PBS Kids Dr Seuss Flower Finder Goes Live

The first project of mine (from this new venture) to actually go live is The PBS Kids Dr. Seuss Flower Finder.

No, it is not an arcade game like I am used to, but I was able to complete the entire build with Flash Develop, using the CS5 IDE to prepare assets and such. I completed the code and application design for this project in coordination with the great production staff at Big Bad Tomato and Creative Bottle.

The game is very similar to the 100's of kids games and activities that I worked on for Mattel in last 13 years, so while its not as challenging as trying to blit 10,000 particles to a Canvas at 60FPS, it was a very nice transition to my new consulting gig.

There are quite a lot of assets in a production like this, so the loading times had to be carefully coordinated. The game-play coding was not overly complex, but the script timing and application flow was a little challenging and necessitated some additions to the new EFG framework as well as some additions to the SoundManager for playing random sounds and stringing a list of sounds together. I was able to make use of the built-in AS3 Transition manager class for the Iris out transitions and the wonderful Greensock library for tweens.

Here are some game-play screen shots. You can't see the beautiful View.as class that I created or my new XML parsing routine inside my Model.as, but really who needs to? This is for kids of all ages who love them a little Dr. Suess.