No sooner has Brian and I finished off Haku, we’re looking forward to our next big thing.
Enter Project: Grande
This project is a bit unique for us, as we have no deadline or contest in mind. It’s all about aiming bigger than before, with a stronger story and pushing the limits in Flash.
We’ve spent about 2 months so far just concepting and experimenting, trying to find that winning idea to run with. I’m not going to give out many specifics yet, but we’re pretty sure we’ll be leveraging the Box2D engine. For a bit of a teaser check out some early concept sketches from Brian:
This is a graphic representation of ‘Flock theory,’ that is, the theory of how birds interact and fly together in a flock. The theory I followed was the Boids theory, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. This theory follows three main rules:
- The biods fly towards the center of the flock’s mass
- The boids move to avoid each other
- The boids move towards the average velocity of the boids in the flock
If you follow one boid it may seem like they have a death wish with the sharpness of they’re turns, however, we must bear in mind my simulation only uses two dimensions and not three dimensions as is the case with real birds.
Download Source here.
Find out more about Boids here.
Forgetting every bit of physics I learned in high school, I made up this interactive wave generator.
Essentially it generates sine waves from the point you grab and release. I tried generating waves in four directions but with the lack of real physics it just didn’t feel right.
So to start off this showcase of mine I thought I’d start with a favourite: the k-scope.
The idea was to create a kaleidoscope program that I could make using any vector or bitmap. With this version I went the vector route and built in a little drawing canvas so anyones indistinguishable fingerpaintings get turned into a work of art.
Note: With most of the flash demos I’ve built a little preview swf to load just the preview image first and the full flash demo once you click. This is to avoid loading 10 flash demos at once.
