Team Cooper Blog

What an interesting time I had last week at The Children’s Media Conference in beautiful sunny Sheffield.

The keynote speech by Henry Winkler blew me away. I had no idea about his struggles with dyslexia or being accepted by his parents. I didn’t know about his advocacy work for children and I certainly didn’t know that he was a children’s author. His speech was monumentally uplifting and truly heart felt and in no way schmaltzy which I have to admit I was kind of expecting. He’s is completely endearing, funny, down to earth and very inspirational.

The session titled ‘Development 101′ came as a bit of a surprise to me as development in TV media is more about development of character and story rather than actual creation of projects like it would be in the digital world. That didn’t stop it from being interesting though. Carl Draper was part of the panel and he was talking about his role as a TV-Digital interpreter. I really liked what he was saying about how digital media can be used to galvanise the audiences emotional connection to a brand through interactivity. That’s the main reason we at Team Cooper are interested in getting involved in the industry; we love the power of interactivity.

There was little if no tweeting which is a new experience for me (being a confirmed addict) but it had a positive effect on my ability to pay attention. The only time we were encouraged to tweet was through the very interactive and enjoyable session produced by Juliet Tzabar. ‘Get Smart with your Brand’ focused on how children’s brands could make effective use of their licensable content in the games and digital markets. As a moderately shy type *cough* I often find it intimidating to stick my hand up and ask questions or contribute in sessions. Being able to tweet diminished that issue for me so I could join in which had brilliant results as I won a magical prize for my input (which our 3yr old was extremely appreciative of).

We were only able to attend thanks to lovely people at Screen Yorkshire. In addition to getting us in they also provided us the amazing opportunity to be mentored, guided and introduced to this new world by the wonderful Sarah Muller.

The one uniting theme of the conference for me seemed to be trains. There was lots of talk about children’s obsessions with trains. This obsession was defined as being a result of a magical combination of factors it’s a vehicle with all of the elements of mastery that go along with that, a puzzle element in putting the track together and the brilliant opportunity to play at deity. Someone in the audience derailed this discussion by questioning if boy’s were interested in trains directly because of the tunnels…

So lots of new friends, great contacts made, practical skills gained thanks to Mel Norman and lots of great possibilities moving forward – woot!

Children’s Media Conference; What’s the future of children’s media? from Bold Creative Work-in-Progress on Vimeo.

Hello,

I’m Simon, the other new developer.

It’s been a few of weeks now since I started my placement here at Team Cooper and a demanding few of weeks it has been. I have spent the last two years on a game programming course at Sheffield Hallam studying C++, DirectX and OpenGL and because of this, it’s been a task converting to Actionscript and adopting the MVC method of thinking. It’s all experience though and I enjoy a challenge. I think the effort has paid off and now, rather than just accepting that things work, I am recognising how different sections of code play their part and why this approach leads to a cleaner coding practice.

As I’m aiming myself towards a career in the games industry I think any experience earned in my year here will benefit me; working with Flash, which is famous for creating interactive and good looking experiences, will definitely help. I’ve been involved in various projects from Flex applications to Flash games and I’m also developing my own project in the “20%” free time which will be a suite of fast paced mini-games. I’ve mainly been working with existing code so far so writing these mini-games from scratch using an MVC approach is going to be fun.

Simon

It’s been a little too long since I blogged, but blimey it’s been busy!

I’ve been wrapped up with completing our pitch to the BBC for the @North project. The team have been working on consecutive projects for another large broadcasting company which we’re very pleased with. We’re working on an augmented reality project. We won our second contract with the lovely people at Quba. Plus there’s our first FLEX application which is nearing completion, I’ve really been enjoying getting my teeth in to a little bit of development, I say development I’m only working on the CSS but still I haven’t done any FLEX stuff before and I love learning new things. To help us wade through all this work we’ve taken on 2 members of staff Russ has blogged already and I’m going to try and coax Simon in to a small blog intro of himself.

All of this work has led us to question when are we going to get all those game ideas built? So we’ve committed to giving everyone in the team 20% time. Any games produced in this time will launch from our gaming brand Robot / Lizard. Working on similar lines to that of Google (and we understand our neighbours Yoo Mee) everyone will get the opportunity to complete their own self directed project’s one day a week. We had an awesome brain storming session this afternoon. We’ve initially set a timescale of 10 weeks (10 Fridays) but this is a guideline and as it’s the first time of trying this we want to be very flexible and just see how it goes. I think of all the projects I’m most excited about the one Russ is going to be working on. He’s going to start our first Unity 3D project. It’s a departure for us Flash loving developers but it’s a direction we’ve been talking about for a while now – this feels like the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

Then in our ‘free time’ we’ve been enjoying participating in and getting to know the now many and various Sheffield Geek communities springing up care of the good people at GIST. Inspired by them and with Trevor Ward taking the lead we’re setting up Sheffield’s very own Adobe User Group (16^th June, The Old House 7pm – in-case you’ve missed our several tweets on the matter)

I keep talking with people about what I’m planning to do in my ‘free time’ and then I think about what I’m saying…

Evening all,

I’m the new Developer mentioned in the last posting, settling in to the new more spacious offices. I’ve been here a month now, returning from a round-the-world trip to settle back into some good old Actionscript development in the city centre.

I’ve already been set to task working on some quizzes and with some exciting projects on the horizon it’s all looking quite interesting!

Russ

Well, it has been a year (almost to the day) since we moved in to The Electric Works and we like to keep things fresh. We’re not moving too far this time – actually just in to the office next door. It’s approximately 1 meter door to door so hopefully it won’t take us too long.

We’ve got a student starting his placement year with us at the end of May and we’re starting recruitment for a Senior Flash Developer so we thought it was about time we had some room to stretch our (in my case very long) legs.

From this…

… to this

It’s not a huge difference, theres room for about 4 more desks but to us it’s a sign of our continuing growth and that makes us very happy.

It’s the second official Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace was pretty much the first female computer programmer. In her honour lots of people are blogging today about women in technology.

So I’d have something to write about I actively went out to find (Googled) some female role models working in technology. Even though 2 weeks ago I couldn’t have named any it really wasn’t hard to find lots of women making a big impact in technology. I can now list a number of women who are inspirational figures, the most current on my list being Jane McGonigal. She recently did a TED talk that’s blown me away. She’s a games designer and she works for the Institute for the Future. She’s trying to work out how to make a link between people playing in virtual game worlds and the real world. I’ve been reading a Theory of Fun (by Raph Koster) and it discusses how fun is basically an evolutionary reward from your brain for learning something new, possibly useful. Jane feels that if the we can spend time learning how to fix problems in a fun, rewarding and engaging way in a virtual world then we’d get a lot of problems solved in the real world. The work I do is not exactly world changing, I justify what I do as creating entertainment, making people happy and ultimately I love it (who can say they love their work?) I find what Jane is working on very inspiring. I’m not saying Team Cooper will ever create anything as meaningful as Evoke just that Jane’s ideas are going to affect and inform everything I work on in the future.

Rebecca Jesson (Social Media Manager at Quba) and I have been discussing if it’s a faux pas to blog about yourself today. I think we’re women working in technology and our experiences are as valid as anyone else’s, so that said, for those that don’t know here’s a bit about me. I’m a creative person who has always had a love for science, my Mum was a physics teacher, my Dad a mechanic and I’ve grown up with a constant source of information of how stuff works. I’ve been working in technology since the mid nineties. I started as a web designer, I watched the boom and bust from a safe distance. I’ve worked as a Flash developer in E-Learning, a freelance digital creative, a web design tutor to NEETs and as a team lead in digital marketing. Now I help run Team Cooper with my husband Tim and we create fun Flash things. At the moment we’re going through a period of growth and we’re starting to think of ourselves more as entertainment developers. The public are consuming ‘casual games’ more and more as their chosen form of entertainment – so why not? We’re building on the success of Beastie Burgers by creating a Facebook version and follow up games, taking advantage of this up swell in the social games market.

Being a woman in this environment has never been an issue, ever. Maybe I’ve been lucky? I suspect it’s more to do with the industry being populated by modern thinking people who really aren’t bothered about what you are, just about what you can do. It’s noticeable in the office and at various events that the number of women is in the minority but I don’t think that’s from a lack of trying. I think I’ve probably experienced more positive discrimination than the other way around. The problem is getting young women to make technology a career choice in the first place. So I fully support Ada Lovelace Day and hope that someone reads this blog or one of the others being posted today and that they see positive experiences and role models to help them to make a choice to join in the fun. Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone!

Maybe it’s the time of year but we’ve really been feeling the love recently.

Last Friday I attended We Love Technology which kicked of Sheffield’s lovebytes festival this year and I came away from it all giddy with techno joy. There was lots of talk about a convergence of ideas between the many different fields of design, craft, diy and technology. James B’s talk about social friction has given our ideas around social gaming new life. I love the idea of open hardware and as a big instructables fan I think defining an open source style process for hardware is a great idea. There were a few generative artists, an electronic log and my most loved things of the day were the thought provoking items made by Mr Jones.

Tim had an adventure to the Casual Connect conference in Hamburg and came home with the fire of social gaming burning in his eyes. We’ve generally been moving our gaming ideas in that direction, starting to focus more on social gaming (watch this space for a Beastie Burger Facebook version) and having spent 3 days hearing other developer’s love for social gaming, it’s opportunities and it’s benefits we feel reassured and motivated to move our plans forward.

And then yesterday we found out we’d made the short list of 45 companies to join in the BBC @ North project. It’s a great opportunity for us as one of the smaller companies on the list, being in a group with some of the north’s best digital and creative agencies makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Over the holidays and in the last few weeks Tim and I have been putting the finishing touches to our business plan. It’s something that we’ve only ever got halfway through and have been meaning to finish for ages.

Two things finally kicked us in to gear. The first being that while the business is doing very nicely at the moment we really want to grow and to develop more of our own content. We feel that if we don’t do something pro-active about it now we’ll keep coasting as we are and before we know it another year will have passed with no real change. The second was getting a great advisor from Business Link, we’ve had a few false starts with them but finally we’re dealing with someone who is actually helping us. We keep talking about how we would like to take on another developer and make more of our own games and she has helped us stop talking about it, make an action plan and just get on with it. We’ve bags of ideas for games and after the success of Beastie Burgers we’re really excited about getting on with another project.

It may sound a little stupid but the process of writing the business plan has helped us firm up what the actual plan is. I think the plan has only ever been a discussion, a virtual plan – now it’s a document it feels a lot more tangible. An added bonus is that through the process I’ve learned a lot about the casual games market, as I’ve mentioned before this is a bit of a new world for me personally. Writing the plan has made us do lots of research to back up what we think is a good idea with some hard facts. Until now we’ve had a vague idea of how things are, Tim reads a lot of industry blogs and magazines and I’ve been ‘working hard’ (or playing) absorbing myself in casual games seeing how the portals work, what works, what doesn’t and what’s popular with the audience. Now we feel we’re in an excellent position to get some funding and get our next game into development. We’re all feeling really hopeful and excited about the coming year.

Hello Team Cooper blog, its been a while, I’m sorry but we’ve been really busy. The launch of Beastie Burgers did exactly what we needed it to do – it generated a lot of interest and ultimately has won us some top new clients. Beasties has had over a million plays now and is proving to be a brilliant ambassador for the company.

It feels like Christmas and the new year has become our busiest time of year. It’s possible this is beacause of the increased number of businesses sending their clients seasonal greetings digitally rather than the considerably more expensive, less sustainable and pretty old fashioned Christmas card. I’m quite excited about Christmas and in the last few weeks we’ve been creating a few animated cards plus a couple of seasonal games. We’ve made an extremely cute game to help Watford Palace Theatre promote their panto Cinderella. And at the moment we’re putting the finishing touches on a winter rally game which is extremely addictive - it had most of us in the office fighting for the top score during development.

When we get back in the new year we’ve lots of work to get on with for some new clients and a couple of well know brands. Exciting stuff!

A very Merry Christmas to all our clients, suppliers and blog readers – see you in the New Year.

It’s been a long time coming, but we have finally released our Flash game, Beastie Burgers! Hoorah!

If you haven’t seen it already, you can play the game on the Robot / Lizard website. We have also released our Facebook app, the Beastie Builder which you can play with here.

Having completed it, we are now in the process of licensing it to a few Flash game portals. We have a primary sponsorship agreement with gamesfree.com which has been good to help claw back some of the development cost as well as help with distribution. We are also talking to some other portals about secondary sponsorships to be implemented once the primary sponsorships exclusive period is over.

The main reason for developing the game, was to help promote ourselves, and raise awareness of our Robot / Lizard Productions moniker in the hope that we might get some further game development work off the back of it. So far it seems to be doing pretty well at spreading itself around the interweb. In the past three days it’s been played about 80,000 times which is more than I had expected (for some reason, most of those players have been based in Spain) and the number of hits seems to be accelerating which is good news.

I’ll probably post a bit more about the development process behind the game on the Robot / Lizard blog in the coming weeks, for now though we’re still wrapping a few things up, and I’m going to wait until we’ve got a bit more data before I decide how much of a success it’s been.

I’d just like to give a quick shout out to the few people who have put up with my random ramblings and helped me produce this piece of work.
Those people are: Kyle (for all his hard work coding the thing), Phil (for making it look so good with his wonderful illustrations), Emma (for her moral support, animations, and for testing it), and Jean-Marc (for the narration on the introduction). Thanks guys! It wouldn’t have got this far without you and I am incredibly proud of the end result.