As the rollercoaster of time hurtles ever onward, sometimes it’s nice to step down and enjoy a little of the candyfloss of reflection while holding the stick of memories, possibly washed down with some hindsight lemonade.

Pointless metaphors aside, here’s a little looksy at the past year from the Den-o-View…

January

One of the tightest schedules known to man led to a ‘frisson of excitement’ (read: pant-wetting stress) as we delivered ITRNomad, an e-learning tool for global risk consultants Drum Cussac. Amongst other features, you can play the ever popular game of ‘Is this man going to punch me in the face?’ It’s a classic.

February

TD history was made in Feb as minutes after Ben ‘Ben’ Templeton set a new chin up record on the amazingly painful G-Clamps of Doom, Antoine ‘AK47’ Kougblenou risked life and fingers to the destroy Ben’s new record and become Champ of the Clamps!

March

March was a month that now signifies revolution in the art world, as two of America’s most prominent artists released their most brilliant work yet. Installation artist Charlie Sheen aired his ‘completely batsh*t mental’ series, where he subverted the notion of TV interview by describing himself as an F-18 fighter jet with wings of crack and filled with tiger blood from MARS. Not to be outdone, controversial poetry star Rebecca Black explored the linear, entropic nature of time with a rousing, anthemic ballad called, simply, ‘Friday’.

April

Nothing happened in April.

June

All change on Backfields Lane as we said bon voyage to Flash Developer Adam Vernon and Studio Manager Kaila Engar, and hello to new Studio Manager George Rowe. We also enjoyed a plethora of lovely interns this year, so a big salute to Chris Carter, Rachel Chu, Abi Ponton and ‘the’ Peter Simon.

July

PARTY! The yearly 14 Backfields Lane studio party rocked some bad magic, with a combination of random punch, cheese toasties and dangerball. Dangerball 2011 proved to be a mildly less destructive affair than 2010 as no Powerbooks were broken, but the spirit of danger was alive and well and we definitely broke a few glasses.

August

The month of August has become synonymous in the Den with the words “bOOm! thanks for following!” (B!TFF!) and the ‘If This, Then That’ fiasco. For those unfamiliar with ifttt.com, it’s a collection of interacting APIs; you can set it so one event triggers another in separate application. Our casual experiments led to ‘B!TFF!’ being posted on our Twitter account about 30 times in a day, as Tech Director Dan’s personal Twitter account automatically posted B!TFF when somebody followed him (but not actually @ them), which was then automatically retweeted by the Thought Den account.

Lesson learned: just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

September

Ever wanted to run your own exhibition featuring Gilbert & George, Damien Hirst et al but didn’t want to have to spend years at Art College talking about juxtaposition and wearing a beret? Well now you can! September saw the release of ‘ARTIST ROOMS: The Game’, a collection of minigames that ape the challenges of running your own gallery. Made for officially the 19^th coolest company in the World, Tate, you should go play it, if you ain’t already. You even get a 3D gallery at the end to explore. wOOt.

October

Sad news this month as a mobile app we, and our internationally renowned client, have sweated blood over for months and months gets blocked in the App store due to a copyright issue. It’s still stuck there, wallowing in dev limbo. Here’s hoping some Christmas goodwill may let this FREE and MEGA COOL app finally out into the wild. We hope.

November

Shiz got furry in November as we launched ‘Survival’, an iOS and Android game for the lovely wildlife charity Wildscreen. Clocking up nearly 10,000 downloads in its first 4 weeks in the wild, Survival teaches the kiddies about endangered animals and engages them with the charity. Plus lead designer Ben Webb got to draw lots of pictures of lovely animals. Result.

In other November news, we gave Owen Curtis-Quick, lead developer on Survival and ‘Supercake’ to his friends, a lovely cake to say thank you for his amazing work on the game.

Aaaaand Dan and Ben got invited to the House of Commons to talk digital industry with the Crafts Council and MP Barry Sheerman MP. Busy month!

December

Well, we wrote this blog post, for a start. And North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il died, but the two were largely unconnected. It was also revealed that the ‘Ultimate Dog Tease’ was the UK’s highest watched YouTube vid this year, which Thought Den contributed at least three views toward.

What a year! And we didn’t even have a chance to mention:

• A continuing shift in company focus towards ‘playful learning’. Education + Fun = Funucation!
• Creative Director Ben dating an award-winning TV personality.
• We’re moving office in January. Yeah I know it’s in 2012, but we’re thinking about it now. We’re having a party, you can come. He can’t.
• Our oldest Product (capital P) gets a rebrand: Virtual Tours for a sexy world: TD Virtual Tour site

We look forward to seeing y’all in 2012. Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

- Ben, Dan, Ben, George, AK, Peter and all the Thought Den fam!

Back in the good ol days (2009) our mates and collaborators down at Mobile Pie decided to rate the usual spots they hit for lunch, and compiled them into a lovely graph. In 2010, they did it again. So enamoured were we with their Lunchometer that we bought them the web address as a present…

They didn’t want it! Well, they did, but they didn’t do anything with it for ages, so we stole it back (AHAA). Based on their original idea, we have now created…www.lunchometer.co.uk

Let me tell you a little bit about it…

Everybody likes lunch, but it’s a minefield out there. What’s needed is an easy method, preferably built in flash and colourised in earthy tones, for rating and sharing your favourite lunch spots. Lo and behold, from the fingers of tech emeritus flash wizard Adam Vernon flew graphs of spellbinding beauty…

It’s just a bit of fun, but we think it’s a nice way to do a little bit of office bonding, maybe give the new kid/senior C# developer advice on where to eat, and embed a little something cool on your blog without even breaking a sweat.

All you need to do is go to the Lunchometer creation-o-matic, specify a name and your area and start entering in your haunts! If you like, you can then copy the embed code and paste it anywhere you enjoy pasting HTML.

Here is the Thought Den Creative Director/senior hairstyle guru Ben Templeton’s one about lovely Stokes Croft:

As you can see, Biblos came out on top, mainly due to their bad boy portions, extreme tastiness and proximity to the office, with the French Patisserie coming in a close second.

A few of our good friends have had a pop as well:

Scott at Play Nicely clearly loving the work of slightly-out-the-way, Edward Lear themed Runcible Spoon.

Dave Tidman over at Kerve in Bath, collaborators on projects for JD and Soutern Comfort, obviously feeling the Nando’s portion love!

Whereas Hannah Flynn from Tate, for whom we made this lovely game, gives you a little rundown of what you can get around their neck of Millbank, LDN.

You may have also noticed the little ‘settings’ fork and spanner in the top right. Click on it. Go on! You can use these functions to discount certain ratings categories (if you don’t care about proximity, for example) and see how this effects the rankings. You can also change the graph to a more horizontal alignment, turn off the auto sorting or even make that Lunchometer full screen! MADNESS. Feeling hungry? Create your own Lunchometer right here!

Hello, I’m Abi.

I’ve just finished my degree in Illustration at the University of Gloucestershire and am lucky enough to have an internship at Thought Den for a couple of weeks. I have been living in Bristol for about a year working under the name of Pigeon; doing exhibitions, entering competitions, meeting with local art groups, doing commissions for children’s books and local bands and anything else I can find to do with art and illustration.

I am currently working on a series of Christmas cards and other products to take to a gift fair in December and preparing work for upcoming exhibitions. I like to draw animals, especially birds because they can be easily adapted to do lots of things, so my character for Thought Den is a bird  playing a game on an iPhone because they love their games and apps.

Things you need to know about me if we are going to be friends:

• I love good coffee, freshly ground, yum
• I have a really sweet tooth and love sweets, cake and chocolate of any kind
• I like little dogs with funny faces
• When I was little I wanted to be a bus driver, an opera singer and a zoo-keeper
• I do not like seafood or fish of ANY form

Hi, I’m Peter and I’m also a self-taught graphic designer and illustrator from Hungary (you can’t make a joke about that I haven’t heard already, believe me). I just got the opportunity to work here at Thought Den as an intern which I still can’t quite comprehend. I get to do what I love? Aaand a free sandwich? Gotta love it.

How did I end up here?

After getting a diploma in advertising I realized I’m not even interested in it. So I set off to find out what I AM interested in. Somehow I ended up working in an Irish monastery. As this still wasn’t my lifelong dream (surprisingly) I figured out I should do something with the one thing I’ve always really enjoyed doing: drawing. Thanks to a random series of thoughts I ended up in Bristol, where I am also working as a chef!

For my first task at Thought Den today I was asked to create a character that said something about my style, and something a bit about Thought Den:

You can see the result, Todd the thoroughly-nice bear, below some random facts about me:

• In case you’re interested, I like freshly squeezed orange juice in the morning, and I like my tea with honey.
• One of my biggest dreams just came true recently: I finally got my hands on a nightcap.
• Things that inspire me lately: robots, bears, dinosaurs, ninjas, monsters, especially robot bear-ninja-dinosaur monsters.
• I like simple stuff…and liquorice too.
• And I also like Chuck Jones’ cartoons.
• I’ve never tried tea with milk.

Last weekend about twenty of Bristol’s finest game designers, developers and associated talents sweated blood, sweat and more sweat (the PMStudio is WARM) at Bristol’s leg of the Explay Game Jam. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the games jam, let me elucidate the rules slightly in a dramatic film style….

24 hours. One theme.  Some people. Their mission: make a game.

That’s about it really. No stifling rules on programming language, group size, games mechanics or the like. The games don’t have to be screen based, and the attendees don’t have to be in the games industry. What results is a rather lovely hodge-podge of talents, working styles, crazy ideas and heavy drinking.

Arriving on Friday evening, after a brief round of “I am X, I do Y and my favourite game is Dragon Ball Z” (not originally a game, but the pun doesn’t work otherwise, pedant) we split off into teams. The two Thought Denners in attendance, Technical Director Dan Course and Studio Manager/misc George Rowe were two facets of ‘Team Disco’, a six headed hydra also including sound designer/father Owen, film maker/Mohawk enthusiast Sy, script writer/games designer/sarcasm aficionado James and illustrator/dinosaur impersonator Nat (who also wrote a blog post about this).

Team Disco in full effect: misc, sound, develop, film, program and draw

Ben Rhinehart of Mutant Labs, who are part-organisers of the Explay festival, then proclaimed the Jam’s theme to be ‘mirror’. While we reflected on this (ho-ho) we were also treated to the first of Jam’s amazing meals, a home cooked Indian feast.

Curry + beer = ideas

Much post curry brain storming ensued, with different coloured pens and post it notes in full effect, and after a couple of hours of solid synapse bashing we had whittled our ideas down to a streamlined game of disco themed British Bulldog with Medusa and vampires which happened in a temporal cycle of light and dark, with a dating element that also used Chat Roulette and AR…

We quickly adjourned to the pub before our idea got anymore out of hand, where we discovered another team were working on EXACTLY the same idea (well, it had Medusa in it). What to do?

Saturday dawned, and we discovered James had been up all night with our idea spelled out in scrabble pieces, a common practice in the game script writing paradigm. Fortunately, it turned out that our original idea was an exact anagram of ‘turn-based game that’s a bit like Frogger with bugs, but they have mirrors and are being attacked by an angry kid with a magnifying glass’. Who knew?

The place was starting to look like a morning at Thought Den

With the final idea down on paper, another amazing meal, and late comer George arriving with a mirror ball, the stage was set for some serious game creation action. James and Dan cracked on with creating the game in Unity (which Dan had never used before), while Nat started drawing some lovingly detailed bugs and Owen attempted to create the loudest laser/klaxon noise he possibly could. Film maker Sy decided to document the whole game creation process and managed to create a great five minute snapshot of the event:

What was the resulting product? Well, I think Nat described it very well in her blog post on the day:

You are a bug trying to reach the discarded sandwich, but a kid with a magnifying glass stands between you and the gingham paradise, trying to fry you to a crisp (with an entertaining fizzling sound, thanks Owen) It’s a tactical multiplayer, each turn a player moves forward a small distance and positions their mirror anywhere in a circular radius around them, once all the players have moved you hit a button and the kid with the magnifying glass randomly spawns and sends out a ray of sunshine-death which can either hit a bug directly or bounce off another bug’s mirror and potentially hit a rival. The first to the sandwich wins.

It’s not exactly ready for release, but what do you expect in one day? We had a lot of fun making it! You can play it here: http://us.thoughtden.co.uk/GamesJam/

Some quote highlights from Team Disco:

“But I supplied the graphics to you beautifully?”
“Yes, but what YOU fail to remember is that I am massively incompetent”

“Guys, you know how our game is like Frogger but with bugs? Would anyone be offended if we call it Bugger?” [Bugger was later contracted to Buggr to make it well currentz]

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Our rival teams created some fantastic little games in their time. Team Mirrornaut created ‘Mirrornaut’, a side scrolling 8-bit platformer programmed in C Sharp. It’s a bit like Canabalt but with a button to swap to a mirror image of the level. The character also looks like he has an awesome afro, though I think that is just the Team Disco influence and it’s actually a helmet. The graphics are really cool, as is Nick Dymond’s soundtrack, and the whole game is very polished.

Team ‘Late’, as they were dubbed in the DropBox race to the finish, decided to show off and create two games in the 24 hours. One was an iOS app for two players created in GameSalad, based on reading mirror images of words, and could quite easily have been submitted to the app store at the end and gone on to international acclaim. Their second game was a 3D affair, where you play Jason (of Argonauts fame) who must fend off the deadly gaze of loads of attacking gorgons; it left us both awe-struck and a little scared of David from Echoic’s “Medusa, give me back my fleece!” sound effects (though I don’t think they remember the story of the myth quite correctly!)

The Bristol Game Jam was a fantastic event, and we met a lot of great people who do and love similar things to ourselves. A massive thank you has to go to Debbie Connor and Tomas Rawlings of Aurochs digital for their hard work in organising the Jam, everybody who attended and contributed, Korash, Ben and Ella from Explay, Debbie’s neighbour for the amazing food and Lethal Bizzle for providing the post jam entertainment (seriously).