What do you get if you cross, Adobe AIR, FDT, Robotlegs, Arduino, Git, multiple screens, animations and buzzers?

You get a TV game show!

This is a project I worked on at Spinifex Group and our client Ambience Entertainment – a Kid’s TV game show called “What Do You Know?” that will air on ABC3 at a future date.

I’ll break down the workflow.

TECHNOLOGY:
Adobe AIR’s ability to build applications over multiple windows and target multiple screens made it a perfect choice for this project. Also the ease of packaging new version and sending to the client to install was fantastic. There are 10 windows that need to target several screens, all this was placed into a config XML file.

Another developer also developed an XML editor application in AIR to create and edit the questions for the game. Also controlled here was timeouts, questions types and question values.

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

CODING:
All coding was done in FDT4, started it in Beta RC4 but moved it to the final release as soon as it came out.

http://www.fdt.powerflasher.com/

FRAMEWORK:
I had almost completed my first Robotlegs project so thought I would carry my new found knowledge into this project. Having now completed 2 projects with it have found it really helped me break down my code, few things I will do different next project, but that’s always the way! Plus Robotlegs comunity support is great. I had a few questions I had to ask and they were answered in full within hours.

http://www.robotlegs.org/

VERSION CONTROL:
Have moved to using Git for version control, fortunately did not have to revert at any stage, but it is all there in case I do. plus no freakin’ “.svn” folders polluting my code.

http://git-scm.com/

Have been evaluating clients for Git, used SmartGit for this. It’s pretty cool. Thinking of trying out EGit, Eclipse plugin, in FDT next time.

http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/index.html

HARDWARE:
As with all game shows buzzers are pretty much a given! The buzzers were controlled with an Arduino controller. So needed to find a way for Flash to communicate with Arduino. Used a combination of techniques and tools available here.

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Flash

It was pretty cool having something external talking with Flash, might do some R&D fun stuff with this… when I have some fee time!

The application also needed to communicate to an iPad that the host was holding. AIR was able to make a socket connection to an app and update when required. Had been hoping to develop the iPad app in Flash also, but instead we used Appcelerator Titanium (one of our other developers build this so I did not have much to do here)

http://www.appcelerator.com/

Got a chance to visit the set at Fox Studios a couple times, the last being today to see it being used for a live recording. Was great to see it all working.

JK.