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 14.11.2011 @ 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…)

POSTED 27.10.2011 @ 16:09

R-FID_HTER

This project turned out to be a complete blast! As seen by the visible lack of previous blog posts I have been heavily tied up in the development of this project. After brainstorming and implementing a constant stream of new features with the rest of the team we managed to pull an all-nighter and really get this project into a rather polished and playable state. In the end to create this into a multiplayer fighter game we required two sets of the Arduino kits. Since the previous blog post we had merged with another group which had gained us two [...] (read more…)

POSTED 26.10.2011 @ 11:03

More Tanks & Iain Lobb

So I have been a bit useless at updating my blog lately, since my last post in this topic three different sessions have gone by. In the first of the sessions was a followup to the tank lecture. We used the graphic we created of a tank and brought it to life. Using the Flash IDE and AS3 we hooked the graphic up to a keyboard and allowed the tank to drive forward, backwards, left, right and fire the cannon. This really helped in getting me back up to scratch with programming methodologies which was very useful after spending a [...] (read more…)

POSTED 13.10.2011 @ 13:30

Son of a Pitch!

Venture Culture is one of the modules I am really excited about this year. Not only do I get free reign over what I do, but it could be the start of a future successful business! Involved with this is a set of Dragon’s Den style pitches where I get to practice my communication skills speaking to groups and to present my ideas to others. In this weeks discussion we were to bring three ideas to the table and discuss them with the group. In the actual session we only discussed one idea each briefly and got initial thoughts from [...] (read more…)

POSTED 12.10.2011 @ 19:34

Harduino?

One of the modules covered in my final year is Everyware; which as I understand it involves the use of Arduino systems. Unfortunately I managed to miss the only lecture of the year so far which involves getting us into pairs; and after communicating with fellow coursemates I have discovered I seem to be the odd one out. Because of this I have paired up with an existing pair in hope that I will be able to continue on with this module OK. In the past years we have been presented with Arduino but I have managed to dodge and [...] (read more…)

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