Mutant Labs Blog

Reading Blue Coat Gets Mutated

15 years old was the age that a lot changed for me. I went on work placement at a computer games development company called Mucky Foot (Urban Chaos, Startopia, Blade II). This week long insight gave me an opportunity to test games and experiment with 3DS Max, my first venture into the other side of video games. Those ingredients were swiftly added to the cosmic mixing bowl that would later become my career pie.

It was with this in mind that I got on a train to talk to Reading Blue Coat school, situated in deepest darkest Berkshire in a small town called (you guessed it) Reading. I spoke to these 100 attentive students for an hour about the other side of the games industry, speaking from the heart about game science, entrepreneurship and Half-Inch Heist. They followed by asking some rather insightful questions. We all learnt something that day, they learnt about the games industry and I learnt that hurling inspiration and passion at 15 year olds is a thoroughly rewarding experience.

Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day development of games and apps, but every now and then you find yourself thinking about where you came from, and how to give back to those who helped you get to where you are. Props to Mr. Gandy (head of careers at RBCS / my Step-Pa) for organising the trip.

Also, the same weekend my Mum got a puppy called Ludo, cue aww’s.

March 15, 2013

Posted by: Andy Sargeant in Free-Range Friday, News

Leap Motion Game Experiment #2

If you haven’t heard of it already, Leap Motion is a revolutionary new device that allows you to interact with your computer using individual hand and finger movements. We were lucky enough to be sent a few Leap Dev kits to play with, and we’ve been working on some demos during our Free-range Fridays (personal project time).

After our initial Leap game demo we wanted to try something a bit different, and having recently released our first iOS game Half-Inch Heist, we realised that some of the game mechanics might work well using the Leap as the controller.

Enter Half-Inch Heist Leap Prototype..

The game

Avoid the falling rubble.
Last as long as you can

Slow-motion using the Leap

We stumbled across a control feature that works really well, mapping the Z-Axis of your finger to the timescale. This gives the effect of slow-motion when you ‘push’ your finger in, and the opposite when you pull your finger out!

Controls

The Leap can track really accurate finger movements, which makes it perfect for avoider style gameplay where quick reactions and fast movements are required. I think the controller also has a novelty value, making it a good match for short, digestible arcade/action games. It opens up some great opportunities for creating secondary game mechanics, and more engaging experiences for games based on traditional controls (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY9NO4GQJRk – just kidding!).

Tech

Leap Motion AS3 Library - https://github.com/logotype/LeapMotionAS3
Axel 2D game framework – http://axgl.org/

Keep your eyes peeled for more Leap stuff.

March 5, 2013

Posted by: Ben in Development, Free-Range Friday, Games

Leap Motion R&D

here’s a little R & D project we’ve been working on @mutantlabs.

Leap Motion kindly sent us a couple of dev unit’s for their Leap motion device, for more on the leap motion see leapmotion.com.

We developed a library (AIR Native Extension) that allows us to access data from the Leap in AIR projects. (If there’s interest we’ll happily release it!) We often use AIR for game development at Mutant Labs. This is a small game to test and demonstrate the functionality of the Leap & Extension working together.

THE GAME..

Match the colours up by moving your finger or hand around a RGB colour-space cube, once you match a colour for 2 seconds you cut the corresponding wire of a bomb.

As the game progresses, the defusal time decreases and number of wires to cut increases, making the game challenging and frantic.

We also chucked in a little generative sound tech in the game that dynamically generates a funky sounds track based on your bomb disposing techniques.

Voice overs and some of the graphics done by our good friend @_DrewTurner.

stay tuned for an in-depth blog post coming next week!

December 6, 2012

Posted by: Rich in Design, Development, Games

Mutant Labs at #DigPen V

Last week 2 of the Mutant Labs team attended the #DigPen V developer conference in Plymouth.

#DigPen is a grassroots movement of people who make web and digital stuff in the far South West of England. They run community conferences and events, and support meetups, hackdays, barcamps and anything else web and digital going on in Devon, Cornwall, West Somerset and West Dorset.

#DigPen first appeared in 2011 with its inaugural ‘un-conference’ held in the Universities Roland Levinsky building, hosted by Frankie Dolan of Medworm. Mutants (‘Lil) Ben and Alex were fortunate enough to attend and speak at this first event. Since then #Digpen has been on the road visiting Exeter and Falmouth for conferences and a dev hack and Jam in Princetown on Dartmoor.

Over the past 18 months this loose gathering of software, web and game developers has matured into a tight nit community and a great resource for socialising, learning, sharing and collaborating with fellow like minded people.

Returning to Plymouth, #Digpen V was held at the University’s Robbins Conference Centre on Saturday the 29th of September, with an introduction and hosting by Sophie Dennis from Cayenne. Sophie also co-organised the event, so we have to extend a huge thanks to her for what we thought was an excellent conference

Friend of Mutant Labs, Ian Lobb of Dull Dude Games kicked off the morning session with an insight to his extensive experience working in and managing creative, innovative studios. Ian provided us with some great tips and advice, and left every agency in the room with one mission: to “hire a goth”. You can see a video of Ian’s session here: http://vimeo.com/50514251

Freelance Developer Andy Mantell treated us to an on screen code walk through of CSS PreProcessors – in example he used SASS. He also gave a nice roundup of Compass and showed us how to breeze through sprites, and CSS mixins to make CSS3 & vendor prefixes with fewer lines of code. Andy showed us how SASS can make our love for functions and variables work in our favour, and save us heaps of time and effort when writing CSS. You can see the slides for his presentation here: http://slides.andymantell.com/digpen-v-css-preprocessors-why-how-and-wow/ (tip – use keyboard arrows to navigate).

In the seminar room during session 3, we were treated to a live coding introduction to Django by Stuart Marsh, a discussion hosted by Shirley Atkinson titled “how do we get more kids to code?”

Session 4 introduced John Nye giving us an in depth look at testing websites across a range of devices, and Luca Sale sharing his insights on the web ecosystem, and how things are evolving.

In the main auditorium, afternoon sessions were presented by event sponsor GOSS’s Robert McCarthy, Gary Ratcliffe, and Cayenne’s Sophie Dennis.

Rob and Gary took us through a decade of experience with server side JavaScript, starting with JScript, V8, and now Node.js. Rob and Gary took us through their logic and how they worked out how Node.js could fit into & benefit their development workflow. Ultimately, it was a real eye opener and lesson on how properly to evaluate new technology and implement it when required, not just because its the latest thing.

Myself and fellow Mutant Ben Reynhart were also invited to speak. Ben Kicked off the fourth and final session with his creatively titled “Whiskey and Web Design” – an in depth overview of how over the past few years, we at Mutant Labs have refined our processes, made mistakes, learnt how to improve upon our methods, and continue to refine our formula for improving our process of delivering great products. You can see Ben’s slides below:

Whisky and Web Design from Ben Reynhart

I concluded the final session with a short presentation on the importance of collaborative working in development teams, and as freelancers. I gave a synopsis of my experience over the past 5 years and collaboration has led me to improve my skills rapidly, try new methods, ideas and techniques, and ultimately keep an open mind to how I work, and the tools I work with. Following this session I opened the floor to the audience to discuss collaboration tools and methods they use, and fielded questions and answers to and from the conference attendees. You can see my notes on that session here

All in all – a great conference. Thanks to Sophie Dennis & Andy Robinson of Cayenne, Shirley Atkinson of UoP, as well as sponsors Plymouth university and Goss Interactive.

@benholiio

October 2, 2012

Posted by: Mijahn in Events, Uncategorized

Jumping Across Platforms Part 2

Following on from Part 1, I wanted to go over a few things that we have integrated into a game we are currently working on. Rather than talk about the project (I’d have to kill you), I’m going to go over a few things that we’ve discovered along the way during production.

While I really enjoyed testing various platforms, I feel the various tech demos we put together were not nearly enough to decide which ledge to jump from… What I mean by this is at the time of testing, HaxeNME was way faster than Adobe Air on iOS. We were literally chucking 5 times more display objects around on stage than Adobe Air and getting much better results. This in itself was exciting, but as we discovered quite early on, Frame Per Second isn’t the be all and end all.

The game we are developing heavily relies on the iPhone camera to capture user-generated content. It was quite clear that at the time, Adobe Air’s implementation of Native Extensions was much more mature than HaxeNME. Native Extensions allow developers to ‘extend’ outside of AS3/Haxe and use native libraries. It was unfortunate that we had such trouble at this stage with NME, as we were really keen on using it. It was only after a couple of weeks of constantly hassling the (very helpful) NME community, while we tried to compile an extension, that we agreed – enough was enough. We knew from the outset that our game would require certain native functionality (In App Purchases to name one), so it was a pretty straight forward decision to step away from NME for this project.

That aside, the major factor that swayed our decision to use Air was that it happened to land on the precise time that Adobe announced Air 3.0 and support for Stage3D (previously Molehill) for mobile devices. For those who are not familier with Stage3D, it allows the flash player to push graphical tasks onto the GPU, giving a much improved performance – especially for more demanding applications such as games and video players.

While attending Flash on The Beach 2011, Lee Brimlow from Adobe announced the release of Starling - a port of the native iOS library ‘Sparrow‘ by the brilliant Daniel Sperl of Gamua. Starling is essentially a 2d, hardware-accelerated framework for games. Amazing right?! Well, unfortunately the first iteration of Starling didn’t really deliver the supersonic performance that Adobe had advertised. However, fast forward 12 months later and it’s blazingly fast. Providing you stick to sprite-sheets and avoid vectors like the plague, then you are in for a real treat.

Other 2d frameworks that we looked at which are worth noting are Genome2D, Axel, and ND2D.

I plan on writing a whole post on developing for mobile with Starling, so stay tuned if this floats your boat. In the mean time, go over to the Starling Wiki and check out all the brilliant tutorials and get started.

During the last 6 months we have been developing the game with our own custom framework, built on top of Starling. Aside from re-jigging a couple of native extensions and exporting to different screen sizes; this project has truly become cross-platform, thanks to some amazing technology. We plan on shipping for iOS in the next couple of months and then onto Android later.

So there you have it. If you’re a flash developer already, you’ve just been given a great opportunity to join all the cool kids who make games for iOS and Android. Ignore those who jumped on the first ship to HTML5, it’s not the only way!