Anatomy of a project

In the beginning...

We were contracted by a medium sized advertising agency in the neighbourhood to come up with a program to help them organize their workflow.

We discussed our clients' needs in detail, before a single line of code was written, and being "visual types" the client had a clear idea of the user interface they wanted for this job management software. We were sent some Photoshop documents and a list of desired features. The software needed to run in a mixed Network environment (Mainly Macs and 2 Windows machines). The software needed to specify job details, assign it to one of the staff members, set a state for the job (new/correction/done) along with the ability to change details or reassign it.

The program should allow an overview of all jobs, sorted by different criteria, such as person assigned, priority, delivery date or job status. In addition a module was needed to get an overview of the hours put into a job.

Midflow adjustments

It turned out that the design of the first version of this module was sub optimal. The ability of Revolution to load stacks at Runtime was quite handy here. We just provided a newer version as a stack, plugged it into the projects plugins folder for our application and had a very happy customer in no time. :-)

Later additions and modifications

A simple Notepad module followed. During the first few months of use of the program, new needs arose and the existing modules needed to be modified to fit specific needs. As the agency hired more staff, some of the jobmanager modules needed to allow for restricted access by specified personnel. However, management needed to access these modules from any machine in the agency. So we implemented a simple privileges system, that asks for a password if certain modules are accessed.

Happy Completion

The program worked flawlessly and still works after 3 years very reliably. It now handles a few thousand entries with new ones being added every day. It is built around a tailor made Revolution server program, that logs all incoming requests and auto backups its data. The server can be accessed by Revolution clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Mac OS Classic. We are still maintaining the system and add new modules now and then. The customers are very happy with the program and would be pretty much lost without the data stored in there.

Satisfied customers are the best form of advertising

This collaboration became a fruitful partnership in other areas of software development, which laid the foundation stone for a library now known as animationEngine. Here's how it happened:

The advertising agency acquired a new customer, who was very interested in using "New media" to promote their services. This customer collected empty printer cartridges for refill. Along with a complete redesign of their homepage, they wanted two games as a giveaway.

The games had to reflect the business of the recycling company, so we designed two games for them. The first one was pretty simple. You moved a box using the arrow keys and had to collect printer cartridges and other articles that fell from the top of the screen. Each cartridge you collected scored points. If you collected rubbish, points were subtracted. Game duration was one minute. If you managed to collect a clock, your time expired.

The second game was much more sophisticated. The goal of the game also was to collect printer cartridges, but this time they were pictured on turning "coins". Coins were moving on different paths. The game featured 20 levels with beautiful artwork and an online highscore system. Players needed to complete a level, before they unlocked the next one. After a level was unlocked, they could freely choose which level to start with.

Demand for our games has increased so much since the second release that we decided to spin off a special games creation division to our business this year.

See Drops and Zack for our latest examples.