Week 2: The Return of the Artists
Well, I've completed my first complete week at the new job. And while I'm finally feel like I'm starting to get the hang of Flash development, I still find my self confused and amazed by the differences between it and C# or C++ development. In some ways it seems like I'm writing plug-ins for some kind of "Animation Server" or vice-versa. Anyways it's a quite a bit different than what I was used to, and for a semi burnt out developer, different is good :).
What really blew my socks off was though was the sheer amount of power and potential a skilled artist can bring to bear on a project. As a server developer, I never worked with the artists directly. Any servers I worked on may have undergone huge changes during the development process, but usually the interfaces that those servers used to communicated didn't change much, and when they did, they lacked the visual punch that is there when your application can actually be seen.
What I'm trying to get at, is "WOW, I work with some really great artists!"
On my first day, we had a brief technical kick-off meeting for the project I was working on. The artists I was working on were still on their winter breaks, so I was given a little bit of a head start to work on the prototype, before they returned. This seemed like it would work out well, since I still had a bunch of Actionscript to learn, and the best way to learn is by putting together a prototype of the project's functionality and then turn that over to the artists to "gussy-up" with actual art. My biggest fear was that the code I had written would be totally inappropriate right out of the gate, and all of it would have to be thrown out to support what the actual functionality would be.
On Thursday I got to see what the actual app was going to look like. (As it's still in development, I'll refrain from describing it in detail.) The simple drag and drop functionality that I had put into place had been replaced by some smooth animations, and the basic polygons I had used for "stickers" to be placed throughout the page had been replaced by a collection of dancing, colorful stickers reminiscent of the sticker books kept by girls when I was in 1st grade, only in web-tolerant colors. As an extra bonus, from a functionality it looked like I hadn't been too far off base with where the designers and artists wanted to go with the project. I guessed about 70% of my code was still good without modification. And the remainder would be easy to implement.
I spent the rest of Thursday and Friday morning cleaning up my code to support the updated comp. There was an effect that the artists wanted to try, and they hadn't quite been able to do before, so we discussed the idea and how the art assets should be arranged and I put together a prototype of the effect. It seems to be what everyone was looking for, and it felt good to finally get to say "Yes, that shouldn't be a problem!" And mean it. Now I'm sure that my inexperience will eventually result it my mouth writing a check that my .as can't cache (all puns intended) but for now I'm enjoying the feeling of not knowing any better.
My major takeaways for the week are:
1. Movie Clips are Empty man! Empty.
2. I may like Actionscript and Flash for the same reasons I hate Perl.
3. Having an artist pwn your programmer art is actually a really cool experience.
4. An event-based approach to communication between art assets and code in Flash may prove a valuable way to get code reuse.
-Vincent
What really blew my socks off was though was the sheer amount of power and potential a skilled artist can bring to bear on a project. As a server developer, I never worked with the artists directly. Any servers I worked on may have undergone huge changes during the development process, but usually the interfaces that those servers used to communicated didn't change much, and when they did, they lacked the visual punch that is there when your application can actually be seen.
What I'm trying to get at, is "WOW, I work with some really great artists!"
On my first day, we had a brief technical kick-off meeting for the project I was working on. The artists I was working on were still on their winter breaks, so I was given a little bit of a head start to work on the prototype, before they returned. This seemed like it would work out well, since I still had a bunch of Actionscript to learn, and the best way to learn is by putting together a prototype of the project's functionality and then turn that over to the artists to "gussy-up" with actual art. My biggest fear was that the code I had written would be totally inappropriate right out of the gate, and all of it would have to be thrown out to support what the actual functionality would be.
On Thursday I got to see what the actual app was going to look like. (As it's still in development, I'll refrain from describing it in detail.) The simple drag and drop functionality that I had put into place had been replaced by some smooth animations, and the basic polygons I had used for "stickers" to be placed throughout the page had been replaced by a collection of dancing, colorful stickers reminiscent of the sticker books kept by girls when I was in 1st grade, only in web-tolerant colors. As an extra bonus, from a functionality it looked like I hadn't been too far off base with where the designers and artists wanted to go with the project. I guessed about 70% of my code was still good without modification. And the remainder would be easy to implement.
I spent the rest of Thursday and Friday morning cleaning up my code to support the updated comp. There was an effect that the artists wanted to try, and they hadn't quite been able to do before, so we discussed the idea and how the art assets should be arranged and I put together a prototype of the effect. It seems to be what everyone was looking for, and it felt good to finally get to say "Yes, that shouldn't be a problem!" And mean it. Now I'm sure that my inexperience will eventually result it my mouth writing a check that my .as can't cache (all puns intended) but for now I'm enjoying the feeling of not knowing any better.
My major takeaways for the week are:
1. Movie Clips are Empty man! Empty.
2. I may like Actionscript and Flash for the same reasons I hate Perl.
3. Having an artist pwn your programmer art is actually a really cool experience.
4. An event-based approach to communication between art assets and code in Flash may prove a valuable way to get code reuse.
-Vincent
posted by Vincent at
8:55 PM
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