As expected, the final couple of weeks of the year were pretty quiet.

I continued work on Milkhill for a couple of days, which wasn’t as long as planned, but enough to move all the movement in it over to a physics engine, and also add some “bases” for players to capture. This addition – along with some alterations to the player avatars – involved wrapping my head around Unity’s in-built animation system (which, it turns out, is state machines all the way down). Christopher LaPollo’s 2D tutorials were about the clearest, most concise explanation I found on the matter, which helped massively. It also helped that they were text, not video. There are a lot of Unity tutorials out there that are video-only, which is a real pain when you just want to skim something to ascertain if it’s what you’re interested in; Kudos for Christopher for doing all the typing.

I spent one lunchtime at the second meeting of XYZW Club, in which Ben walked us through adding light-sources and Gouraud shading to our simple toy renderer – an awful lot added pretty quickly. The conversation to wrap up the meeting – slightly boggling at how far we’d leapt in that single session – was really interesting.

On Friday 12th, I talked about building data-driven visualisations and products for MySociety: as I’d hoped, the discussion afterwards from the audience was really interesting and pertinent – everything from how to initiate and explore data-products through to the legalities of licensing data. It’s always nice when there’s a healthy, buzzy discussion, and lots of experience in the room for people to share (rather than just me rabbitting away). I also think that talk is pretty much retired now, so I should probably write it up in the new year.

In week 114, I worked a little on Leithhill, a small database exploration tool wrapped around a research database – this had been on the backburner a little, and a day or two with the data model suddenly pulled it forward into something really useful. There’ll likely be a little more to do on that in the new year.

Needless to say, there were meetings and conversations: I’m still trying to work out what next year looks like, work-wise, and I have a lot of availability (and various ‘maybes’ floating around). So if you’re interested in working together next year, do get in touch.

And really, along with a little admin, that was it. A quiet end to 2014. I’m out of the studio until the new year, when the job of getting 2015 under way in earnest really kicks off. See you then.