Well, it's that time of year again when the shops, TV and web begins to fill with festive cheer. Ads containing scenes of an idyllic white christmas - actually shot in June somewhere just outside the M25 - fill the airwaves as we trundle towards the holiday period.
It's also this time of year that our clients begin coming to us with great ideas for Christmas promotions that we work to deliver something cool and original and its usually this time of year that we ignore our own promotional needs in favour of our clients, leaving ours to a last minute panic the week before Christmas, you know the form!
Well this year things are a little different, we've got a few nice client Christmas projects moving through the studio, but also, I'm very pleased to say that (Steve Job's permitting) stage 1 of our Christmas promotion is done!
Let me give you a bit of background to this story, back in Christmas 2008 we developed a cool little game called Light Entertainment, it was well received by our nearest and dearest but we always felt that the very nature of the game required a new type of interactivity, sure you could play it with a mouse and acheive relatively high scores but what it really needed was some sort of futuristic touch interface! Fast forward to Christmas 2010 and touch is everywhere, everyone is touching everything, but not in a bad way, we felt the time was right to bring our little game back into the world!
We like a challenge in our Tinnovation sessions, we also have very different technology preferences, so after much heated discussion we set ourselves a target of delivering our game on the following devices iPhone from 3G thru 4, Android, desktop, web and last but not least the Christmas gift on everyone's lips, the iPad.
We set about using our new found knowledge of Adobe's iOS compiler to convert our Flash game into a format that would work across all these devices, should be easy, eh!
- Father Christmas' helper in action...
We set Jason, our illustrator, animator and (reluctant) developer the task of converting the game, he soon discovered that this new approach to app development was so new that there is very little supporting documentation out there on the web. So, through much trial and error he eventually stripped the game down to nothing and painstakingly put back together piece by piece exporting out and testing as he went.
We plan to cover the process in more detail in a future post, but let me just say it was no easy task!
That said, last night Jason and I spent a good 4 hours putting our shiny, new Christmas app up on iTunes Connect ready for review by one of Steve Job's Cupertino-based crew! This process on it's own requires a degree in certificates and a whole lot of patience, but it's now there, ready to get a yay or nay, from the Apple's app team and hopefully up well in time for Christmas!
To ensure you get the option to download the game, make sure you register on the Contact page with the message "I want to touch someone this Christmas..." get a sneak peek of the game here.
Now on with the Android (should be a lot easier!), desktop, web and iPad versions or Light Entertainment HD as it will soon be
