Interactives
I currently work at a video/multimedia studio at NMSU, and before that, I used to work at ExploreLearning, so I've had a lot of experience creating multimedia content. Much of it is relatively uninteresting (such as a kiosk that lets users touch a map of New Mexico to get contact information for their county Cooperative Extension Service agent), but there was something interesting in nearly every job. Here are some highlights.
For developers, I have a Shockwave3D Developer's Guide available.
Interactives are in Shockwave for Director format.
Dungeoncrawl (New!)
Made way back in the Director 5 games and tweaked every couple of years since then, I recently dragged this game out of the dark recesses of my backup CD's and stuck it up here for you to enjoy. Crawl through the deep dungeon, slaying nasty monsters, collecting gold, and generally kicking some evil butt. An oldie but a goodie.
Sacraments
Sacraments is a console-style RPG I created for the RPGDX.NET Spring 2004 game creation competition. It was programmed in Macromedia Director on Mac OS X, and is freely available for Mac and Windows.
Plot teaser:
It's been over a year since young Garrick has seen his friend Sarah.
She left their sleepy little town to become a Templar, an elite
knight of the church. Now her training is over, and she is coming back
home to pick up their partnership once again. But her return will set
into motion a series of events that will threaten their friendship,
call up the ghosts of a bloody race war, and possibly even kill them.
I also wrote a series of articles for Director Online (a.k.a. "DOUG") about how the game was built and architected:
So far, the game has gotten very positive feedback, with several people sending me unsolicited thank you's for the game. I have yet to receive any fan art, though.
I recently received an offer from someone to write music for the game, and we're working together now to bring some great music to the game.
ExploreLearning
From 2000 through 2003, I was the Chief Architect of Multimedia at ExploreLearning, a company that builds online Math, Science, and Language Arts interactive teaching tools. I developed a large code library to assist building these tools, and a small core group of programmers (including myself) built scores of tools off of it. We made some great interactives that illuminate difficult subjects in a unique and compelling way.
The idea was to provide tightly-focused teaching tools that attack a particular perceptual problem, and do it extremely well, rather than try to provide some generic tool for teaching all of Algebra. For instance, when teaching about parabolas, it's difficult to communicate to students the role that the coefficients of the independent variable play in the equation. Graphing several different parabolas to show the differences is time-consuming, and errors can introduce misunderstandings. However, with a parabola Gizmo, we attach sliders to each coefficient, and the student can quickly grasp the role that each coefficient plays by seeing how the graph changes when the coefficient is varied. (I wish I had these tools when I was teaching college Algebra!)
In particular, probably my biggest achievement there was the creation of a generic Geometry interaction architecture, which allows programmers to quickly build manipulative Geometry simulations with points, lines, shapes, angles, congruencies, etc. Practically the entire Geometry curriculum was built on this engine, with the sole exception of the 3D Geometry Gizmos (which I also built).
Crazy about Corn
We made a children's CD-ROM game called "Crazy about Corn" to teach about the history and importance of corn in our lives. (Did you know that just about everything in the grocery store except for fresh produce and some fish use corn in some way?) The actual package includes a CD-ROM, some activity books, an audio cassette, and a videotape.
It won several industry awards, and kids absolutely loved it. My favorite part is "Frank-CORN-stein's Castle", where you can mix and match genes to create your own corn monster. (The idea is to teach kids that corn is a man-made vegetable, engineered by early Native Americans from a grass seed, and that scientists are able to work with corn to create new breeds and varieties. This was before the whole GMO debate showed up - I suppose the game would be much more controversial now than it was when we made it.) I liked it so much that you can see a similar idea in the environments section.
BrigaDOOM 3D "Haunted Coaster" engine
While planning out BrigaDOOM, I made this 3D first-person roller coaster test. The code accepts a spline curve described by a text file and builds a coaster track out of it at run-time. The idea was to build a 3D coaster building game.
Unfortunately, performance in the browser environment isn't as fast as I'd like, so the project will probably remain a tech demo, at least until Macromedia irons out the model-count slowdown bug.
All textures were hand-drawn in Flash, in an experimental style I'm trying out wherein I use a cartoony look for the textures to build an entire world. I think it works rather well. I also like the occasional flickering track light.
The coaster is largely non-interactive. However, you can hold down the SHIFT key and move the mouse up and down to look further along the track or back behind you.
BrigaDOOM 3D 'Dark Ride' engine
This is a technology test that goes along with the 3D coaster engine I was working on (see above) for "BrigaDOOM". Instead of building a roller coaster, the user builds a "dark ride" (a ride-through "haunted house"). The game was going to be called "Sim-Spooky".
Currently, the engine supports reading in a text file that describes the rooms of the haunted house, the path the karts take through them, and the lighting setup for the room. There is the groundwork for props, but it is not fully implemented yet.
This engine faced somewhat different challenges than the coaster engine. The model-count slowdown bug wasn't as bad for this engine, since the ride is compartmentalized into distinct rooms; I can turn rooms on and off at will to reduce the model count in the scene dramatically.
However, the lighting proves to be a problem. In Director, all lights illuminate all models; there is no way to limit the light's influence on a particular subset of models. Therefore, you cannot have a well-lit room in the haunted house adjacent to a dimly lit room. I wanted to give the user the ability to choose their own lighting for each room for maximum effect. Unfortunately, this would require loading each room separately.
There's a down side to that, though: a delay between rooms, and you can't see directly into the next room when the doors open in the current room. I'd really like for the doors to bang open onto the next scene without delay, but the choice may be unavoidable.
This simulation also uses the cartoon texture technique mentioned above. I'm particularly happy with how it turned out in this engine. It just works, even better than I thought it would. For a close-up look, check out the 'Sim-Spooky' desktop picture and the monster samples.
Other projects
I've worked on a lot of multimedia projects, many of which I don't have any images or video from any more. Here are some of the more interesting things that I've worked on:
Online Reporting System - For our College, I built a PHP/mySQL based online reporting system for reporting progress made towards national and state Extension initiatives. This innovative system ditched an archaic, unwieldy system that required agents to enter exhaustive data about minutes worked and ethnicities served, and instead replaced it with a blog-like structure that lets the agents focus on the actual impacts of their work, which would often get lost in all the numbers. It won the ACE 2005 Silver award in the "Innovative Use of Information Technology" category.
Bone Health CD-ROM - One of my more recent projects was programming a CD-ROM aimed at preteen girls to encourage them to add calcium to their diets. (Research shows that a lack of calcium at this age cannot be recovered, even if you drink milk constantly when you are older, and that young girls are particularly at risk.) I worked remotely with the artists and product managers, so that was a challenge, but the end result turned out much to the client's satisfaction, from what I understand.
Digital Desert Library - This educational web site was developed to be a teaching resource about everything that lives in the desert (well, the deserts around New Mexico, anyway). It's got a big searchable database of all kinds of plants and animals, along with resources for teachers and students to prompt them into learning more. It was developed in cooperation with a group of teachers, who helped develop the companion laserdisc. (New Mexico schools have a lot of laserdisc players just lying around...)
Careers Kiosk - For the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum, I made a touch-screen kiosk that teaches people about the large variety of jobs available in the Agriculture industry (specifically, it's not just farmers and ranchers!).
Seeds of Change Garden - This web site was developed as a companion to the 'Seeds of Change' exhibit at the Smithsonian. Basically, it discusses the impact caused by the transfer of food crops, horses, and disease between the "old world" of Columbus and the "new world" of the Native Americans. It encourages students to grow their own "Seeds of Change Garden".
Antigovernment Extemists Reference - The FBI approached us to create a reference CD-ROM to distribute to local law enforcement agencies around the country to help educate them about the complex and esoteric world of the extreme right-wing antigovernment organizations such as the Posse Comitatus and the KKK. The final product included a searchable database of audio, video, text, images, and web sites. I learned a lot from this experience, and I felt much more informed about extremist organizations in America. A year later, while driving across the country to my new job at ExploreLearning, I visited the Oklahoma City memorial. Normally, I suspect, it makes one feel helpless against such senseless acts of murder. It was good to know that I had been able to do something, however small, to help fight against future incidents.
Desert Blooms -
In New Mexico, water is always a precious commodity, so the El Paso Water Commission
decided to create a CD-ROM that can be distributed to landscapers and home gardeners
to encourage them to use plants native to arid regions because they use far less water
than non-native plants. The CD-ROM contains a searchable database of thousands of plants,
complete with multiple full-screen images of each plant, and notes on their use.
Birds of the Bosque Kiosk - For the Bosque del Apache National Park in New Mexico, I programmed a kiosk that allows visitors to go on a virtual bird-watching trip (since birds only visit seasonally) and call up detailed information on all the species that visit the park.
Choices in a Pack - This multicultural tobacco education program was delivered on floppy diskettes (can you even imagine such a thing now?). The goal was to educate kids in the unique New Mexico cultural landscape about the dangers of smoking and chewing tobacco using two fun games that emphasize concerns close to their hearts, such as how many CD's you could buy with the money someone would spend on cigarettes, or how different it makes the color of your teeth and the smell of your breath.
Smokey Bear Kiosk - The project that started it all. My first multimedia project was building a kiosk for the Smokey Bear museum in Lincoln, New Mexico. Containing a series of games and puzzles for kids, it educates about Forestry, forest fires, and the history of Smokey Bear.
Robohopper Kiosk - For the New Mexico State Fair, I made a touch-screen kiosk that teaches people about the research that NMSU does that directly affects the quality of their lives.