Flashforward Profile: Grant Skinner
  
|
| Grant Skinner — gskinner.com |
|---|
Grant Skinner is another old friend of Flashforward — he’s been a film festival judge, presented at more conferences than he’s missed, and won the film festival twice in 2003 alone.
Skinner is CEO and chief architect of gskinner.com, a Flash development and consulting company. He works with leading new media agencies and progressive corporate clients to create cutting-edge applications, games and multimedia pieces. Skinner’s expertise in fusing coding with interface design, usability, marketing and business logic has garnered international acclaim and resulted in a number of prestigious industry awards.
He also maintains an exceptional blog, which has become a true focal point for the Flash community, and not just for discussing Skinner’s projects.
Witness, for example, the discussion that ensued when he asked for feedback on an idea he didn’t end up deciding to speak on this year: Top 5 Flash Problems Solved. Not only did this post elicit many excellent suggestions for such a topic, but many of them were subsequently answered by Skinner or other readers. (Note also that many of these issues are being addressed by other Flashforward sessions, so even though he decided to talk about something more exciting, we’ve got you covered.)
What’s more exciting than solving Flash problems? Shooting ravenous (but cute!) little 3D creatures with an overheating gun, that’s what — Puki: The Swarm. And again, watch how Skinner’s announcement of the beta became the de facto review/complaint/bug tracking system for the game, and how he continually improves it in response to this feedback.
The experience of building and improving this game is the subject of Skinner’s presentation, “Dissecting Puki”…
Want to learn how a genre-leading game, viewed by millions, was assembled in a couple of weeks by a single developer in his spare time? This session is a behind-the-scenes tour of the popular 3D Flash game, “Puki: The Swarm”. Skinner details the architecture, code, mathematics and algorithms involved in the game, as well as the conceptual and creative path of the project. Finally he shares a variety of helpful tips and tricks he discovered while developing the game, including strategies for optimization, discouraging cheating, safe-guarding high scores, and thwarting “game pirates”.
Of course, part of the fun of Flashforward is catching the speakers off-stage as well, and if you see Skinner you might ask him how it’s going with GLIC…
Or better still, you can join us in congratulating him on his June marriage!
