I’ve recently completed a new IT exhibit for Glasgow Science Centre called The Animator.  

The exhibit allows visitors to create their own Wallace & Gromit style stop-motion animations using a built-in camera and a simple touch-screen interface.  

The key with this one was absolute simplicity.  All commercial stop-motion applications have tons of features that most people will never use, and have interfaces that take a while to learn.  By contrast, The Animator was designed so that people could learn to use it in seconds, then go on to create an impressive looping animation in just a couple of minutes.

Keep a look out for it on your next visit to GSC.

I’ve always been a fan of developing desktop and kiosk applications in Flash.  Many people see it as a web-only technology, but over the years it has matured into a very capable programming language.  And if you add on a third party extension such as Zinc or mProjector, Flash has all the file/registry/device capabilities of any other language.

My latest kiosk app is a re-working of GSC’s News Editor.   This time the client was the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the subject was the GM debate.   The original plan had been to create a kiosk-only application, but in the end we decided to export a web version too.  Because everything was based on web technologies (Flash, JPEG, PNG, etc) the only thing that had to change was the compression level of the video files.  The web export added just a few hours to the overall project, but resulted in a far wider reach for the application.  

You can try it out here: http://www.scri.ac.uk/knowledge/games/youchoosethenews

My final freelance project of the year is another educational game for Glasgow Science Centre.   Pixelated Pix explains some of the technology behind digital imaging, from CCD capture through to LCD display. 

The aim of the game is to correctly identify images that have been ‘pixelated’ in one way or another.  The game also sees the return of cheesy gameshow host Charlie Smiles, who last made an appearance in Bang or no bang.

The completion of this game ends a hectic year of freelance work which saw the development of:

• Four educational games: Epidemic Emergency, Forces at the Funfair, Glasgow Science Investigation and Pixelated Pix
• A viral game: Penguin Knockout for the Falkirk Wheel
• An e-commerce shopping site: Ruth Ruthven Jewellery

These projects have been a lot of fun, but have taken up a huge amount of my free time this year, probably around an extra 50 days on top of my day job.  So I’m going to take a wee break in early 2009 and turn my attention to some home improvements.   Tool time!

Another wee game I’ve been working on recently, just launched.  It explains some of the science behind criminal forensics and allows players to practice matching fingerprints, footprints and DNA samples in a “Guess Who?” style format.  

I wanted to call it GSI: Glasvegas, but we compromised on GSI: Glasgow Science Investigation.

This week we finished another game for Glasgow Science Centre.  Forces at the Funfair uses a rollercoaster game to get across the concepts of rolling resistance, drag and the impact of weight, shape and colour.  

Forces at the Funfair was another highly technical development.  Because the science centre wanted the game to be as accurate as possible, they called on freelance physicist Ben Craven to come up with a mathematical representation of the rollercoaster.  Ben’s model was highly detailed and in the end produced 72 different “what if” scenarios, timed to a tenth of a second.

The finished game puts a fun ‘skin’ on the logarithmic curves and equations that are going on behind the scenes.   I’m particularly pleased with the way the control panel turned out.  Rather than going for the usual Fisher Price look and feel, I opted for something a bit more industrial.  The result reminds me of the kind of control panel you might see in a 1950′s movie.

Yesterday I wrote about my new Penguin Knockout game that had just launched.  Well it turns out Flash games are like buses — you wait 6 months for one to come along and then two come at once.

Today sees the launch of another product of my spare bedroom… Epidemic Emergency, a new educational game for Glasgow Science Centre.

This is actually one of the most technical games I’ve ever developed.  As the science behind the game had to be accurate it required a lot of research into virus transmission and mutation.  I now know more than I ever expected to know about ‘macrophages’, and actually know what they’re talking about when they describe bird flu as ‘H5N1′.  

Please visit the site, have a wee play and let me know what you think.