On the evening of May 8th, at the Marriott Richmond, the 18th Annual Richmond Technology Awards were held in celebration of the many breakthroughs, advancements and outstanding technologists Richmond has to offer. As Richmond’s “Academy Awards” of Technology, the Gala hosts over 600 of the area’s tech giants with eight award categories. The awards presented included The Community Catalyst Award, The Emerging Company Award, The Technology Builder Award, The Innovation in Development Award, The Innovation in Utilization Award, The Educator Award, The RichTech Chairman’s Award, and most importantly The People’s Choice Award.
As a part of the event we were thrilled to develop a cross platform voting app for the People’s Choice Award. Armed with smart phones, and laptops the public was able to vote for the winner of the award with just a push a button from their Android, iOS, or internet connected devices. During a period of less than 24 hours surrounding the Gala we had over 1,500 votes total across all 3 platforms (iOS, Android, and Web).
We would like to congratulate TCSC for taking home People’s Choice Award, with an astounding 862 votes.
The finalist as well as a more detailed description of each award can be found on Richtech’s event site.
Taylor Jones
Taylor’s interest in understanding how everything works, gives him the unique perspective of working on projects from every point of view. While the Adobe Creative Suite is where he will always find myself most comfortable, he is also a certified Mobile Applications Developer (on the Appcelerator Titanium Platform) with experience in developing on almost every mobile platform. Pushing the pixels while also writing the code, to make any product look and feel the way it should.
This past weekend RVA Game Jams hosted a real-world meetup for Ludum Dare 26! The ludum dare comes in two flavors, a 48-hour solo competition and a 72-hour group based game jam. We had participants in both flavors at the 804RVA jam location, and saw some great concepts get put into action!
I decided to use the Ludum Dare compo to learn some new features of Unity that I had not previously worked with. One feature I had not yet used was the physics joint system. I expected it to be a challenge, but Unity surprised me with its power once again. Adding a hinge joint was as simple as adding the component to a game object and then pointing the joint at the game object it was attached to; two clicks! In order to get the functionality I was going for I had to set a few variables, mostly limiting the angles of the joint.
The theme for this Ludum Dare was “minimalism”. A nice theme that can be interpreted a lot of different ways. The game design I came up with was a simple snake-style game which differs from the traditional game by not constraining movement to 90 degree turns. Additionally, the pellets that the snake consumes to increase its size are vulnerable to physics effects, resulting in the snake’s tail moving the pellets around. Initially, I thought I might use a “convoy” of vehicles to represent the snake, but eventually settled into a chinese dragon theme, resulting in the title of “Dragenvoy”.
I had a lot of fun making this game (I think I played it as much as I worked on it while developing). The community at RVA game jams is very talented and produced some great results for this game jam.
Below is a link to the game, leave a comment with your high score and any feedback!
Shaun is a student at Virginia Commonwealth University studying Computer Science. He wields the sword and shield of algorithms to slay the beast of complexity. Software Development is his passion and enjoys any discussion related to development.
The Richmond region is home to a diverse and vibrant community. Every day, in our garages and laboratories, studios and galleries around town, the RVA Creative Class creates impactful, creative and innovative solutions across all disciplines. i.e.* is a galvanizing initiative to launch Richmond into the limelight and over time, put us on the map for innovative excellence. On April 16th, 2013, at Richmond CenterStage, 14 finalist will compete for a chance to win a $10,000 , six months of free office space at New Richmond Ventures, $3,500 worth of IT strategy and implementation services from Imagine Simplicity, and mentoring from 804RVA. In support of the competition Shockoe (for the second year in a row) has developed a voting system, hitting the big three this year with an native iPhone, native Android, and Web application, for the competition. The app features full descriptions of each finalist, and real-time in app voting, on-site (CenterStage) the night of April 16th. The app will aid in determining the winner of the People Choice Award, as well as prize the $2,500 prize, courtesy of First Capital Bank! We hope to see you at CenterStage on VOTE night!
Taylor’s interest in understanding how everything works, gives him the unique perspective of working on projects from every point of view. While the Adobe Creative Suite is where he will always find myself most comfortable, he is also a certified Mobile Applications Developer (on the Appcelerator Titanium Platform) with experience in developing on almost every mobile platform. Pushing the pixels while also writing the code, to make any product look and feel the way it should.
Once again, our very own, Shaun Doanchy with the VCU Kinetic Imaging Students won Best in category: “Installation, Performance” with their work titled “Anatomia” at the Undergraduate student show. The installation has been set up at the Anderson Gallery in the Carriage house on the VCU campus at Shafer and Franklin. Take a look at the video documentation of the installation from 2012′s InLight.
The 3D models were created by students using Maya, and the rest of the work was done in Unity3D. The piece takes advantage of the Microsoft Kinect sensor to interface with Unity to recognize gestures made with the body. The virtual space is an interpretation of various systems within the human body.
The installation at the Anderson Gallery is fantastic, taking advantage of a huge 20+ft projection screen. Stop by and check out the installation and all of the other great works at the Anderson Gallery between March 28 and April 14.
Special thanks to the team: Brian Dove, Mary Anne Matel, Crixell Matthews, Omri Glaser, Shaun Donachy, David Reinhold, Sean Ruecroft; And the instructors: Semi Ryu, Thomas Karnolt, and Byeongwong Ha.
Interested in other games or looking for a team to help you with your next million dollar idea? Contact us, we will be happy to seat with you and go over the details.
We’re proud to announce that this weekend our very own Shaun Donachy and Mack Stump were part of a team named “Most Innovative in the Entire World”. This is an amazing achievement and should be applauded.
Ok but seriously, they actually won the “Most Innovative” award at the Dominion Enterprises University Hackathon, competing against teams from across the state of Virginia to create applications on top of various Dominion Enterprises APIs. Their mobile app was for Dominion’s boat buying and trading system, and brought a completely new user-interface to the standard “what kind of thing x are you looking for” system (think auto-trader or cars.com). Instead of building a standard “how much are you willing to pay, what color, what model, etc” system, the made an entirely visual and interactive way of narrowing down each criteria for what kind of boat you may be looking for, until you were left with just a few options tailored to your specifications.
And it was awesome.
They certainly deserved the award, and we assume it will be the first of hundreds if not thousands for the dynamic Stumpachy (our little celebrity couple name for them) duo.
After the January Game Jam I wrote about previously, I found out about @McFunkyPants one game a month and decided to jump on board! I was able to use Audiball as my January submission and got to work on February’s game. After spending last semester learning Unity and furthering my experience with this amazing tool at the Global Gamejam, I decided to continue developing with Unity. I was looking for a fairly simple concept for February’s game and eventually decided on a game design with similar mechanics to pac-man. The twist I introduced was a randomly generated graph which allowed the maze to criss-cross in different ways.
Throughout the month of February I had a lot of ideas about how to develop the idea, but couldn’t try them all! The result is a fairly playable version I titled, “Red Node Attendant”. The Player must get to all of the red nodes on the graph; traveling along the edges without backtracking or running into the yellow enemies. Some gameplay changes occur as your score improves. I had a blast making this game and look forward to the next one. RVAGameJams is hosting another game jam this weekend called Flow Jam. Hopefully we’ll see some great new Flow Themed games get made! Interested in learning more Unity or working on a Unity project? I’d like to talk to you!
Shaun is a student at Virginia Commonwealth University studying Computer Science. He wields the sword and shield of algorithms to slay the beast of complexity. Software Development is his passion and enjoys any discussion related to development.
We all know WordPress is rapidly becoming the dominant Content Management System for the web. Whether it’s your preferred CMS or not, if you’re in the world of web development you have almost certainly run into WordPress as a system by which non-technical folk can manage and edit the content for websites created by us technical folk. However I’m here to tell you that once you learn the ins and outs of WordPress as an engine for content, it becomes so much more than that: it becomes a dynamic content portal that can handle just about anything.
The most interesting use we’ve found for it was with our new iOS game Letter Lasso. The game is a simple spelling game where letters fly around the screen and the user must drag them together in the correct order to “lasso” and spell the correct word.
One of the major features of the app is that when you earn enough points or pay through in-app purchase, you can get more and more word packs to learn and play with new words.
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Obviously we needed a way to add and edit word-packs and have them load into the in-app purchase system, but doing this with native code every time we wanted to add a new pack would be a ridiculous burden to put on our native coders. Instead, we built a system on WordPress where any one of us can add a new word-pack at any time and have it appear instantly in the app, since all the in-app purchase system is doing is looking to our WordPress server to see which packs we’ve added and then displaying them for the user, priced at the number of points needed for purchase specified in the WordPress admin.
Pretty neat right? Wait: there’s more.
Because WordPress supports the dynamic adding of users with custom permissions (admin, subscriber, editor, etc.), we’re now building a system on WordPress to essentially allow ANY user to create their own word-packs and share them with others.
Think about it: your daughter comes home from school with her spelling words. Her normal plan would be to write them out 10-15 times or for you to quiz her on their spelling or some other clunky, joyless system for learning. Soon, all you’ll have to do is get on your computer, sign in, and add all her words into her Letter Lasso game. Then, all she has to do is play.
Without WordPress, this would take us months to build all the connections to make that possible natively on iOS, but with WordPress it’s going to take a week. And that’s an amazing thing.
So much of building software relies on following in the footsteps of giants. From the people who wrote the first compiler to let us give computers commands without learning Fortran (thank you, by the way) to the heroes of Stack Exchange who answer and vet virtually every problem we encounter before we encounter it, the day to day task of a programmer involves a massive amount of work that is already done for us. And it’s (mostly) awesome.
But what happens when you set out to do something that hasn’t been done by many people before? What happens when you have to solve problems that Google can’t help you with? That’s what happened when we set out to build Letterlasso, an iOS game, with Box2d on the Appcelerator Titanium platform instead of with XCode and Objective C.
When we began work on Letterlasso, the Box2d module for Titanium was less than half a year old, and hardly anyone had published anything with it yet. The adoption of new coding techniques and technologies will always be fairly slow at first, as early adopters pave the way for others by figuring out the basic problems. As you can see here, things as simple as “how do we join two things together when a click event is fired”, we had to learn for ourselves.
After months of starring at our screens, searching for solutions, and occasionally finding them, we have launched Letterlasso: an educational word game where you “lasso” letters together as they move around the screen to spell words. The journey has forced us to understand our platform of choice, in this case Titanium, in ways we never did before. Seeing it downloaded all over the world has been one of the most rewarding experiences of our lives, and we promise: when we see a question on Stack Exchange about Box2d and Titanium, we’ll be the first to answer it.
