Chris Andrews

Pancake Pandemonium is the first of four children’s interactive storybooks published by Digital Leaf, deployed on IOS and Android. The book is based around one little girl’s dream of eating piles of pancakes which turns into a nightmare.

Its a very fun tale and is made even better with lots of interactive elements which bring the story to life. The story even features narration by an adult and a child, or the option to read it yourself. Hidden within the story are pans that can be collected which unlock a fun bonus game.

Within each scene the user can do different things, such as:
Touching polly to make her wake up the sleeping dragon.
Help Polly to tidy up a messy kitchen.
Touch the beehive to make the bees mad and more.

The app created by Playerthree and was built using Adobe Air and Stage3D, utilising the Starling framework. The animation was all created using the Flash IDE and exported using a JSFL script which I created, that allows us to export all of the assets and the keyframes of the animations to different scales. It features custom AGAL fragment shaders which allow you to sway the pancakes from the left to the right. A modified version of Flint particles to make the 800 bees buzz around the screen and form “BUZZ OFF” and has been designed and built to work across multiple screen resolutions for IOS and Android.

The book is currently available on IOS and can be found here on iTunes and will soon be available on Google Play.

Mad For the Mix is an online and mobile Facebook game developed by Playerthree for Dreamies Cat Food. It’s a small but addictive puzzle game where you need to rotate blocks to match four or more flavours in a horizontal or vertical row. As your score increases more flavours get added to the board making it more and more challenging to get matchs before the time runs out. At the end, Derek the cat mixes together the flavours collected to work out your final score, plus any bonus flavours and any combos which may have been picked up.

The mobile version of the game allows you to play online or offline, playing online saves your score and enters you into a weekly competition. It also allows you to invite friends to play the game, post your score to your wall and check out how your friends are doing as well.

The game can be played on Facebook  and will soon be available to downloaded from iTunes or Google Play. Artwork for the game was provided by the client and was created and published by Playerthree.

Over the past year I have been using the Starling framework to build IOS and Android games. One of the biggest issues is getting the app to work across multiple devices with different screen resolutions. So I thought I would share the code that I use to get my app scaling correctly on an iPad and now the new iPhone5. This code has been used in a couple of projects soon to be released on IOS and Android.

package
{
 
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.geom.Rectangle;
 
	import starling.core.Starling;
 
	public class Main extends Sprite
	{
 
		/**
		 * The width that the app is based on, this should be the lowest width such as 320 (iphone) or 384 (ipad) 
		 */
		public static var _baseWidth			:Number = 384;
		/**
		 * The height that the app is based on, this should be the lowest height such as 480 (iphone) or 512 (ipad)
		 */
		public static var _baseHeight			:Number = 512;
 
/*-------------------------------------------------
* PUBLIC CONSTRUCTOR
*-------------------------------------------------*/	
 
		public function Main()
		{
			if ( stage ) init()
			else addEventListener( Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, onAddedToStageEventHandler );
		}
 
/*-------------------------------------------------
* PRIVATE METHDOS
*-------------------------------------------------*/
 
		private function init():void
		{
			// Create the viewport to pass through to starling, this uses the full screen width and height of from the Flash Stage
			var viewport:Rectangle = new Rectangle( 0, 0, stage.fullScreenWidth, stage.fullScreenHeight );
 
			// Create starling, passing the Root Class to be created once starling has been initialised, 
			// the Flash stage and the viewport we created above
			var starling:Starling = new Starling( StarlingRootClass, stage, viewport, null, "auto" );
 
			// I have then added an event listener to the stage to listen for Event.Resize so that we can update the viewport
			stage.addEventListener( Event.RESIZE, onResizeEventHandler );
		}
 
		private function updateViewport( $width:Number, $height:Number ):void
		{
			// Resize the Starling viewport with the new width and height
			Starling.current.viewPort = new Rectangle( 0, 0, $width, $height );
 
			if ( !Starling.current && !Starling.current.stage ) return;
 
			// Get the scale based on the biggest percentage between the new width and the base width or the new height and the base height 
			var scale:Number = Math.max(( $width / _baseWidth ), ( $height / _baseHeight ));
 
			// Resize the starling stage based on the new width and height divided by the scale
			Starling.current.stage.stageWidth = ( $width / scale )
			Starling.current.stage.stageHeight = ( $height / scale )
		}
 
/*-------------------------------------------------
* EVENT HANDLERS
*-------------------------------------------------*/
 
		private function onAddedToStageEventHandler( e:Event ):void
		{
			removeEventListener( Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, onAddedToStageEventHandler );
			init();
		}
 
		private function onResizeEventHandler( e:Event ):void
		{
			updateViewport( stage.fullScreenWidth, stage.fullScreenHeight );
		}
 
	}
}

Nom Nation is a challenging but fun edutainment platform game developed by Playerthree for Channel 4. You are Chef, a last lone cook, aiming to recover the Book of Nom’s missing pages and use the power of the Noms to end Jabber The Gut reign - King of Food Convenience and acting head of the McFatass Corporation. You must travel to the very heart of the McFatass Corp through the Land of Nom. The Noms are there to be eaten and will provide you with energy, protection and many special power-ups. Understanding the power of the Noms is the secret to success.

Myself and a few others had the task of creating levels for the game. This created a variety of different levels which challenged the player in a variety of ways.

The game can be played on the Nom Nation website, and it can also be downloaded from iTunes and can also be found on Sony PSP.

Another game in the Bubbimals series, Memory Match, is what it says, test your memory and match the cards. We created two game play modes, fun play and timed play, each with an easy, medium and hard difficulty.

The objective of the app was to deploy it as a freebie and use it to promote Bubbimals Tell The Time. It was built using Flash and deployed to IOS with rendering done on the GPU. The assets are converted from vector to bitmaps on the fly, this was so that we could deploy the app easily onto multiple devices without the need to create multiple spritesheets.

The game was created and published by Playerthree.

The app is free and can be downloaded through iTunes.