All about me and my super crazy interweb antics

Hello, you have found the blog and online portfolio of Christian 'Cookie' Cook, a final year Digital Art & Technology student from the University of Plymouth. On this site you will find the various ramblings and progressions of his studies in the digital world. Heavily influenced by the gaming industry, he aims to incorporate game into every day life; because life should be fun.

If you wish to contact Christian, you can find him on such sites as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn or alternatively you can send him a traditional email if you fancy.

POSTED 14.12.2011 @ 19:33

Get around.

Wow, another big gap in postings, I apologise! Along with breaks comes creativity, and I have lots to show. In the past couple weeks I have done lots of work on NIGHTLY. First off was the quick 2 minute pitch, which was a rough gest towards the idea of my product with initial reactions from my peers. This pitch was filmed, which is what I am throwing the blame on to my nervousness; I speak with my mind… not with my mouth! I have actually had this footage for a couple of weeks now but have been pretty much too [...] (read more…)

POSTED 23.11.2011 @ 18:41

Each evening, after dark

Good news! Very positive response from the group about my branding for Venture Culture. People loved the name, and loved the logo to accompany it. However, the tagline sucked and I am not happy with the colouring of it. Now that I look back at it, everything seemed a bit facebookish (did I just invent a word?). That is the kind of impact a social network can have upon your creativity, shocking. After throwing about a million different iterations of my tagline, developing synonyms for each word to create a unique and catchy phrase, I am kind of torn between [...] (read more…)

POSTED 17.11.2011 @ 23:39

Announcing: Nightly

Ok, so after deciding on a name, I literally have sat in Photoshop and not allowed myself to leave the computer until I came up with atleast one good logo design. After about 20 different logos and iterations, I have come up with the two logos seen below. I have a feeling that I am going for the logo on the right. Maybe because it took me 30 mins to create that cocktail glass. You may notice I have a very boring and obvious tag-line. I like to serve up products that do what they say on the tin, and [...] (read more…)

POSTED 17.11.2011 @ 15:56

Namination

One thing I have always sucked at: name creation. Whether it be on a game and I name my ingame avatar Bob, or if its an important university project; I always spend the most time stuck on this step. During the lecture I absorbed every single possible way to create names and branding advice. The best way I found was to do a brain-storm! See the image for my results. I quite liked toying with the idea of ‘night’, as you can possibly tell be the large expansion in that area alone. Associations with animals work pretty well for businesses, [...] (read more…)

POSTED 14.11.2011 @ 12:34

Prospective Competitors?

To further refine my idea for Venture Culture, we have been asked to look at similar businesses (at least one being local) and examine how their business structure works. Because my idea is a gap in the market/location it has been tricky finding competitors, so I have tried to find the most closest thing. University of Plymouth Student Union (Website) http://www.upsu.com/events Product – What are they selling? A part of the UPSU website provides events listings for local bars in the Plymouth area. Within this they have a ticket purchasing feature which allows users of the website to purchase tickets [...] (read more…)

POSTED 09.11.2011 @ 20:52

Space Syntax

This week in the Everyware module, we have now completed experimenting with Arduino technologies, and have now moved onto spaces and how we move around in them. Through the examination of different spaces we are able to analyse key routes through a particular area and highlight unoptimised areas. The latest task is to map out a floor plan of the Drake Circus shopping centre in Plymouth, and come up with a personal assessment of how we think the network of space works. This not only involves checking a space from an architectural point of view, but also to get an [...] (read more…)

POSTED 07.11.2011 @ 19:21

EX-PLAY ’11

I wasn’t originally going to blog about Extended Play 2011, but circumstances changed and I have more to write about! Come tuesday last week, the course leader called me up and asked me if I was interested in demonstrating the RFIDHTER project for the DAT course and to give a student prescence at the show. This really excited me, and then me and the team spent the next few days cleaning up the game in preparation for the event! The controllers got re-jigged around and built sturdier; not to mention we sexified them up with heatshrink tubing to make the [...] (read more…)

POSTED 07.11.2011 @ 18:16

Tanks Alot!

The Kinect. A Christmas present I have had for months and never had the living space to utilise it. Damn American living rooms. Yes, the latest happenings of the Gameplay module is to hook up Kinect hand tracking to our previously created tanks, controlling and firing our way to victory. It uses a very dirty method of bringing in data from Kinect into Processing… into a Text Document! This text Document is then read by a custom written class which interprets the X/Y position of the users hands into something we can utilise on the game. As there was only [...] (read more…)

POSTED 07.11.2011 @ 17:50

SWOT’s this?

SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunies and Threats. There is just a definition of what SWOT means if the post title slightly confuzzles you. To further develop my previous idea and create a more strong business plan, it is a good idea to SWOT and rejig ideas around from the initial plan; leading to a more solid and concrete idea. Strengths Weaknesses Great Design Update Frequency Fresh Idea Unsupportive Collaborators Useful Tool Poor Profit Supports Local Business Networks Lack of Interest Free to Run One Man Team Opportunities Threats Gap in App Market Competitive App Market Word of Mouth Website Alternatives [...] (read more…)

POSTED 07.11.2011 @ 16:59

Mindset Shift

It’s actually been almost a month since I posted in this topic, I keep mentioning that I need to catch up with blog work and one day I will post consistently! So just to firstly summarise the last couple of weeks of the Venture Culture module the following has happened: 1. I have thought up a completely new idea 2. I have been a very busy lad 3. Several VC sessions have taken place where I have planned out my business idea in a bit of depth Lets go through these points and see whats been happening. First off the [...] (read more…)

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