Wes Gorgichuk

Wes has an extensive background in JavaScript, Node, PHP, and MySQL development. He enjoys learning new technologies and has unwittingly received the, unofficial, title of DevOps at gskinner for managing the internal server infrastructure in addition to his programming duties. When he's not learning new technologies he can be found hitting the trails on his mountain bike or travelling the world and eating at some of the best restaurants there are.

Alpha video in HTML5

Alpha video in HTML5 should be easy right? Not quite, certainly not as easy as Flash was. In an article a long long time ago, from an internet far far away … I wrote about alpha video in Flash 8. (remember Flash?). Back then alpha video was a huge new feature that allowed developers to create a .flv with a transparent background that worked in all browsers. Allowing us to do all sorts of fancy effects. With Flash being a thing of the past, modern browsers are not in agreement on what video format we should use on the web. It makes things a little more muddled today.

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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.

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