Ben Farrell – Page 16 – creating digital hugs

Discovery Channel

user · December 26, 2009

While at 360KID, we created a interactive CD-ROM for the Discovery Channel. The aim was to create a series of modules for kids to explore various scientific topics. I didn’t have a huge part in this project – it was mostly maintenance as I came in at the end, but I did develop one of …

Sagwa: the Chinese Siamese Cat

user · December 26, 2009

We at 360KID did a few games for PBS Kids with Sagwa. We did two similar style games. Counting Koi was a simple counting games where kids would count fish in a pond, and Exploring the Palace was mostly a click and explore type of game. The logic and gameplay in these games aren’t incredibly …

Cats Incredible Journey

user · December 26, 2009

Cats Incredible Journey was a game created while I was at 360KID. It focused on helping kids with emotions if I recall correctly. In it’s prototype phase, it was a Flash game with limited interaction and awesomely designed animated sequences. The reason behind the interaction and gameplay being so limited and lightweight was so we …

Backyardigans: Mission To Mars

user · December 26, 2009

Backyardigans: Mission to Mars was a CD-ROM game we created at 360KID. It featured several games for this Nickelodeon show that were strung together by cut-scenes to create a great story where the Backyardigans journey to Mars. The game was comprised of several Flash modules (cut-scenes and games). Multidmedia’s Zinc was used to package this …

Playground Discovery

user · December 26, 2009

Playground Discovery by AT KidSystems featured a loveable robot named Cosmo. Cosmo led kids around through various activities as they popped bubbles, flew around in a jetpack, and jumped on springboards. The action was driven via a hardware device they called “Mission Control” which featured 4 large pressure sensitive buttons, and a microphone used for …

Composing Music with the Flash ByteArray

user · July 14, 2009

Demo here, view source for code (view source for code, and who knows what bugs there are) I’m getting into unfamiliar territory these days with exploring sound in Flash. Flash 10 gives you the ability to take a sound object, and extract the entire thing into the raw data….a byte array. How do you interpret …

Working with the Flash Sound Object as a ByteArray

user · June 27, 2009

Last year I was experimenting quite a bit with Flash’s computeSpectrum functionality. With computeSpectrum, I could take a snapshot of a playing sound and get volumes for various frequencies of the snapshot so I can visualize the sound. Now, I wanted to take it a step further and visualize the sound before it’s even played. …

theWB.com

user · February 18, 2009

Just writing a short post to tout theWB.com which went live today after a makeover. My new team and I at Digitalsmiths produced the video players and the clip search tool. After just cancelling cable, I can’t argue with even better video sites putting out great content. I’m always a fan of Buffy and Angel …

Music Inspired Gameplay

user · February 11, 2009

This is the last part of my recent musings. Over the last two posts I’ve argued that digital storage has completely changed the way we listen to music, unfortunately in some ways for the worse. We’re less inclined to replay an album in whole, and more inclined to put it all on shuffle. A friend …

Weekend Project – Bye Bye Cable TV

user · February 1, 2009

Last Thursday my Hauppauge Dual Hybrid HDTV Tuner card came for my computer. Until then I’d been using another dual tuner card to record and watch cable TV through Windows Media Center. It was cool and all, but in that time we’ve gotten Netflix, and found out about Hulu.com, and I got a job working …