About me

Hi, My name is John Cotterell, I have nearly two decades experience of front end, flash and game development, now consolidated into a focus on game development with webGL, three.js, AR, VR and all accompanying technologies. I'm an all-round developer with a focus on creative development, gameplay, user experience, and making anything, even ads, academia and educational material, look lovely and feel fun. I like developing and working with Game engines, Gameplay mechanics, Gamification, Kid friendly media, Educational Multimedia. At my best when I'm making things run well across platforms, whilst making people's jaws drop with visual FX, and a mixed understanding of code, graphics, animation, sound design and even a bit of copy, though my sentences are too long.

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BugBall

Technologies: Javascript, WebGL, Three.js

A javascript and three.js game with branching AI that I'm working on

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Click here for the HI-FI, anti-aliased version with realistic lighting and shadows.

Number Cruncher

Company: World Learning

Technologies: Flash, AS3, Javascript, three.js

This game was originally commisioned by world learning for their games collection on roosterbank.com. I designed it be a lemmings inspired puzzle game in which you have to reconstruct a factory production line to produce the correct numbers.

Scramble

Company: World Learning

Technologies: Flash, AS3

This is a game I'm particularly proud of. Inspired by a mixture of Scrabble, Boggle, and countless gem and candy dropping games, this aimed to hit a fun and educational middle ground in the centre of them all. Quickly referencing a huge library of words defined by traditional Scrabble rules, this became a lot more fun than I could have anticipated.

Wordsearch

Company: World Learning

Technologies: Flash, AS3

This was a very simple brief, make an interactive wordsearch. Given the right production values and thematic design really brought an old concept to life.

Apple Catcher

Company: World Learning

Technologies: Flash, AS3

Very simple concept, I didn't think this would be fun until we added the music and gave the main character some emotions.

Briscola

Company: GameAccount

Technologies: Flash, AS3, Flash Native 3D, xml Sockets

A traditional Italian card game brought to the online gaming world. This was a lot of fun to make, using the native 3D in flash to render out the deck of cards, with all game states broadcast by a java server to avoid continuity errors and handle multiplayer logic.

Market Navigator

Company: Blue Barracuda

Client: Threadneedle Investments

Technologies: Flash, AS3, Flash Native 3D, xml Sockets

Same as below, only this time with a catamaran in the sea instead of a sports car. Plus you can jump over islands and whirlpools. Nice.

Market Racer

Company: Blue Barracuda

Client: Threadneedle Investments

Technologies: Flash, AS3, Flash Native 3D, xml Sockets

This was on of my favourite game design briefs, to make a top down racing game look as cool as possible and add as many effects as possible, whilst racing around on what looks like a giant bank note. I had to learn AS3 for this because we needed more particle effects than AS2 could cope with.

Objec.tv

Technologies: Javascript, three.js, svg.js, firebase

A mind-mapping and note taking tool I created.

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Dawn of Titans

Company: Natural Motion (Zynga)

Technologies: Flash, AS3, ScaleForm

This is probably the biggest game title I've worked on to date. Coding and laying out the UI for publishing to scaleform, communicating between Actionscript UI and the C++ game engine.

Diamond Dash

Company: Camelot (National Lottery)

Technologies: Flash, AS3

Camelot wanted to add some arcade elements to their traditional online scratchcard and slots games to give them a broader appeal. I was commisioned to make this game as part of that initiative. I think it reminds me of qubert.

Spin the Sign

Company: 888.com

Technologies: Flash, AS3

One of a suite of idents and minigames for 888.com to improve customer retention and make their website shinier and flashier. Incredibly simple interactive challenges to play, allowing time to get the visuals to just the right amount of shininess and flashiness.

Kinect Air Drums

Technologies: Flash, AS3, as3kinect library, xbox kinect

I bought a Kinect when they first hit shelves but didn't have an XBox, so I plugged it into my PC, and used the open source as3kinect socket library to make this simple drumkit demo. There was lot more potential for this piece of kit than has yet been realised, though the lag times made it unsuitable for musical applications.

Plume Generator

Company: AKQA

Client: Coca Cola

Technologies: Flash, AS2

This was quite an unusual and enjoyable project for such a large brand. A completely customisable wallpaper generator based on user doodles, choice of music and a personality profile, all blended into one app with infinite possible end results. I wrote the doodle and radio tuner for this project. Dan Wood wrote the personality profiler, whilst Joakim Carlgren tied together the rest of the app and the multiple pallette selections. I think AKQA threw every designer they had at this project too.

Grand Prix

Company: Dynamite Idea

Client: Ladbrokes

Technologies: Flash, AS2

This was a very experimental and very early attempt at rendering 3D in flash. The brief was to simulate a race in real time for the purposes of placing bets on the outcome. Jo Mills designed the hell out of it, James Naylor built the race simulation in 2D and I projected the race into isometric 3D and built the rudimentary models.

Creature of Havoc

Company: Icon Books (wizard books)

Technologies: Flash, AS2, Poser

One of the earliest flash games I built, circa 2002. The only time I used poser for a project, and remarkably, the only time I recall creating all of the visual assets for the game as well as the soundtrack.