Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Flash on the Beach ‘07

Ok, the second Flash on the Beach conference..

Was it better than last year? Well, it was different (so no comparisons here). Having attended both conferences, I really enjoyed this year’s creative and inspiring input. The fact is that the countdown has already started for next year’s Flash on the Beach, which I believe is getting stronger and..sunnier, as it slowly moves towards the summer months!

3+1 amazing days of a mixture of workshops, Adobe teaser presentations, presentations from leading people of the industry, targeted for developers, designers and the people who just do both, giving advice and tips, while others being more technical, and sessions just to get you inspired. In fact most of the sessions were meant to get you inspired and challenge you to break the default.

John Davey did an amazing job bringing all these talented people together, and all speakers seem to love him and say the best words about him. They also seem to believe that it is the best flash conference.

It was also a great opportunity to network and meet like minded (and not) people from all over the world. It is funny when you hear people asking; ‘what do you do?’ and the answer is ‘Flash stuff!’.

I should also add that Charis designed the flyers for the 2 party nights of the conference.

A list of my personal highlights:

The Game Development workshop opened the conference for me; an all day session from the successful team of Plug-in Media, Seb Lee-Delisle and Dom Minns, targeted for both developers and designers and the ways they work together to create a project, in this case a cupids-hit-each-other game. Their relationship was well put by Joe as a married couple’s one From pen and paper, or wacom tablet and screen, drawing techniques in flash, animating tips, and best practices for integrating these with code, to coding simple physics and collision detection, parallax scrolling, and finalising the game..and turning your code from AS2 to AS3 in 10 minutes (maybe 20). However, this session could do with a bit more of code examples and working closer with the speakers. Something to look for next year..

The next day started with the Adobe guys and an overview of the new features of the Flash IDE and the player in the next release. Best parts were; native 3D support, kinematics both at design and run-time and the new Thermo tool. Also, seeing the Adobe team dressed up as Sherlock Holmes and Watson was great fun.

Seb-Lee Delisle and his 1000% Extra FREE particles were the best introduction to the pandemonium of creative and inspiring ideas to come. He went step by step through his particle engine and the visible advantages in speed when using AS3 to render hundreds of particles. I also learned what a difference a bit of blurring effect use can make when comes to creating realistic effects. He also went through techniques of using particles in different ways, like braking apart objects on stage when clicked and tracing particles in around letters and words.

Keith Peters‘ talk was about how casual games are the new phenomenon on the web market, and how easy it is to get a piece of that market. He explained why it is a good idea to integrate your game engine to incorporate dynamic ad banners, high score tables, levels, and other standard features when publishing your games online and promoting them using popular services like Mochi Ads, Digg, StumbleUpon and others. Casual games are not about the visuals and the narrative, but mostly easy to make, fun, little games targeting people at the office that need to ?kill? their time when their boss isn’t looking.

John Grden, presented his Papervision3D flash component and how easy it is to import 3D collada objects into flash and start playing with them. He then showed how the same can be achieved in Flex, using a bit of code. Moving on a promising finale presenting his shader effects that will come in the next Papervison3D v2 release.

Joshua Davies was an amazing and inspiring speaker. He showed how randomness can be your friend and make your computer an artist. Matt wrote an interesting post about Joshua here.