Pixel Fish Receives a Grant for Swarm – Backyard Buzz

Pixel Fish Studios was excited to learn that we are among the recipients of the New Filmmaker Grant Program created by the Idaho Film Office. Our portion of the grant will be used to develop our upcoming video game Swarm – Backyard Buzz.

We’d like to thank the Idaho Film Office for their support and shared vision of creating new jobs and opportunities for our state. Pixel Fish Studios is committed to fostering the video game and 3D/CGI industry in Idaho and creating new employment opportunities. We feel that Swarm is a key step in reaching this goal.

About the game: Swarm – Backyard Buzz will be a third-person multiplayer web-based game centered around some of the characteristics and the community of bees. Development and design is expected to take approximately one year.

Our Business Cards Start Conversations

Inevitably when we hand someone our business cards and they look at the back, their first question is, “What’s this?” Our simple response is that it’s a bar code which is usually followed by a look of confusion as to why we would put a bar code on our business card. A simple demonstration and it becomes clear.

While technically called a QR Code, these bar codes can contain information as simple as a web or email address to a host of information as the image below illustrates. The nice thing is that with the right smart phone app, all of the information can be captured and stored by the phone with little effort by the user. While we think that it provides a certain cool factor, perhaps the best thing about our cards is that they really do get a conversation started.

Pixel Fish Studios business card

Nighthorse Dam – 3D Previsualization

This was completed for the Bureau of Reclamation Northwest Regional Office located in Boise, ID. The previsual flyover depicts the Nighthorse Dam project currently in construction outside of Durango, Colorado. Through the use of CAD files and GIS data, we were able to provide accurate terrain and equipment visualization before most of the construction had even begun.

[SWF]http://www.pixelfish.me/flash/nighthorse.swf, 402, 327[/SWF]

Flash Trashin’ – Get Over It

Adobe FlashMuch has been made over the past several months about how Flash is finished, HTML5 and jQuery will take over the world, blah blah blah.  The Flash haters and knee-jerk reactions are in no short supply as some on Twitter wish Flash would just go away. Don’t like it? Fine, but publicly stating death to Flash is short-sighted.

At the the very least Flash has made the online world a better place by encouraging innovation and competition. Just as the emergence of jQuery, HTML5 and Unity will force Adobe to rethink what Flash should be.

As a company we make all of our decisions based on the client’s needs. Sometimes Flash is the answer, sometimes it isn’t. In the end, they’re all just tools that allow us to do our job. It’s nothing to get emotional about.