The second last of my freelance projects for the year, Ruth Ruthven Jewellery, was also my first ever e-commerce shopping site.  I’ve integrated with payment engines in the past for s1jobs and other related sites, but this is the first time I’ve built a full shopping cart style online store.  

The shop was built on Zen Cart, with PayPal integration handing the credit card side of things.  One benefit of Zen Cart is that you can use their CMS to allow editing of other pages.  So, for example, Ruth has control over the Upcoming Events page via the CMS, even though that page technically sits outside of the shop.

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.

Last night we launched a new site for The Herald called HeraldTalk.   Based on the Movable Type platform, the site provides a central, pre-moderated place for readers to comment on the big topics of the day.  

I’m fairly pleased with the look & feel we’ve achieved in a relatively short space of time.  Both in terms of appearanace and code, it’s a fairly big leap forward from the main Herald site.  So far the feedback seems positive and we’ve already had a decent number of readers signing up — result!

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.

A new wee game for you to try, fresh off the export button today.  It’s for the Falkirk Wheel, promoting their Christmas programme and winter sale.  And it’s called Penguin Knockout…

For the game concept I took inspiration from the Falkirk Wheel itself.  I’ve always been impressed by the fact it can raise or lower a boat over 24 meters using an electric motor that produces just 30 horsepower… or about 1/5th of the average family car!   Or to put it another way, it costs less than 20p in electricity to do a full rotation.  

It does this energy-saving miracle by exactly balancing each of the water tanks before it rotates.  I used this principal to come up with the Christmas game concept — which is basically all just a good excuse to hit penguins in the face with snowballs!  

The game features a first for my freelance work, SMS e-vouchers.  When you submit your score you have the option to enter your mobile number.  The system then instantly send you a discount e-voucher for use at the Falkirk Wheel.  

Have a play and let me know what you think.