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Mill Lab Creates Interactive Game For BBCi

London's Mill Lab has been commissioned by BBC Interactive (BBCi) to create a new interactive game for SO, BBCi's Website for teens (www.bbc.co.uk/so). Based on the "Magic 8-Ball" game, ASK THE DJ was formulated by Mill Labs James Stone and John Sunter, and allows players to "ask the DJ" yes or no questions. This cool game, set in a nightclub, features a female house DJ and a male devil DJ who are battling each other for control of the turntables. The player chooses the style of music that gets played, from death metal to house, thereby deciding who wins and who gets kicked off. James explained: "The idea was to make the game as seamless as possible while recreating the feel of getting into a club, so we even created the idea of young people queuing outside while you wait for the game to download." Both DJ characters were animated in Flash with a strong emphasis on their musical orientation, so the devil DJ was animated in quite a rough, jerky manner to accompany the music he played, while the female house DJ is much more "chilled out," animated in a smoother, cleaner style. ASK THE DJ also incorporates a "Magic 8-Ball" format where players type in questions for the DJ to answer. These questions then appear on the screen as graffiti and the DJ responds. For the graffiti, James and John created a custom animated typeface, which allowed them to create the pop-up animated replies from the DJ. James and John also decided that they wanted to move away from the very formulaic games that they came across on the Web, so they worked to create a very filmic look. "Although file size does need to be kept to a minimum when creating Internet games, it doesnt always mean that you should compromise your art work," said John. "I decided to try to come up with a rough looking style for the game. As it was based in a nightclub I wanted to illustrate just how dark and dingy real clubs are." The designers accomplished this by combining software such as Painter, Photoshop and Flash with still photography and hand-drawn animation. ASK THE DJ can be accessed at www.bbc.co.uk/so/games/.

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