Aardman Category
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Baldy Dash is released – play it to win a Nintendo DS
19th Oct 20090
Baldy Dash is a game myself and the talented crew at Aardman Digital built. It’s to promote the new Shaun the Sheep Nintendo DS game “Off His Head” published by D3.It marks my second game released this month, and my 5th involving sheep, farmers and lots of grass 🙂
The concept is similar to Star Fish – drive around, collect the wigs and avoid everything else. The sheep amble around the farmyard, trying their best to get in your way, slow you down and end your game.
If you play this game on the official Shaun the Sheep web site (and are logged-in) it will enter you into a competition to win a Nintendo DS and copy of the game. Just make sure you have the highest score on the Competition leaderboard by the end of November.
Click here to play Baldy Dash and read more about the development process.
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WebbliWorld is live!
23rd Jul 2009
After a manic “finishing off” period the brand new version of WebbliWorld finally went live today. It’s out of beta and open to everyone!
We’ve added loads of cool new features including a huge stack of new items, pod colours, t-shirts, hair styles and more. The in-game currency is working and you can buy new items for your house (or yourself).
Lots of other little fixes, updates and changes were added – but best of all did I mention that it’s LIVE! Almost a year of work and now the general public can charge around and explore for themselves 🙂
There will be a special promo video going up on the home page tomorrow, but in short feel free to register and play (especially if you have young kids who may enjoy it).
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WebbliWorld Public Beta is Go!
10th Jul 2009Today was pretty momentous for me to be honest.
We finally, finally, FINALLY launched the true public beta of the kids virtual world I have been working on since December 2008.
Called WebbliWorld it’s aimed at young kids (5 years+) and offers a hybrid Flash / HTML multi-user world. You can run around the Flash world, chatting, playing and customsing your space. While checking out the new site content through HTML links. It works in a similar manner to Whirled really.
You can access the beta at http://beta.webbliworld.com
Feel free to register and play. You will need to have your account manually approved before you can “buddy” with other people in-world, but the moderation team are working flat-out this weekend to ensure there isn’t much delay.
While it may look a little “sparse” at the moment, there are some really cool things coming on-line shortly (yes, including games!)
The Technology
It’s built on ElectroServer 4.0.7b, which the ElectroServer team supported excellently. There were quite a few issues with http connections that they worked diligently to resolve for us, so hopefully other ES users will benefit from those fixes too. We’re running on a pretty meaty server that should be able to cope with thousands of connections.
We had a soft launch of the site today, promoting it just on a few dedicated forums that Aardman run (Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit) and we’ve seen a flurry of users registering, walking around and chatting. This is the first MMO world I’ve built, so there was something quite magical about seeing a room full of users all charging about, that knowing that they weren’t fellow office staff 🙂
Development has been a truly mammoth task for me. I did all the AS3 code, platform design, server plugins, all of the AMFPHP gateway work, web site php/html/css/javascript, MySQL structure, stored procedures, debugging tools, logging tools, numerous utilities and admin systems… the list goes on and on! Now you can see why I’ve been so utterly frazzled and haven’t released a new game in the past 4 months 🙂 Thankfully a few weeks ago we hired a really good AS3 developer to help with the project, and his input has been invaluable. You can see a lot of his handiwork in-world, and in the exciting new features we’ll release soon.
Feel free to register and have a play. There are lots of hidden things in there. Click around, as lots of objects do stuff you may not expect. At the very least please edit your pod 🙂 Wake the pod up by clicking it, then click the “Edit” icon on your toolbar to start placing items. Feel free to post screen shots of your pod designs here!
Oh and if you see “WebbliMunro” charging around the world – that’s me.
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Our new showreel
30th Apr 2009
After months of hard work the Aardman Online team, of which I’m a part of , released the new version of the company web site: www.aardman.com. Wednesday was a hectic day for us all as we put the site live. Doing last minute changes you never expected to be doing 😉The design I feel is a brave one. Created by Luis Cook it’s a clean fresh sheet of paper, where all the superflous items are resigned to shades of grey. And the colour of the beautiful imagery and showreels is allowed to stand out and be the centre of attention. Which on a site like ours is exactly how it should be.
Please have a play with the home page (hint: click the animated characters as they charge across the top of the site). But the main reason for this post is to shout that our new Online showreel, featuring loads of our Flash games, is now up:
http://www.aardman.com/online/
Enjoy 🙂
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Flash Game Developers required at Aardman Online
22nd Apr 2009I’m cross posting this from our Online team. I know for the vast majority of you it won’t apply (because you’re not in the UK) but I thought it’d be worth a shot, you never know who is lurking!
Aardman Online based in Bristol (UK) has a couple of freelance requirements. If you fit any of these descriptions can you email Rohini a portfolio of your work, as well as your rate and availability ASAP! For all roles, it’d be ideal if you can be based on-site at our sparkly new Bristol office, but for the right candidate we’d consider working from home if you are able to come to Bristol for meetings and briefings.
- We’re looking for an experienced AS3 developer to help expand a Flash Virtual World built on ElectroServer / AMFPHP. Previous MMO experience very advantageous, but not essential if you can handle digging deep into API docs. Basic php / mysql comprehension also desirable. Assets are packaged with CS3/4, development with Flex SDK.
- We’re also looking for 2 x Flash game developers, ideally AS3 but would also consider AS2. If you’ve had experience working with sponsor APIs e.g. Kongregate / Mochi that’d be ideal. Can you send me your portfolio or examples of any games you’ve made.
Market rate and start date is flexible for all positions.
Oh, and you’d get to work with me 🙂
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