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!