Most of them had to do with the kind of technologies that we’d be using to make the game happen, obviously one area we want to completely wanted to leave to the specialists was the projection part. There was also the matter of our choice of server side technologies and front end technologies and visual development too. Getting it all coordinated and made in such an insanely short amount of time, required a good deal of minute by minute project management.

Projection

Specialist company Blitz communications were enlisted as the project partners to provide the game with over 120,000 Lumens of projecting power ready to blast hot photons onto the face of a chosen building.  (it ended up being 3x projectors for each side the game is played on, that’s about 40 times as much power as a home cinema projector).

Building Choice / Game development

As the building choice wasn’t completely final till very late in the project (pending permissions, discussions with the UK Civil Aviation Authority, Councils and lawyers of a multinational oil company) we had to keep certain things very flexible, and completely adaptable to circumstance,  for example, the choice of the game being Battleships, was in jeopardy as we could only potentially use one side of a building.

Visual Language

Regardless of the game mechanics and everything else that was going on at the early stage of the project, we developed a neat circuit like visual design language, sympathetic to the overall theme of the show. Conceptually speaking, we were thinking, the players would be uncovering the circuitry underlying the facade of the building, by destroying it.

From a visual design specification standpoint we made it so it could wrap around the features of pretty much any building with standard architectural features such as windows, window frames, dividing spaces, decorative columns. While bearing bearing in mind the limited space available to project onto, we wanted to stay as far away from the usual tropes of projection mapping which include faux shadows, excessive animation, lighting effects and playing with negative space. Our objective was to make it distinctly befitting of the brief and more importantly, legible at distance.

Needless to say, even though we had a projector to experiment with, we kept tweaking the visuals and in particular the animation effects till the final test day. This flexibility and agility is ultimately required on projects like this. 

Creating the mobile game

The requirement for the game was that a crowd of people could connect to play the game using their phones, with minimal instruction and setting up.

Given the time constraints, to bypass the App store and Google Play was imperative, we wanted to be able to test and  tweak the client side experience till the last minute and in response to the requirements of the project. So we created a very usable HTML5 browser based interface for a game that could be played on any smartphone.  Because the game was team based, we had ensure that every player could view what their team-mates were doing on their own phone, in realtime. To achieve this we used the brilliant Node.js to create a socket server, which each player connected to through their instance of the game. This node server is essentially what facilitated the realtime interaction.

Every client connection to the game fed directly to a server we had set up, where a database collected all the game actions. The game logic itself was all done on the server. The results of each players actions in the game were in turn fed directly to two computers running an instance of Unity for each side of the building.

Unity

To say unity is built for fast prototyping is an absolute understatement, in the right hands, it’s an absolute force to be reckoned with. We’d actually previously used it for a brief put to us to create a series of games for a well known national brand in record time (sadly under NDA, but they’re delicious!), and some of our research and development work is built upon pushing the Unity platform to do unexpected things.

One of the things we could do with Unity was simulate the physics of crumbling, and the special effects such as sparks and explosions.  Unity essentially took the game logic from the server, and displayed the corresponding visuals, the code was abstracted enough to work on each side of the building with a few minor variables being changed.

A few weeks ago, we were called up by one of our friends to say they were considering us for doing something quite ambitious on a landmark scale in London and would we be interested!

Naturally this had us intrigued. With more details flowing in by the minute, and fuelling our imagination,  we quickly realised this represents an opportunity to work with a TV crew that we’ve really enjoyed getting to know and working with in the past… and we’d also get to meet one of our heroes … much celebrated and loved Mr Stephen Fry!

First for some context— Channel 4 have recently commissioned Stephen’s new show, Stephen Fry: Gadget Man

We were tasked with coming up with a game that could be played on the side of a building, not one to shy away from complexity, we came up with several ideas of the types of crowd games that we could make in the incredibly short time. Needless to mention, this is ALL while working on several other projects too!

While we were brainstorming, we had the idea of loosely basing it around the game, ‘Battleships’ so the journey of finding a building in London that had two identical opposing sides began. This particular aspect proved to be one of the trickiest aspects of the project with Shell actually pulling out at the 11th hour and one of London’s University’s being finicky about turning off their lights.

(to be continued)

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Here’s a mention of one of our largest side-projects which graduated from RITH labs this year.

We think sideprojects that have a lot to say demand their own blog  as well as their own site  and even a chance to spin off into their own business directions!  Which is precisely what we’re doing to librarygame which brings game mechanics directly into the library experience.

Since we started RITH, we’ve had a thirst for discovering things that are worthy of spending our spare minutes and hours on. There’s a great tradition of design agencies with their own products, sometimes these grow to dwarf the design company itself.  One area that jumped at us early on was all to do with a place we spent a good portion of our childhoods at, Libraries!

We collectively think, they’ve been malnourished with really awful interfaces in the past and a lot of the issues they’re facing these days precisely relate to really basic user experience factors which can be improved with little cost and a sprinkling of imagination.

We think we’re well placed to do this as well, other companies that are creating platforms for ‘gamification’ are usually applying a very broad brush thinly, but we’re after deep engagement, not simple game layers and veneers of attractiveness, we want the game to spark enjoyable learning journeys and habituate good practice.

There’s a lovely quote by Esther Dyson:

“Go where other people aren’t. Any time you approach something as an outsider, you’re able to see what people who are familiar with it can’t.”

This fits quite nicely with this venture that we find ourselves involved in. We are in a way complete outsiders, yet we’ve been looking into the library world since we were kids, and with great enthusiasm about making a difference since 2005 as professionals.

The story so far!

So for the last two years at RITH, while we’ve been working on client projects we’ve also had our own incubator or as we call it startup–within-a-startup, RITH Labs. RITH has given us an incredible business, with TV appearances, mentoring placement students, collaborating widely with agencies far and wide, and immense roster of clients.

There were points where we kept it stealthy, and there were points where we went all out and mentioned it to people at conferences like Mashed Libraries.

Out of all those interactions and all our work (at weekends, nights and crazy hours)  something new and beautiful emerged at the end of 2011. We created, something that is a bit of a first in the library world – a game that is played in your library! … and you guessed it, we called it LibraryGame!

What is Librarygame

Librarygame is a library enhancement tool and a game that’s played within libraries, it essentially embeds the mechanics of games; things like points, collections,  achievements, leaderboards, messaging and reciprocity directly into the experience of using a library to compel patrons and generate loyalty. Our first partner has been the University of Huddersfield.

Who it’s for?

It’s for public and academic libraries of all sizes. Library patrons sign up with their regular library cards and their interactions within the library are tracked (obviously with their implied consent) things like their book borrowing, recommendations, completion of certain tasks (reading lists) carry points. There is a huge amount of customisation that is possible.

How does it work? 

The University of Huddersfield were very keen to get their hands on it and customise their own flavour of Librarygame, which we called Lemontree. We decided to deliver a little bit more than a prototype we were originally commissioned to make and so far its been quite a success and we’re in the process of balancing the game play and iterating upon the initial offering for students in 2012.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with a national teaching fellow (Andrew Walsh) and one of the leading proponents of Library 2.0 (Dave Pattern) on making Lemontree happen.

To find out more about Librarygame for your library please visit:
http://librarygame.co.uk/

Can I see it working somewhere?

To see the first version in action
https://library.hud.ac.uk/lemontree

Shortly following our second appearance on Channel 5′s The Gadget Show last year, that episode about casual gaming, we received a lot of calls and offers of work and pitch opportunities. A good few we declined because they weren’t a great fit for what we do, but one of them we absolutely loved and said yes to— and now we’re in a position to tell you a little bit about it!

Blue Flame Publishing asked us to develop an interactive gamebook app!

It’s in the style of  ‘choose your own adventure‘ books, which were popular in the 80s, as a reader you would have to make choices at the end of each chapter which affected your hero’s journey through reading the rest of the book.

With Askary’l Grimoire which is part of the Hamnasya trilogy, you play as Edhan on a perilous mission to find a stolen book of immense power, while avenging the death of his mother! It’s a complex plot with lots of twists and turns and lots of opportunities for you to completely immerse yourself in the storyverse.

To further expand its reach, it’s totally bi-lingual! (French and English) and multidevice for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, with interfaces which suit each device.

We see a lot of nice interactive projects centered around reading, a lot of projects where the content needs to find a right vessel, but many of them suffer from a paucity of content, or they haven’t really considered their target market carefully.. or quite simply they have serious usability issues.  Well we’d like to think  this one is a little bit different not just because we feel very vested in the idea as developers, but what’s fresh about this project is that  it’s working with original never seen before content and a client who is genuinely concerned about tailoring the format  for the audience familiar with either dark fantasy writing or  the vernacular of RPG gaming.. from the style of the interface to how the instruments in the melodies sound like, everything has been considered.

To us retronauts and avid readers, it’s one of the  most exciting developments in publishing we know of that beautifully merges new content with some additions that makes sense for the platform it’s on without diluting the focus which is the reading experience itself. We’re merely enhancing that reading experience with unobtrusive interactivity.

Specification

The content comprises of 500 chapters written by Nicolas Lenain accompanied by incredible illustrations by David Revoy. We actually really enjoyed unravelling the complex interactive narratives as kids in the form of analogue books, so an app for iOS devices really will make the book a truly engaging read and adventure. Music and sound effects are by by Leaf Sound Design and a top VFX studio in France Delapost Paris are working on a trailer!

In short we’re excited about working on an enhanced reading experience. combining the reading experience of a traditional choose your own adventure style book, with RPG elements, score keeping, inventories, set collection and interactive fight sequences to make for an engrossing  journey alongside the character, where you can be the hero!

We were lucky to be one of the first mobile agencies in the UK to work with publishers like Harper Collins doing interactive accompaniments to books, and this project feels perfectly in keeping with that.

We want to share two observations and one exciting bit of news about something we’re working on.

1. Sometimes the tactile qualities of physical interfaces and a heightened sense of physicality and (some might say superfluous visual realism) in virtual interfaces make our interactions a bit more pleasing, memorable, reassuring and more importantly, quite human!

2. Often phone-cameras suffer from a noticeable lack of stability and grip, it’s not just that we crave for that familiar feel, or the affordance and reassurance that a physical depressable button or toggle gives us, it’s also the fact  that phone cameras aren’t that easy to frame shots with – essentially you’ve got one hand touching a screen and another holding the camera. Even in the case of iOS5 and iPhone 4 and 4s’ with the volume buttons taking a shot, it still feels quite fiddly. There are quite a few projects that aim to address this.

We think BeepHQ’s POPA is an attempt to address both issues head on, whether it’s with the unmistakeable big red button, the pleasing to hold leather grip, the affordance of holding a your phone in a familiar way that resonates with professional photographers and amateur snappers alike or the textures in the app itself which are also beautifully skeumorphic, POPA delivers and does so with finesse!

So when Brendan Dawes the director of Beep Industries and good friend of ours asked us to help out, we were super excited to see how we could improve the performance of the app and add a few wishlist features like ‘touch to focus’ and faster response times and stability to the experience.

With that said, no amount of software or hardware is good if people aren’t using it or don’t get it, here’s an awesome review by a street photographer with some lovely work in his portfolio. For us the proof in the pudding on how well POPA works and how people take to it, was when Brendan was demo-ing it to us in a cafe in Manchester – the guy working in the cafe came over to have a play, he intuitively got it there and then! It’s a button, I gotta press it, it has an app! I’ve also heard about kids using it with ease.

Beep Industries already had a fully fledged app, our role in working on the app was to ensure it acts in a responsive and stable fashion and work on some features! We’re pleased to say we’re looking forward to future developments which we’re also partnering with Beep Industries on!

So a couple of weeks ago we got a call from our friends at the Gadget Show and they were wondering whether we could help them out with something very close to our hearts! An FPS called Battlefield and their dream to make an utterly immersive experience.  The incentive… getting our hands on the hottest game of the year well before anyone else would and playing on the Ultimate Battlefield 3 Simulator.

We genuinely can’t talk much about our involvement until the show airs, other than saying we did the Kinect Body Tracking and consulting on some of the other bits. The trailer, which has racked up an impressive 600,000 views on YouTube since yesterday, should give you an idea of how all the components (there were five specialist companies helping out) helped create something that has excited a lot of people in the gaming and military simulation world!

We’ll be releasing some more pics and information on how we developed our component after the show airs. Like our Facebook page to find out more and get sneak peeks at future work we do, well before anyone else knows about it.

The show airs on Channel 5 on the 24th of October in the UK. If we can get past the licensing issues we’ll post a recording here for our American friends!

Update: there is a huge buzz gathering around this episode, it’s been picked up by some of the biggest games and tech websites including Engadget and Kotaku! You can even see the RITH Macbook Pro on the Engadget behind the scenes photo gallery.

The trailer has now had more than 1,000,000 views on YouTube… fantastic!
The trailer has now had more than 2,000,000 views !! and even a parody! haha

Update 2 :  watch the full episode

The University of Huddersfield UniApp that we developed has been shortlisted for a 2011 Times Higher Education award for Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year!

We’re really pleased because its our first awards nomination. That in itself was a nice little accolade, but being shortlisted in the final is the icing on the cake

UniApp / RITH / UoH Team

So we’re looking forward to going down to London for the event, along with the happy bunch at the University of Huddersfield who were involved in the project. The event itself is on the 24th of November at Grosvenor House and seeing all the other projects that make their way onto the stage, and possibly even UniApp should be interesting! Fingers crossed.

How we developed a useful cross platform app. 

As far as the app goes, it’s been downloaded a healthy number of times on both iOS and Android devices (though much less on Android), in fact it’s a very significant number (a double digit percentage of total student population of Huddersfield University) and it spiked again with the intake of students this year.

It’s easy for us to say we designed and developed it and take all the credit, but really it’s a good case of the University seeking then listening to user feedback, then approaching us for a proposal. The University was involved in every process and carefully weighed the options and choices presented to them in wireframe and prototype form, to optimise the usefulness and reach of each facet of it. At no point did we indulge our own ideas of what it should be without carefully evaluating the point of that feature or implement something without evaluating its use over time.

Features like:

• Searching the staff directory
• Live computer availability in the Library
• Photos of buildings to ease familiarisation with the surroundings
• Renewing library items via a simple interface
• Searching the library catalogue

Are all useful features to a potential student or member of staff, and that’s what makes a good utility app!

The project is also a very good case for totally customising something for your end users, and not going for the cookie cutter solution. Ironically those who do end up with generic solutions usually end up paying extortionate license fees which is a trend we hope to reverse one bit of software at a time. Nothing beats handcrafted software that you iterate on.

Wax on, wax off.

The last couple of weeks we’ve been catching flies with chopsticks and getting a fun ninja / robot / kung-fu game together for Channel 5′s The Gadget Show and Mr Jason Bradbury. A short while ago we were approached by the lovely researchers at the Gadget Show to see if we could work with them on another project, this time for a challenge involving Suzi Perry and Jason Bradbury, two of the shows star presenters, in a casual gaming face-off!

We have until the end of March to register as many game visits as possible on the Gadget Show website, so spread the word! We want to win. Here is the game http://fwd.five.tv/adv/mechu-fu-game, make sure you Tweet, Facebook Like and check out Suzi’s game too.

On this game we assembled the finest talent that we’ve worked with. Monty Adkins composed four musical tracks, Rose Dodd provided sound effect design and placement student Joe Sharpe did a stunning job of translating Jason’s original direction into a series of animated characters and environments.

“It’s like you’ve looked into my brain and photocopied it” – Jason

Well given our name, you could be mistaken that we do sports related things but to be quite honest we probably fare better at video game versions of athletics and doing what we do best in our spare time,  tinkering with technology!

So  how do you end up being asked by the Gadget Show on Channel 5 to do something for them on the topic of football and referee-less games using smart design?

Well it all started when we got a call from our friends Smallfry who had previously appeared as innovation and product design experts on the show and helped the hosts of the Gadget show, Jason Bradbury and Suzi Perry, go head to head in designing future wearable gadgets.

In this episode we were asked to come up with ways of detecting the offside rule and measurement of a free kick’s minimum distance between players of opposing teams using computer vision. If we’ve lost you there fear not. The process we went through is actually more exciting than the end product and the speedy turnaround and working proof of concept the real story.

This episode aired on Monday 13th of September on Channel 5 in the UK @ 8pm you can watch it here on the Channel 5 site (UK only) we start at 3m55s.

In this our first year at Running in the Halls, lots of stuff has happened, Sam got engaged, we’ve been filmed for an episode of the Gadget Show!

…we had work featured in a national newspaper (Telegraph – Iman doesnt like the picture they took of him and the Glitch Book!) and we got to go to DIBI Conf and SXSWi in Texas and met some of our heroes and old friends!

Alison kept making games like brian and discovered a newfound love of dress making! (though she wont let us post pics!) and… she was also interviewed by PC Gamer about a month after we started!

We also pitched our ‘not so top secret’ but still in stealth mode Lemontree (which we first debuted at Mashed Liverpool) to one the UK’s largest and most successful public libraries (oww we cant talk about it yet) and worked on a few more projects we’re not allowed to talk about!

We’ve had the tremendous privilege of working with some fantastic new clients:

and the good fortune to work with some old ones like ALPS doing more funky stuff behind the scenes on their behemoth of a web app designed by our Sam.

Best of all we’ve made some amazing friends and formed great partnerships which we intend to nurture with our new directions and projects. Kettle are an award winning NY based interactive agency operating in a similar area as us with some incredible clients and Smallfry are one of the most respected names in UK product design!

We’re so proud of this little launch as well:
http://batesmill.co.uk

Being based in Bates Mill and saying hello to Ian (the Mill’s utterly amazing and interesting handyman) every morning has been pure inspiration and one of the best things that ever happened to us. We are literally operating at the point where Digital and Analogue collide and stories are formed. It’s tremendous fun doing what we do, so much so that it doesn’t feel like work.

Here’s to the future!
Love from everyone at RITH.

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