Ladies and gentleman it’s been a while. I won’t spend long on the soap-box, and where possible will stimulate with moving pictures, not words, but the important new is – Adam Vernon has joined Thought Den and hopefully you’ll come to love him as we already have (despite his gammy eye, though he insists it’s a new, Bristol-based affliction. He moved here especially you see! A good stat for Bristol Media perhaps – Thought Den drag Edinburgh graduate 400 miles to new Bristol studio)

Below is video 01 from our new Geek Club series, charting the Den’s trials, tribulations, banter and revelations. Think Blue Peter, without the bog roll tubes. Or HP Labs, but with less money and more sellotape.

Adam says :

“It makes use of the OSC protocol (likely eventual successor to MIDI), which is normally used to transmit musical and audio control data over UDP. The iPhone app, TouchOSC, is designed to be used as an OSC controller and also supports transmission of accelerometer data, indicating the orientation of the phone. The UDP packets are received by a Java flosc server, running on the PC, which retransmits the OSC data over Flash-friendly TCP. On receipt of a packet, Flash assigns the received orientation values to the rotationX and -Y properties of a cube made with the Flash10 3D API.”

Word on the street is that we’ve moved studio. An official (and thoroughly imaginative) announcement will follow forthwith. Isn’t it a shame that ‘real’ work gets in the way of devising these witty and clever ways to let you know we now stare at different coloured walls when Firefox crashes? Soon your inboxes will sing to the sound of Thought Den’s latest self-indulgent, digital distraction. Curious? You should be…

Dan too, and here’s his plan to fix it. This coming Thursday (8th April), Thought Den are hosting a mini flash game code-a-thon and we’re inviting other AS2 coders to come along.

Flash AS3 day

The day will see us all coding our own games, but we all have to do it in AS3. Painful? No, because we’ll all be in the same room, we’ve all coded in AS2 before, we’ll have the internet and most importantly we can share as we go. A bit like crowd-sourcing from clever individuals.

Thought Den provide.

breakfast, coffees & lunch
prize for the best game at the end of the day!

You provide.

computer with Flash installed
a game idea
openness to help your fellow man

Mail me, dan at thoughtden dot co dot uk for an invite.

—— DETAILS ——-
The plan.
Code a game in AS3.

Prize for best game.
A book! yup. “The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses: A Book of Lenses” (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Game-Design-lenses-Lenses/dp/0123694965/)

Who’s it for?
AS2 coders / coders, looking to start coding games in AS3

The place.
Pervasive Media Studio
Leadworks,
Anchor Square,
Harbourside
Bristol
BS1 5DB
some details are here – http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/open-studio-friday

The time.
Thursday 8th April. 8 till 5.30.

Places.
Mail dan@thoughtden.co.uk

It’s soon to be Christmas and the deadline looms…we’re hard at work on a beast of a project for the TV Industry – it’s kinda like Base Camp and it’s bloody hard core and it’s going to kick ass. Besides the technical development we’ve also created some lovely animations with Joe Snow and we’ll be sure to shout about these next year. Help bring us some Christmas sparkle by interacting live through the custom-built streaming app below. We’d love to hear from you! Merry Christmas from the Den.