children touch it, use it, play it, interact with it, and experience independence through ZAC."

PC only for now. If you scroll down, there is a video to watch of the browser in action. It appears to fundamentally alter the way you browse the internet.

Twistori: A Microblogging Microscope

via Compiler:


---> Twistori

"Strip Twitter down to its raw, emotional core with Twistori. The simple website scrapes Twitter posts for exactly six keywords using the search engine summize. Now you can filter the Twit-o-sphere to see what your fellow microbloggers are loving, hating, thinking, believing, feeling or wishing."

Very cool. Nice design, too.
Reminds me of another great site: We Feel Fine

Simplicity in Design

via Compiler:


Cartoon from Stuff that Matters.

Encyclopedia of Life goes LIVE

via BBC News:


--> Encyclopedia of Life

I've been following this project for the past year; it officially launched today. Imagine being out in the wild with an iPhone-like device and being able to dial up all known scientific information on a lifeform. The goal is to have indexed 1.8 million species by 2017. Truly amazing!

"The first 30,000 pages have been unveiled of a vast encyclopedia which aims to catalogue every one of our planet's 1.8 million species. The immense online resource is designed to greatly enhance our understanding of the world's diminishing biodiversity. The creators of the database say it could have an impact on human knowledge comparable to that which followed the microscope's invention in the 1600s. It is designed to be used by everyone from scientists to lay readers...'If someone were to sit down and start writing, from scratch, an encyclopedia of life, it would take them about 100 years to complete. But we think we'll be able to do it in one-tenth of that time,' explained Dr Edwards."

14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century

via Wired Science


18 engineers, technologists and futurists recently compiled a list of the challenges and goals that we face in the 21st century. Committee chair, William J. Perry, states "we chose engineering challenges that we feel can, through creativity and commitment, be realistically met, most of them early in this century." Here's the list:

• Make solar energy affordable.
• Provide energy from fusion.
• Develop carbon sequestration methods.
• Manage the nitrogen cycle.
• Provide access to clean water.
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure.
• Advance health informatics.
• Engineer better medicines.
• Reverse-engineer the brain.
• Prevent nuclear terror.
• Secure cyberspace.
• Enhance virtual reality.
• Advance personalized learning.
• Engineer the tools for scientific discovery.

While they are certainly all admirable and important, I noticed one towards the bottom that's up for grabs :)

Here is the page that specifically discusses personalized learning. A must read for all FableVisionaries!

Throughout the educational system, teaching has traditionally followed a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, with a single set of instructions provided identically to everybody in a given class, regardless of differences in aptitude or interest. Similar inflexibility has persisted in adult education programs that ignore differences in age, cultural background, occupation, and level of motivation.

In recent years, a growing appreciation of individual preferences and aptitudes has led toward more “personalized learning,” in which instruction is tailored to a student’s individual needs. Personal learning approaches range from modules that students can master at their own pace to computer programs designed to match the way it presents content with a learner’s personality.

Sound familiar?? For those interested, here's the official website: www.engineerchallenges.org