Nat Wales

In my free time, I’ve been experimenting with rigging and animating characters in Unity and had built a small demo character controller which I had recently shown to a few of our creative directors. Somehow that demo ended up inspiring this really quick turn around game-like experience presented with the ‘Point C’ campaign we pitched to Capella University. In this ‘game’ you control an IT character who runs around a maze of servers in search of point C while trying to avoid annoying little managers who attempt to block your path. For the AI I used Rival{Theory}’s RAIN system and set up a very simple goal-based behavior tree. I’m eager to dig further into this and other AI systems. We did win the business, but I am not sure how much that had to do with this:

I just wrapped up rebuilding a ‘Fighting Hunger Quiz’ for Bank of America. Originally built in Flash by another vendor, I rebuilt everything from the ground up using native web technologies. The original flash animations were preserved by re-working the flash files and exporting JavaScript objects with createJS to be displayed in an HTML canvas. There was a good deal of manual manipulation to get the animations to export as many blending modes, color transformations, nesting, and path tweens were not supported, but it was a pleasure preserving something that had been so well done. Hopefully I did not butcher the original animations too badly. It sure beat building everything over from scratch and what better tool for this type of job than Flash? The exported JavaScript objects were lean and easily extended to create methods for setting animation states so that they could be integrated into our new quiz. And of course it now runs on all devices. The Flash/Create.js pipeline certainly has it’s hiccups, but so far I haven’t found anything that works better.