The Content Kingdom

Last week, Josh Selig (Wonder Pets!) wrote an interesting Kidscreen article about how all content, specifically video, is finally kingless and created equal. With the ever-growing number of websites, videos apps and subscription VOD services, the sheer amount of video is dizzying. As a result, we’ve been talking a lot about the future of content and what it means for consumers and kids. I decided to use Josh’s parable as a jumping-off point and pen my own ending.

 

…Content was just content. And the people rejoiced.

 

Ultimately, everyone abandoned the castle and the kingdom was fractured. The former kings devised plans to retain land they once controlled while new nobles emerged. Lord YouTube promised the people an audience, notoriety and riches. The commoners wanted their voices heard so they rolled up their sleeves and crafted billions of videos at no cost, all while the former kings churned out hours and hours of original programing in distant lands. Content poured out from big castles, remote villages, young settlements. And not just video – apps, games, books, and toys. What a glorious time it was!

The people fully embraced it. They dedicated their waking hours to binge watching seasons of the latest “it” show and countless videos of kittens attacking laser pointers. It was exciting! On the surface, everything seemed merry but slowly content became unruly – it was everywhere and it was pervasive. It infiltrated Lord Hemorrhoid’s bathroom. It interrupted Sir Flapjack’s pancake dinner. It even made its way into Lady Heartstomper’s bed (which many handsome noblemen failed to access). It became impossible for people to stop and enjoy a rainbow because the double rainbow on their screens were more alluring. Somehow the once relaxing content became noisy, pesky, and in-your-face. And while the people could watch the content they wanted whenever they wanted to, they had to pay the various kingdoms for monthly access. And if the people weren’t willing to pay for it, they were forced to watch an annoying jester sing a jingle about laundry detergent. Over and over again.

The people grew dizzy and numb to the dozens of services, hundreds of ads, thousands of shows, millions of episodes, billions of videos. Despite the infinite content pool that existed, the divided kingdom continued to churn out more and more at lower costs to keep up with the demand. As a result, quality suffered and ads became an inevitable symptom of cheap, homogeneous and ubiquitous content. And while content was just content, it became an unstoppable force, far greater than the entire kingdom itself.

And the people just watched.

Keyframe Caddy Pro Support

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Since launching Add-ons/tools in the Adobe Add-ons, we’ve been getting a flurry of emails from folks who have had trouble installing the software, learning how it works, and getting it to work flawlessly. While most are related to Adobe installation issues, we’ve been hard at work on improving the Keyframe Caddy Pro user experience. In doing so, there’s a new version in the Adobe Exchange that fixes the pesky “disappearing window” bug. We also created a series of handy materials—a tutorial video, a user guide with tips, tricks, and troubleshooting, as well as as sample Flash file so folks can use Keyframe Caddy with little to no setup. We hope the latest version and materials are useful for our current and future users, especially as we continue to refine our tools.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or tips regarding any of our tools, Add-ons, or libraries, feel free to reach out to us at support@cloudkid.com.

Introducing PixiParticles

In the last few years, CloudKid has made a transition into the exciting (and admittedly sometimes frustrating) world that is HTML5 game development. While we don’t have a favorite framework, we’re big fans of Pixi.js. We’ve used this super-fast 2D renderer on Jessica’s Joyride, Gover’s Winter Games and Fizzy’s Food Truck.

One of the disadvantages of developing with this new platform is the surprising lack of tools for non-technical people. In the days of Flash publishing, if a designer wanted to move a text field 3 pixels to the right or an animator needed to add a little more breathing room for a settle, they could simply re-publish the source file. Not a problem.  Now, however, typically a programmer is needed to help integrate, implement or adjust–which requires time and patient programmers.

There aren’t a lot of visual tools available for Pixi.js (one wonderful exception is Spine) so we decided to make one! We’d like to introduce PixiParticles, our extensible, light-weight (a svelte 12KB!) particle emitter with online editor. PixiParticles is available through Bower (if you’re into that sort of thing), fork-able on Github and fully documented. We made PixiParticles with both artists and developers in mind and we hope you have fun playing with it.

We’re constantly trying to improve our tools so if you find issues with the editor or with the library, please let us know through Github. Both editor and library are MIT licensed.

Here are some live examples: rain, smoke, pixie dust, snow, flame and more.

Explosion

Star

Snow

Smoke

Sparks

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