The Maori Feast was held over 4 days and had more than 4000 guests dining on 9000 sharks, 11000 baskets of potatoes and enjoying large-scale mock battles and huge hakas. We recreated parts of the artwork to allow us to zoom in and added sound and animation to bring this great scene to life.

The exhibition is on now for about four months at the museum. A scaled-down web version of the installation is available on the Auckland Museum website: Maori Feast at Remuera Interactive. The exhibition was also featured on the Asia Downunder tv programme – you can watch it here, Chapter 2: Asia Downunder, 18 Jul 2010.

Fingers crossed for a shot of The Cannon…

Here’s our little guy rounding up the New Zealand+Australian iTunes App Stores and in the latest New On iTunes email for NZ+AU – choice!!

Update: Top Dog was featured as New and Noteworthy in 24 App Stores internationally!

Here are some coloured numbers that show the effects, care of Dave’s MajicRank. Before…

and a bit after…

and a bit more after…

4/5 – “Top Dog is a great game for kids but with hard and easy options it is suitable for any age. Children will love it.” – TouchReviews.net

4/5 – “All in all, Top Dog is fun to play and addicting. I can play it repeatedly and always get a fresh experience. Recommended for anyone who is looking for a fresh and fun game for the iPhone.” – Digital Reality

4/5 – “Such a simple, yet fun game is perfect for the younger audience Flightless have focused on, but each level can be truly challenging to complete at a gold-medal speed. A great game for casual and younger gamers.” – AppSpy.com

19 April 2010

Flightless Soars Up the Charts With Top Dog: Farmyard Adventures

Within hours of their debut launch of the iPhone game, Top Dog: Farmyard Adventures, Wellington interactive studio Flightless, has scored a hit with children and game lovers throughout the country. Featuring a graphic design sensibility often missing from the casual game market, Top Dog: Farmyard Adventures lets gamers control a virtual canine to herd various types of animals into their pens.

“For Kids, Top Dog is currently ranked number 1 on the iTunes store, edging out Thomas, Sponge Bob, and other international brands. We are delighted to see kiwis enjoying a quality home grown iPhone game.” says Flightless Creative Director John O’Reilly.

“The success of the iPhone and now the iPad, and the rise of other sophisticated devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Google’s Android mean the landscape for digital content delivery has shifted. It’s what we’ve looked forward to for years and it’s a natural fit for our skill-sets and passion for crafting quality interactive work. We have a wide portfolio of museum exhibition and online based service work, but Top Dog is our first foray into our own product line.” says John O’Reilly.

“We wanted to create something anyone could enjoy. It’s a great way to spend a few minutes on the bus or with the kids. It’s not violent or threatening, just fun. It also happens to be completely addictive.” says Greg Harding, Flightless’ Technical Director.

Top Dog: Farmyard Adventures is available for $1.29NZ through Apple’s iTunes App Store. An iPad version will be out soon.

Born: 26th February 2010, 3.15pm
Proud Parents: Flightless and the Team at Hamilton and Waikato Regional Tourism

visits welcome

Some observations from my almost-first-month here:

• Things are busy
• Even though I’ve been away from it for a few years, proposal writing, printing, packaging, and delivery is always the same made rush.
• Mention of touch interfaces, new Apple products, Star Wars, or small animals always guarantees a conversation.
• Similarly, easy points can be scored by scoffing at: mocha drinking, saving the habitat of the Kosovar monkey, or snide comments about hard drive destruction.
• The music collection is a topic best left for another day.
• Lorin sends out most of the jokes/quirky finds.

Here’s some of the things that are part of the recent cultural backdrop:

• Not an x-wing
• James Cameron’s inspired choice of typeface
• Cross Country Snowboarding
• Disappointment with George Lucas
• Bitter, bitter, disappointment
• IPad parody (predictable and memetic[is that a word?])

And that’s about my blogging contribution all used up.

This content requires flash

Controls: Click mouse to randomise speed+direction | Spacebar to change shape | C to toggle colour/black+white | B to toggle+randomise blur.

I stumbled across this old thing on my drive and thought I’d AS3 & post it for lack of ever putting it anywhere else… using the words of a certain wacky foreigner (you know who you are), we love the random. I might add more to it just for fun++, but only if it stays <4kb for historic reasons.

“This high-quality sleeping bag looks just like a Tauntaun, complete with saddle, internal intestines and plush lightsaber zipper pull…”

www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/bb2e/

“Hello,

Regards”

Summary: Standalone Flash Player on win xp 32bit will crash when it is using about 1.45gig of memory.

Avoid falling off the nerd-cliff by not reading any more…

In case you were wondering, crashing the standalone Flash Player v9 or v10 by running out of memory is pretty easy on 32bit win xp. The magic number is about 1,454,740k… ok, it varies a bit from that, but at about 1.45gig of memory the player just crashes and offers you a system dump as a peace offering. Awesome.

(Yes, building stuff in Flash that uses gigs of memory is picking an all-in brawl… yes, there are other tools [and no, we didn't use them]. And briefly, no, the problems weren’t coding related like adding a million event listeners non-weak binded and never removing them when objects go out of scope… we know stuff.)

This is pretty annoying, considering your system can still have a lot of physical and virtual memory available. As an aside, it’s also pretty easy to crash the IDE, and don’t start with the debug player which has a mind of its own and doesn’t complain too much while it just stops working behind your back… The IDE also runs out of memory exporting movies, but that’s another rant really – the summary of which is to just export from a Mac when movie exports >100meg start failing, you know, after you’ve saved and compacted and restarted the IDE a few times to keep things exporting for a while. (Yes, there are other tools, compilers, developer IDE’s, etc. so this part only concerns the standard win xp Flash IDE.)

There’s not much solid information about the real limits of Flash, or on the differences between the PC and Mac players (or Linux/64bit for that matter). Adobe have the odd technote here and there that recommends not using more than 16,000 layers and handy stuff like that, but real application performance limits are hard to track down. This might be different for Flex or Air etc., but I’ve not stumbled across much info for them either… and also haven’t really used them much.

Anyway, this was recently a big pain for us in an installation and took some cunning tracking down within the interactive itself to prove the point. (Another aside: It would have been really useful to explicitly call the garbage collector in the release player – but you can’t in v9…)  If we had a dollar for every time we’ve been left scratching our tiny-brained heads when Flash pulls a fast one on us, needless to say we’d own several small islands… each.

We had the pleasure of working with Catherine De Groot and Sarah Gibbs, sisters and founders of  local cosmetics company Trilogy. Not only do they make yummy cosmetics, all their products are eco and critter friendly too, which the animal mad crew at Flightless especially appreciates.  Of course I had to do some ‘user testing’ of the product… I recommend the Rosehip oil, and a few squirts of hydrating mist toner is a treat after a hard night in front of the screen! Go get shopping ladies.

The Colossal Squid Exhibition touch screens for Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and Ewe Tunes, an online campaign for Icebreaker.