Simon Milfred > Projects

I have been volunteering in the organization Coding Pirates, and have done so for three years. The goal of Coding Pirates is to teach children about technologies through playing, fun and a hands-on approach.

Spring, 2015: Weekly game development workshop in the CUDiM department of Coding Pirates. The children where making their own games (using GameMaker: Studio) and controllers for their games (using Makey-Makey). The childrens products where made to become part of a “future-island” together with the other kids’ (from other workshops) end products (robots, 3d prints, etc.).

June, 2015: During Internet Week Denmark I was playing my part in a workshop at Ridehuset, Aarhus, where we made a “technology diorama” with a bunch of kids (sort of like the “future-island”), and afterwards openly showcased it for passing-by visitors.

Fall, 2015: Largely the same kind of weekly game development workshop as in the Spring, again in the CUDiM department, though this time the children made arcade machines for their games. The overall theme this season was arcades, and it was all showcased together with the products of the kids in the other workshops.

September, 2015: We did our first Coding Pirates Game Jam - Aarhus.

Spring, 2016: We started the new GameDev department in Aarhus, where we expanded our game development workshop we previously had in the CUDiM department quite a bit. Again it was game development and controller-making, but this time around the theme was “hacking (in a positive way)”, and the kids were free to choose which game engine to use / a game to mod, as long as they could argue for how their game was a “hack”.

April, 2016: We did our second Coding Pirates Game Jam - Aarhus.

October, 2016: In collaboration with Red Barnet we had a workshop at their “Den Store Venskabsdag 2016″ event at Katrinebjergskolen, Aarhus. We taught groups of children about Makey-Makey and Ozobots.

Fall, 2016: Weekly game development workshop in the GameDev department. The children were making their own games (using either GameMaker: Studio or Unity) and had the possibility of making a controller as well. The main theme was “keep it simple”, and the games were showcased at Dokk1, Aarhus.

November, 2016: We did our third Coding Pirates Game Jam - Aarhus. We also made a volunteers’ game.

Spring, 2017: Game development workshops every Wednesday where the children are making games using Unity or GameMaker: Studio. The theme this time around was “ReThink Vikings”.

February 2017: Workshops in London during Nordic Matters at the Southbank Centre. One workshop with robots and fairy tales, and one with a game jam using the theme “ReThink Vikings”.

March 2017: Coding Pirates GameDev did open workshops at the Danish Championships in Counter Strike: Global Offensive in Aarhus (not the finals). We made a Makey-Makey controller for CS and a small GameMaker: Studio game as well.

May 2017: We did our fourth Coding Pirates Game Jam - Aarhus. Lot’s of awesome games were made. I also made a small Twitch-chat-game to play in the pauses!

Fall, 2017: Weekly workshops on game development every Wednesday.

November, 2017: We did our fifth Coding Pirates Game Jam in Aarhus. Our biggest game jam yet with more than 100 participants!

Spring, 2018: Weekly workshops on game development every Wednesday.

Coding Pirates Game Jam - Aarhus (2015, 2016, 2017)

2015 I helped starting up the Coding Pirates Game Jam - Aarhus (planning, finding sponsors), and volunteered at the event as well. The Coding Pirates Game Jams are events where children aged 7-17 meet and group up, with the purpose of making their own games in the span of the event (24 hours in this case). The event is a competition (with prizes and all), but the main attraction is getting to try to make games and the social aspects of the whole deal.

During spring 2016 we held our second game jam. Again I was in the main planning group, and once more I also volunteered at the event itself.

In fall 2016 we did our third Coding Pirates Game Jam in Aarhus. We also made a volunteers’ game. This time I was not in the planning group, and I only volunteered at the jam itself.

In spring 2017 we did our fourth jam! The theme was “Under the Bed”, and lots of awesome games were made. We also did a live-stream on Twitch with a chat-controlled game playing in some of the pauses. I made that game.

In fall 2017 we did our fifth jam, this time with more than 100 children in Aarhus alone (it was the national jam, so the jam happened in Copenhagen and Odense as well). The theme was “The Unknown” and a lot of awesome games and ideas came out of it. Once again we had a live stream, however this time around a dedicated media crew were running it. It was a busy weekend, an awesome weekend, and a fun weekend.

In spring 2018 we did our sixth jam, this time with room for 100 children. It was held at the university in Aarhus.

The six weeks long graduation production at DADIU is now over with. It has been a great challenge and an awesome experience. Check out the trailer for the game below, and maybe go check out the game on Play Store?

You can find the game on Play Store.

I have learned a lot from being a QA and UR manager. The biggest lessons being something along the lines of “be creative with what you got”, “be loud and everywhere” and “be autonomous”.

More often than not you do not have time to do proper UR workshops, the build will be delayed, or it will not be what you were promised by the developers. At least that is what I experienced at DADIU, and it makes sense to me that this will be mirrored in the industry. You are working in a fast paced process on a tight schedule, and it is almost impossible for the process to run smoothly all the time. The only thing you can do, is do your best to bring value from what you got.     Doing QA or UR has shown to be a constant juggling of extracting valuable information from whatever you have access to. This can be a build (broken or working), people (inside or outside the target audience), concept art, audio clips, documentation, abstract ideas... Anything really. A big part of the job is figuring out what makes sense to test or research, and to consider where the next nugget of value lies.

However, because of the busy work environment you have to be loud. You have to be loud, so that the development team hear, what you have to say, before it is too late, but also so that you get as much material from the team as possible. While it may be extra work on your part, it goes a long way to make your work visible. Take the time to enquire, have meetings to get to know the needs of the team, and make sure to ask for things: The artist, for example, can easily send you his concept art, but he might not think about doing so himself, as he is busy with developing it further. Likewise, it only takes so long to print out some copies of your report and place around the building, but it makes it so much easier for the team to access the information.

After I started doing these things myself, the team were also a lot more interested in my work and opinion. I had great conversations with both artists and programmers, and the game designer sparred with me on multiple occasions. Even the game’s name was the result of my work, as I chose to do some guerilla testing during the weekend towards the end of production. The game director had just settled on a name, then changed her mind based on my findings.

As part of my semester at DADIU I worked as the QA Manager for production team 1 and their interactive experience. The application is, like the game before it, a derivative piece of work based on a H.C. Andersen’s story. In the app the user can build their own scenes (or explore already made ones from the book), interact with characters and objects, and play out stories.

The production was lasting 1½ week and I got to manage two QA test cycles (and did testing for the other production teams as well).

Following is the credits screen from the app, containing the full list of the people working on the app and their respective roles. The app was made for Android tablets. The app has not been published as the game is based on a book from Lindhardt & Ringhof and cannot be published online in Google Play or shown publicly in any other way without written permission from Lindhardt & Ringhof.

As part of my semester at DADIU I worked as the QA Manager for production team 1 and their game. The game is a derivative game based on a H.C. Andersen’s story.

The production was lasting 1½ week and I got to do two QA test cycles (for this production we just did the QA ourselves).

Following is the credits screen from the game, containing the full list of the people working on the game and their respective roles. The game was made for Android tablets. The game has not been published as the game is based on a book from Lindhardt & Ringhof and cannot be published online in Google Play or shown publicly in any other way without written permission from Lindhardt & Ringhof.

During Counterplay 17 a few colleagues from Coding Pirates, Claus Toft-Nielsen of CUDiM and I collaborated with D.A.R.E.’s (Digital Arts Research Education) Bruno de Paula and Andrew Burn to host a workshop, were we helped a group of kids making games using the W.I.P. software MissionMaker by MAGiCAL Projects.

The purpose of the workshop was to test the software, as it is being developed as a learning tool. You can read Andrew Burn’s article about it here.

The 16th and 17th February I and 9 other volunteers from Coding Pirates were hired by The Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces to do two workshops in London during the Nordic Matters event in London at the Southbank Centre. Both workshops was for children between 7 and 12 years old.

The first workshop, “Hack Your Heritage: Robot Fairy Tales”, was all about robots. Here the children were to tell fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen through robots like Ozobots, Sparkis, Quirkbots and more. To support the robots the children also went crazy with lots of analogue materials ranging from paper to Lego to stuffed animals and beyond.

Coding Pirates GameDev logo design

I designed this logo (assisted by Johan Kaaber) for the GameDev department of Coding Pirates (in which I volunteer myself).

The challenge of this particular piece of work was, that it needs to reflect both Coding Pirates as a whole (hence we needed to follow their graphical guide) but also the GameDev-department as a stand-alone unit. It was especially important to me, that the logo mirrored our personality and not just what we do. Our “hack” of the original logo (altering the C and the P) was one way to do this, as we like to do our own twist on things and gladly bend the rules to achieve this. Following is the original Coding Pirates logo for reference:

The first intended use for the logo is to place it on the back of a hoodie for the volunteers to wear (image in the end of the post). To accompany this logo I made a small variant as well, to be placed on the chest of the hoodie (but also to be used in places where the full logo is too big):

Here I chose to remove as much text as possible and only kept the new GameDev-specific elements, however Coding Pirates as a whole is still represented in the style and the use of the mascot, Captain Hack. I also made a variant with the GameDev text, though I believe the hoodie is better of without it (but for other uses, having GameDev as part of the logo makes the most sense):

So this one was just a mini-project done purely for fun. It is a small program to run next to the game Overwatch while you play as the character Lúcio. I also made an online version, but that one only works while the browser tab is in focus, which stops it from working with the game since the game takes focus.

The program pretty much just plays Lúcio’s full tracks depending on what you are pressing on the keyboard, so that it plays at the right times in-game.

You can get the program for free here. You will also find directions of use on that site.

Room for improvements

The ideal version of this program would read values off of the game, and maybe even control the in-game volume to allow for the menu music, but overwriting with Lúcio’s music while playing (and only when controlling this particular character). I tried to do this, but the game shut me down, and I’d rather not try more hardcore methods, since Blizzard surely would ban me from the game.

A HTML5 variant of the avatar containing games or other interactive content (like this blog’s avatar - click here if you are not currently on the blog and cannot see it ).

The idea came to me as I learned to integrate HTML5 on the blog, and I have not seen it done anywhere else (though it may easily already exist out there). It allows for fun, interactive content, but also comes with some cons like:

The gamatar only works on the blog itself. Your regular avatar will still be used everywhere else. 

Using a gamatar may prove annoying on slow connections (though this can probably be circumvented with some clever CSS - for example you can pretty easily make content not show on mobile devices).

I made this blog’s gamatar using GameMaker: Studio and am hosting it on this website. For the right price I will happily make a gamatar with and for you! Also I have a couple ideas for other gamatar projects + I plan on expanding on this blog’s gamatar by adding more games.

My brother is working on a new card game (or, at least a game utilizing cards), and he needed a design for the cards. This is what I came up with (though I will probably alter them as he further develops the game).

So I made another bit of graphical work for it-Works. This time it was for the app DressOnDressOff and.. No, I was not modeling or anything, I simple animated the scanning-line going across the models as they get undressed.

Link to download (original forum post here, but with broken link)

The very first piece of software I made - all the way back in 2007! It was a simple program for Windows storing the user’s passwords using one, single master password for encrypting the list.

I made these animations for it-works back in September/October 2015 to be used in an app about drinking more water called “Sepiida Water”. The idea is, that the sepiida squid gets more and more reinvigorated as it drinks more water going through three different stages.

it-works supplied illustrative materials like the gif above and a number of videos as to how what they wanted it, and then the first thing I did was quickly sketch out a character design + a gif showing what was possible for the animation (below).

After getting the GO from them I refined the drawing, and received their ideas for the animations (below). The animations were done using Spine, a skeleton-based piece of animation software.

It is important to keep practicing skills, so that they do not go stale. For quite some time now, I have been doing a personal challenge to do just that for my Photoshop skills. The challenge is: every time I am in the cinema (which I am somewhat often), I need to make a new profile or cover picture for my Facebook profile based on that movie. For the profile pictures I also want to make sure, that you can clearly see my face, since it is a profile picture.

I have made this blog to showcase the pictures, and gather them at one place.

Example (after watching The Revenant):

Recently I was hired to animate an ad for FOSIA. They supplied the backdrops, dialog, storyboard and character designs, and then I cut the characters up, animated them, and put everything together in the video you see above. Someone entirely else will add soundscapes to it, so the above video is pretty silent. I will update when he is done, and thus the commercial is fully done.

Before making the ad, I though the assignment would use filmed backgrounds, thus the sample I made for them reflected that. Also I had not received the storyboard then, so I was not aware of the characters’ small sizes.

Edit: The finished video is now available on their site. I honestly thought they would do more with the sound design (sfx and the likes), but hey, as long as they are happy, I am as well.