As well as selling printed books, the Pat and Pals website also sells ‘eBooks’, interactive versions of the printed volumes.

The eBooks include animated versions of the books with narration by the ever estimable Bill Nash & Sally Hawkins. The narration can be customised by the reader, to encourage their own reading skills. The eBooks also include a range of simple reading ‘games’, print out activities to play with and black and white versions of the pages to print out and colour in.
I helped spec out and develop the eBooks and built the final applications in Flash, with designs by Will Richards.

www.patandpals.com

Planet Protectors are a new range of environmentally aware action figures from the Early Learning Centre.

I helped develop the site and and its content. I built it in Flash to Will Richards’ colourful and dramatic designs.

The aim was to give the children an online destination that complemented and expanded on the world of the characters.

To this end the majority of the content is held in XML which is then pulled into Flash templates. This means that the site can easily be updated and expanded, turning it into an evolving, living online resource.

I also helped develop the characters of the figures themselves, along with Finbar Hawkins, fleshing out their world and storylines. I wrote an ‘origins’ story as an online comic for the site.

I also wrote the content for an online encyclopedia for the site to expand on the environmentally aware message of the figure range.

The entries in the encyclopedia are tied into the backstory of the characters and the events of the online comic, giving the children the opportunity to learn mroe about the world of the Planet Protectors.

www.planetprotectors.co.uk

I have developed two new games for the Jack Stalwart site - one each for two basic sections: Puzzles and Arcade games.

The Puzzle game is the ‘Bomb Defuser game’ - it is a maths game, requiring players to solve a sum in order to discover the secret code that stops the bomb countdown. Players are provided with a calculator to make solving the sum easier. The game randomly creates a new sum each game, shortening the countdown to make things more difficult.

The game aims to dramatise Maths and make the whole process of solving difficult problems a little more fun.

The Arcade game is a Flyboard Chase - a sidescrolling race through the streets of New York. The player has to guide Jack as he rides his flyboard, avoiding obstacles and picking up lost gadgets. The aim is to stay on the flyboard for as long as you can, while your speed increases in direct relation to your score.

The game is intended not to be too daunting for younger players while still be entertaining enough for the older audience.

www.jackstalwart.com

We have made some updates to Jack Stalwart, including a new games section, with two original games for it (about which more later).

The games section has been built to allow more games to be added easily - the games are separate movies that load into the main site structure.

The updates also include a new ‘language’ section - the French phrase book has been updated to make it more of a ‘test’ or quiz, hopefully making it a more entertaining way to learn basic French phrases.

www.jackstalwart.com 

Jack Stalwart is the hero of a series of children’s books written by Elizabeth Singer Hunt. Jack is a nine year old super spy who travels the world solving mysteries and thwarting criminals with an array of amazing gadgets.

The aim of the site was to allow the visitor into Jack’s world, to become a spy and investigator for themselves. It was also key to include many of the informative and educational elements of the books, particularly features on world geography and culture.

The site lets kids explore Jack’s own bedroom and through it, his world. The aim is to extend the site as the books develop, adding more features - especially games, always a popular feature with children.

http://www.jackstalwart.com/

This was a pilot for an interactive soap for the BBC. The audience would have a mocked up ‘desktop’ and would receive video messages from the characters, each containing a segment of an episode’s plot. Occassional ‘instant messages’ would allow the audience to interact with the characters, altering plot outcomes by making decisions.

I was heavily involved in the development of the concept and the eventual show. I helped structure the interactive segments of the drama and how they fitted in with the main plotlines.

I also built the Flash application for the pilot, using Flash video, XML data and components to create the desktop effect (to a design by Will). The interactive sequences required the video to seek and jump to different cue points depending on the audience choices.

Well, yes, FightBox.FightBox was an interactive TV show for the BBC. Players could download a PC game from the BBC website and use it to create and train their own FightBox warriors. The most successful players won a place in the televised competiton.

BBC technology allowed us to film what was essentially a televised gaming tournament as, effectively, a live virtual sporting event as the players brought their warriors into the arena to face each other and our created characters, the Sentients, to fight to the death for the title of champion.

I helped develop the basic concept and did a lot of work on defining the look, feel, world and characters of FightBox. I helped design and develop the PC game and elements of the TV show. I built and helped run the FightBox website. I worked on the commentator’s scripts and wrote some segments of the TV show. I’ve even got a t-shirt.

FightBox aired on BBC 3 and eventually crossed over onto BBC2 where, after a reasonably strong start it suffered slow death by scheduling shuffle. It was very popular with the online audience, especially the ones that thought they might get on TV. My five-year-old godson loved it.

The Maze House was an interactive ghost story we produced for the Sci Fi Channel.The show went out in short episodes on the Sci Fi channel in the days leading up to Halloween, apparently showing the progress of a small team investigating a haunted house in Northumberland. As the week went by events in the house got stranger and stranger until on Halloween something terrible happened to the team.

The audience were able help with the investigation, by watching web-cams, for example, or using a custom built piece of software that apparently measured levels of electro-magnetic fields round the house. Both the web-cams and the EMF monitors were rigged to produce anomalous results in conjunction with events in the show.

There was also a network of ‘hidden’ background websites that the audience could discover through search engines and links, which gave clues to the background of the hauntings and gave the audience a chance to try and warn the characters of the fate that awaited them.

I came up with the original story line and developed the concept and the show along with Finbar Hawkins and Tim Usborne. I also wrote the scripts, built the website, helped cook for the production crew and even played all 6 characters in a live web chat.

Maze House featured fantastic work from all concerned, especially the actors (including John Millington, of course) and proved extremely popular with the Sci Fi Channel audience.

It’s the show that’s big, not the giraffe.

This was a short series of tiny animated interstitials for Nickelodeon in the UK. Originally it was going to be a chat show hosted by a Giraffe in a Spacestation (although no one can remember why) but then he had as guests a pair of Goldfish with astronomical IQs and minimal attention spans and they took over.

Nickelodeon loved the Goldfish and wanted an entire series of them, which was a problem, since while I had a lot of jokes none of them concerned short term memory loss. Any kudos are due to the animators, JonJon, and the voice talent, including Bill Nash, John Millington and Sally Hawkins among others.

I created the characters and wrote the scripts.

two-minutes.com was an interactive murder mystery set in Cornwall during the eclipse of 1999.It told the story of a group of documentary makers who went to make a film about the effect of the eclipse on Cornwall and the tourist industry. All close friends (and some closer enemies) what the team didn’t know was that one of their number was a murderer and that during the two minutes of darkness during the total eclipse, all hell would break loose.

The audience could follow the drama through the website, with regular diary entries from the group and uploads of video extracts. Due to a ‘mistake’ the audience could also access the team’s webmail and personal folders, giving them a real insight into the relationships between the characters.

When four members of the team were murdered during the festivities surrounding the eclipse the ‘police’ appealed to the online audience for their help in tracking down the murderer. The audience had to sift through the clues hidden around the site in order to find out who the murderer was. With one correct answer winning a prize sponsored by lastminute.com.

I developed the characters and storylines and the basic shape of the thing and then Fin and I got it together for launch - and well after, in fact, since this was a ‘live’ event, which meant all of us but particlularly Fin and I were having to keep the whole drama running as live for five days. It also meant that the whole company got to go to Cornwall for the eclipse, which was nice.

In the end the audience was a lot cleverer than we expected and a lot of them came up with much better solutions to the mystery than certainly I had thought of and they certainly ‘got’ the concept, making it very popular.

two-minutes.com was, from start to finish, one of the most enjoyable and satisfying things I have ever done.