Introducing: Pugs Luv Beats!
We here at Lucky Frame are very pleased to announce our latest project: Pugs Luv Beats!
Pugs Luv Beats is a groundbreaking music composition game for iPhone and iPad, available soon on the iTunes App Store. The innovative game design lets players guide adorable pugs around a galaxy of worlds, creating an endless variety of music.
Visit the Pugs Luv Beats website!
In the game, the player controls an alien breed of pugs. Once the masters of a wondrous and highly advanced civilization, these pugs are the victims of their own greed. They loved nothing more than to collect beats, which they cultivated with their special brand of “luv”. But an ill-advised scheme to grow the biggest beat of all time spun wildly out of control, and their home planet was destroyed. In Pugs Luv Beats, the player must help the pugs to grow more beats so they can rediscover new planets, build houses, and recover their lost technology.
Pugs Luv Beats will be released very soon on the App Store. We are extremely excited to get it out! As a little teaser, you can watch these two videos…the first tells the story of the Pugs and their catastrophic desire for beats, and the second shows the game in action.
If you would like more information about this game, please do not hesitate to get in touch, write us an email at info@luckyframe.co.uk. Expect more updates very soon!
Pugs Luv Beats was supported by the wonderful people at Channel 4 and Creative Scotland, as the logos on the right suggest.
Help needed! Dogs in hats!
Hello folks.
We are getting very close indeed to announcing our exciting new game.
However, there is one more thing we want to do before we tell the world all about it – we are going to make a video.
Not just any video, but a ridiculous hilarious wonderful video. Dogs wearing hats. Live musicians. A set made of cardboard. NEED WE SAY MORE?!
Well, yes, we do, because we need some help. We are looking for a few volunteers to help us out this Saturday the 10th of December in Dundee. We need a few hands on deck to help capture some footage, maybe take photos, organize the pugs, play the game for us on screen, and generally be awesome.
I should also add that if you have a small dog, such as a pug, please bring it along to star in the video. And maybe wear a hat.
If you would like to come by, in return we can offer a sneak peek and free copy of the game, free coffee and food, and when the video comes out you’ll be able to say “Hey! Guys! Come and see this! I helped with this! That’s the back of my head!”
If this floats your boat and you’re free in Dundee this Saturday, please drop us a line at info@luckyframe.co.uk.
One Pig Live, with Matthew Herbert
I’d like to take this moment of calm, before we announce our Big Exciting Release, to talk about another project that we’ve been working on here at Lucky Frame over the past few months: One Pig Live.
I was lucky enough to meet musician and producer extraordinaire Matthew Herbert a few months ago, and we got to talking about his One Pig album, which was released worldwide a few weeks ago. In a nutshell, the album was created entirely using recordings from a single pig, which Matthew followed “from birth to plate”. The album is divided into months, representing those periods in the pig’s life (and afterlife). The result is brutal, touching, gorgeous, and unsettling all at once.
He mentioned that he was looking for an electronic music interface for live performance which really reflected the themes inherent in the album. Sounds like a Lucky Frame project, doesn’t it?
So after some back and forth with Matthew, we decided to build an instrument modeled off a pig sty, which could be played by pulling, twisting, and plucking the wires.
To read a full description of how we built the instrument, soon dubbed the Sty Harp, you can head over to my Amazing Rolo blog. I basically ended up hacking a bunch of Gametrak controllers to use their wonderful innards, which are basically comprised of three potentiometers – two as an X-Y joystick and a third attached to a gear which lets you measure distance.
Jon then coded a nifty system which allowed us to run 12 of these controllers, or 36 streams of analog data, into a computer via USB through an Arduino.
The result is the Sty Harp! Here’s a terrible video of me playing it in a rehearsal. Hopefully I’ll get access to some better video at some point soon.
In addition to building this for Matthew, I am currently touring with the band and performing the Sty Harp. We have already played at the Royal Opera House London, in Bolzano Italy, and at the Liquid Room Tokyo. More gigs are coming up, confirmed so far are:
November 17th, Berghain, Berlin info in English, German
November 18th, STRP Festival, Eindhoven info in English, Dutch
November 25th, Ancienne Belgique, Brussels info in Flemish, French, English
December 2nd, Club Silencio, Paris the internet is curiously devoid of information on this one
December 3rd, Gaswerk, Zurich
It’s a very exciting project for us, and hopefully there will be loads more shows in the future!
Lucky Frame needs you!
Yes, you!
We are currently in the beginning of the final stages of developing a brand new and very exciting (and cute) music game, and we need your help. We want people to come by the swish Lucky Frame office in Edinburgh and try it out, and let you know what you think.
We are having a testing session all day tomorrow, the 19th of October. We still have some free spots, so please get in touch with us if you would like to come by! In return we can offer snacks, coffee, travel costs, a free promo code for Mujik, and a free copy of the game when it gets released. Send us an email at info@luckyframe.co.uk if you are interested!
Man High Mixer
Last week saw the culmination of a great project we worked on with the fine folks at Music at the Brewhouse (the same team we did Love Music Festival with last year): the Man High Mixer.
In a nutshell, the Man High project centered around the amazing story of Joseph Kittinger, a US Air Force test pilot who in 1960 jumped from a balloon 19 miles above the earth and survived. He fell at a speed of over 600 mph for 13 minutes and 45 seconds.
To commemorate this amazing achievement, composers Stephen Deazley and Martin Parker teamed up with video artist Andy Macgregor to create and perform a piece of music with original documentary footage of the jump at Glasgow City Halls. As part of this event, Lucky Frame was commissioned to create a piece of software that would allow children to create their own soundtracks to the Man High videos, without any prior musical experience.
The Man High Mixer is the result, and you can download it for yourself and have a go.
It lets you create music for the video based on really simple decisions. For example, you can choose two colors, and have those colors control the speed or volume of a sound. Or you can use video analysis to control a bunch of effects, or use the amount of movement on the screen to playback a bank of sounds. The sounds are all from Martin and Stephen, so you’re basically remixing the piece to your own liking, by making a series of choices.
So last Saturday, the day of the performance at City Halls, a bunch of computers were set up all around the venue, which were manned by a brilliant team of helpers wearing snazzy Man High t-shirts. They all helped any interested children learn how to use the software and make a recording of their compositions. We’ve ended up with a giant library of soundtracks, which I am currently putting on YouTube. They will be up shortly on the Man High website for all to see!
It’s been a great project, and we’re looking forward to doing more like it with Music at the Brewhouse and Love Music.
PYOING!!
Today we are pleased to launch our latest mini-project: PYOING!
Pyoing is a two-player, head-to-head game. You shoot little bullets across the screen, with the aim of knocking one of two discs over to your opponents side. But there’s only a limited amount of ammo, and every time you fire your opponent gets your bullet!
In classic Lucky Frame style, we have made a video. I think it speaks for itself. If you can name the inspiration for both the game, and this video, you get a promo code!
There’s also a fairly minimalist Pyoing website.
Pyoing is available now from the iTunes Store! Go buy it! And leave a glowing review!
Introducing Festipods!
Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of a project we have been working on for the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab – introducing Festipods!
Festipods is a project commissioned by Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, following our participation in Culture Hack Scotland.
Festipods is designed to be a fun and engrossing way of visualizing the Edinburgh festival events that you have attended. You can create your own little petri dish full of little musical creatures which represent the shows you have attended. They are awfully cute, though some are a bit scary. They swim around and make noise, and you can create a link to send to others to show off!
How does it work?
Step 1: Go to Festipods.co.uk!
Step 2: Search for an event that you are attending (or have attended)
Step 3: When you’ve found your event, click “add to pond”
Step 4: Say hello to your Festipod! Make sure to have your volume turned on…
Step 5: Repeat!
Festipods was built using the brand-new Festivals API, which combines loads of data from seven festivals: Edinburgh Book Festival, Edinburgh MELA, Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and the Fringe Festival.
To make Festipods, we created a pretty huge library of heads, body segments, and tails. Check out the amazing sprite sheet:
Each festival was assigned a color scheme…for example, here are the heads that Sean made for the Jazz and Blues Festival events:
and here are some Fringe tails:
In the API every event contains a unique identifying number, which we used to generate a unique combination of head, body, tail, size, and sound for each one.
Oh yes, that last one is important. Make sure you have the sound turned on, because each festipod emits a sound, and combining different ones together can have some pretty great results!
Unfortunately, because we are using WebGL, Festipods will not work in Safari or Internet Explorer or early versions of Firefox. Bleeding edge.
To weave all of this together Jon made use of some pretty awesome libraries. These include:
– Tonfall for the audio
– The ubiquitous Box 2D for the physics modelling
– Processing.js to put it all together
and much more.
This project is fully open source – download the whole project here!
So go check it out, and let us know what you think! Share it with your friends! Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen, most of all Rohan at Festivals Innovation Lab. Of course, please get in touch with us if you have any questions – info@luckyframe.co.uk.
One of our projects
Here at Lucky Frame we have been working on several exciting projects over the past few months, and unfortunately we’ve been unable to really talk about them, leading to a lot of “check back soon!” and “trust us, it’s awesome!” type phrases being bandied about. We have three or four of these smaller projects up our sleeve, in addition to the Big Game Thing, and now we’ll finally tell you about one of them.
As you know from a previous post, we recently participated in Culture Hack Scotland, an amazing few days where we built a fun visualization of Edinburgh footfall data. I suppose we did a decent enough job, because we were commissioned to come up with a project which would use the new Edinburgh Festivals API!
Our idea is to use the API to automatically generate little creatures based on all of the events happening during the festival. Someone visiting the site will therefore be able to create a little world out of all of the shows they have seen! The creatures will also make sound, generating fun polyrhythmic patterns from the data. For the moment we are calling it FestBugs! Here are a few very very early screenshots from the development stage.
Later this week Sean will be making some probably-hilarious character designs for this little creatures, we’re looking forward to it. Up until now we’ve been spending most of our time getting them moving around correctly – we’re using Box2D to make everything move and bounce about in a rewarding and adorable way (or at least, as adorable as a multi-eyed tapeworm bug can be…). This little screenshot shows the skeleton that the physics engine is using to calculate the motion. Pretty creepy stuff:
Watch out for a launch announcement when it’s all done!
We are growing.
Lucky Frame is very happy to announce a new member of the team! Sean McIlroy is just finishing up his second week of work here in the official LF headquarters, and he has settled right in.
Sean has extensive experience in many aspects of visual art and design, from working on animation for The Illusionist and Titeuf, to doing amazing crazy printmaking, game design, and strange artwork. He’s jumped right away into working on our Big Project, and as I write this is designing a mockup of an interactive musical Pig Sty for me (a story for another post…). We’re really excited to have someone on board who is equally excited about both of those things.
So a big welcome to Sean, we’re looking forward to being able to post some of the awesome work he’s been doing for us already. Expect some ridiculous cute hilariousness (hint: it involves pugs). 
Publicity! oh, and we are hiring…
Hello new readers from the always-excellent Scottish Games blog, where a post all about us went up this morning.
Thanks to Brian for the kind words and publicity! One other thing to add – we are currently looking to expand our team…we are specifically looking for an artist/designer/gamedesigner/production-artist/etc type. The ideal person would be able to do pretty much everything that is vaguely visual, as well as contribute to game design and have as much technical knowledge as possible. We are a very small team, and everyone has to do a bit of everything. Right now we’re working on a series of music games, an interactive web interface, a crazy video project (shhhh….), and an iPhone hurdy gurdy simulator, and those are just the projects that we’ve actually started on. So, you should be excited about working on fifteen things at once. If that sounds like your kinda thing, send us an email at info@luckyframe.co.uk.
Otherwise we’d basically love to hear from anyone else who likes our crazy artistic do-everything approach. We will not be able to hire everyone we want to hire right now, but it’s always good to connect for future collaborations and so on.
Thanks again to Brian! If anyone has any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
