Dustin J Sparks

Flash on the Beach in 2009 will be located in Miami, Florida. In the US finally! In the past I haven't been able to attend a Flash on the Beach conference. So this year I'd like to change that. Check out the Flash on the Beach website, I'm sure it'll be a blast.

This project uses Actionscript 3.0, Flash CS3, and Photoshop CS3. The kiosk is installed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in the Manufacturing Material Effects exhibit. I used Papervision 3D to create the 3D animation and objects in 3D space. Tweener was used for the animation. The navigation is touch-sensetive. Each group of Architects is added as easily as adding a single line into an array containing all of the projects.

This widget was given to me as a quick project that is meant to help out the computer lab workers in taking messages for the Corps administrators. The problem in the lab had to do with student lab attendents taking sub-par or incomplete messages from people who call in, or in some other way attempt to get in contact with a manager or administrator of the Corps.

I took on the project after the original team left and needed to re-write most of the existing code. I finished it and added some extra, unplanned, features in about 7 weeks. It was built entirely on OSX 10.5 Leopard while Leopard was still in its beta stages. The project uses PHP, Javascript, and XML to interface with Ball State's library servers. The widget is installed on all the university library's OSX capable computers.

This project was done as part of an intensive course on interactive television at Ball State. While another team of computer scientists were building a televised version, i was responsible for building the web version. We collaborated as much as possible, sharing RSS feeds and content managements systems that we built using PHP. A group of News designers provided most of the graphics.

This project is currently setup in an installation in the Center for Media Design at Ball State University. It was also featured in a Muncie area art show. The program was heavily inspired by the original by Liquid Journey. It uses a complex algorithm and the flash drawing api to draw pixel by pixel each 'particle'. As time goes on the colors morph from one to another. No pixels are discarded during this process resulting in the overlapping effect.

This project was built as a proof of concept for a flash-based Real Time Strategy game. It uses a very basic Finite State Machine to determine what action the character should be doing (collecting water to survive, walking to the water, or storing the water in his house).

I built this engine originally for a game that I was working on for a digital media class. The game has an editor for it that made it easy enough for the average student to design a level and make it live. Unfortunately my teacher decided that it was too complex for the class and I was told not to pursue it for the class. I continued to modify it outside of class to make it easily modifiable.

I took a commonly used game and recreated it with my own little political twist. It was created as extra credit for a digital media class. The 'balloons' scroll vertically while the player tries to shoot them. Certain balloons are worth more points. When they are shot, they slow down the rest of the balloons. Missing speeds the balloons up. I also included a control panel for manipulating the game at runtime.

This is a live micro-site built about 2 years ago using Flash 8 and Photoshop CS2. The website is very small and compact, designed this way to fit easily inside other websites. It can also be defined as a widget or gadget that also serves as a stand-alone website. I spent about a week building the front-end design and animation as well as the backend PHP contact form and content management system.

This project was done for a summer job working with a Ball State undergraduate fellowship grant. My job was to take a given customized google map and make it interactive and searchable with the Google Maps API. I created a search engine entirely in javascript whose job is to search an XML file for any number of search terms. The XML file contains descriptions, links, phone numbers, and GPS data.

This is a mock-up for a micro site for the Center for Media Design at Ball State. The micro site was to be setup to showcase student produced video webisodes. The banners were meant to hold video segments representing each scene in the webisode. The banners are draggable and expand to show more video segments at any given time. As a little added effect I incorporated pendulum physics on the banners when the site loads.