Has anyone ever told you a skill was worthless, or you’d never need to do that, so why bother?  Well, for the last few weeks we’ve been doing a rather daunting project on the side, all for the sake of pushing our limits and learning new things. When I stand back and look at the results so far, I’m wondering how it relates to this company, our portfolio or anything having to do with training… the short answer is.. it doesn’t.  But, there’s always a bright site to digression – sometimes you stumble upon things you never knew were possible simply because you became curious.

A very rough draft

The project idea initially was to create a sushi-eating interaction, where you could take on the role of a person shoveling various types of sushi into their mouth. Over three weeks it went from that into a giant monster attack destruction game, where users control laser eyeballs of a giant robot, slime, or chupacabra as it destroyed the giant 3d city.

We built the 3D city next

Everything we’re working on is animated with programming, or scripted particle effects, combined with the user ability to upload a photo of whoever, and place it into the giant menacing monster to add some humor and a personal touch – all of which can be saved and sent to a friend.

Here you can upload a photo, rotate and resize, change your monster's name, and choose what monster you'd like

The further we get into this project the more complex ideas pop up, and the more we seem to learn. So besides the fact there’s nothing you can learn from blowing up cars with a laser beam, we’re now more proficient in database management, file saving and uploading, email integration, action script programming and file compression. On the creative end we also managed to design the entire city with Swift 3D – modeling and lighting our way to a miniature city look and feel that couldn’t be created in Flash alone.

Put them all together and you get some exciting results!

Sometimes it’s just nice to try something off topic and a little different. We’ll launch a working version in a week or so, until then.. I’ve got some rubble to draw.