We are hiring! Are you a designer or developer in Edmonton looking for some new challenges? Check out our careers page (or this specific posting) for more info about available positions and how to apply. We would love to hear from you!
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The Dragon Age ISS
In 2014, we worked with BioWare to create the ISS: an interactive, animated cinematic of a player’s history in the first two games of the Dragon Age series, narrated by one of the characters, Varric.
When we first met with BioWare’s online team to discuss the Interactive Story Summary, we were floored. It’s always a privilege to work with one of the best game development companies in the world, and the ISS presented a challenge that was perfectly suited with some of the tech we have been focused on for the last few years. The goal of the ISS is to summarize the complex narrative and decisions that players have made in previous games in the series, and give them control of those choices leading into their latest chapter, Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Keeping it Grounded: Why We Avoid the Cloud (Sometimes)
The Cloud
Don’t get me wrong, the “Cloud” is great. Being able to utilize existing apps and not having to worry about updates or security is a huge time saver. But when it gets down to it, “In the cloud” is a buzz term. When translated to laymen speech it means “Storing your data and running your applications on an offsite server, somewhere”. It’s that “somewhere” that is a legal gray area for us, and for certain clients. For example; let’s say we’re working on a project for Microsoft, but are storing documents and files on Google servers. The two companies can (and do) collaborate, but what if they don’t on this project? And we’re storing sensitive Microsoft information with Google? It could cause legal issues if a dispute ever came up. This is the primary reason why we choose to self-host the vast majority of our infrastructure. The services we self-host include a Git server, bug tracker, wiki, file syncing server, and a custom built timetracker. Having a local server host all these services allows us to be extremely agile in development and with our workflows.
Breaking Into the Web Industry
Taking Your First Steps
Finishing school and stepping into the industry is both daunting and exciting. Having gone through the process of graduation and job searching myself just a year ago, I want to shed some light on what to expect and offer some tips along the way.
After working at gskinner for one year, I was fortunate to attend the grad show where I had first met Grant when I was a student. Along with the CTO and Creative Director, we observed the new grads and discussed possible hires. It was an eye opening experience, learning how management assesses talent. It allowed me to empathize with the hopes and fears of the new grads as they try to find a way into the industry. Luckily, the web platform is broad and provides a large pool of jobs to fill.
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Technitone.com is back!
Create Music with Technitone (again!)
In 2011, we worked with Google on a Chrome experiment to demo the then-new Web Audio API. Although we were only tasked with coming up with something that could show the new audio features, our (often-excitable) team came up with a project that pushed our capabilities in a ton of technologies, including WebGL, Canvas, web sockets for multi-player, and CSS animations. For a great technical dive into the original Technitone.com we launched with, check out the html5rocks.com article!
QA for the Modern Web
Most of the products we deliver at gskinner are web-based applications. This means that one of our major goals is to have a QA process which ensures that they look and behave as expected across target devices and browsers, while having a fallback plan for those not supported. It’s a challenge in the modern web, especially when new technologies in the browser landscape are constantly emerging, while others are being refined or completely removed. This is the reason why we have a QA process that continues to evolve and expand. Here are a few ways that we currently approach it.
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Check. Check. Is this thing on?
It’s been nearly a full year since I last blogged. (Do people still blog? Maybe I should snapchat this instead?) I used to blog a lot, but life became busier, posts became more infrequent, and eventually it stopped being a habit and became a chore.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot to say. It’s just that the last few years have been a crazy and exciting ride, and I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to writing posts.
Five years ago, Flash as a platform died. For a lot of shops, the migration was gradual. Not for us. Our clients come to us for cutting-edge tech, and almost overnight, Flash didn’t meet their criteria. We went from almost 100% Flash work, to nearly 0% in less than a year.
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New versions of CreateJS released!
Wow. What a difference of couple of years makes. Most of you have noticed a shift in the industry over the last two years towards HTML5 — instead of running away from this change, we’ve embraced it. Our response was CreateJS: a collection of Javascript libraries that allow us to create the same high quality experience and quick turnaround that we are known for.
Not only has the framework been a major part of our development, but some great tools have been created to improve user workflow, such as ToolKit for CreateJS and Zoë.
We are happy to announce new versions of the CreateJS Libraries, available now on the CreateJS CDN and GitHub.
This update includes a new common event model, vastly improved documentation, and a ton of new features and fixes for each library. For specific information on the changes, please review the VERSIONS.txt file in the relative GitHub repositories.
We have also introduced a minified CreateJS library to the CDN, containing all the latest libraries in one handy file.
With this release, we are happy to announce the launch of the CreateJS blog, which will provide a centralized location for announcements and articles about the libraries. Read more about the update to the CreateJS libraries here.
Thank you all for testing, feedback, contributions, and bug reports…keep them coming!