Deadly Nadder from Flame It!

Last fall Ben Preuss called me from ThinkNerve. Ben runs a fantastic little studio in Brooklyn, partnering with Hollywood boutiques, producing dozens of Flash widgets and microsites. I’ve always been an admirer of his work.

Ben had an iPhone project called “Flame it!” and wanted to know if we could help. The idea was silly but fun: transform your breath into a fire-breathing dragon. Sounds simple enough. Today we submitted it to the App store. Shortly we’ll submit the native French and German versions.

Yet, when all was said and done, the App had to be written in OpenGL, CoreAudio, C and C++. The menus were all custom, maintaining the look and feel of the movie. Listening to your breath, processing the audio, then controlling the stereo sound and flame in real time required a bit more work than I originally thought. The audio engine is custom, as you’re recording, playing and animating sounds in a real-time loop with less than a 10msec delay.

After I got audio working — suspending correctly, resuming without hanging, and handling sound effects in real time — I had to create a new particle engine for the flames, inspired by the fabulous work of Particle Illusion. It should be able to play all effects from their library of thousands, some of which were used in 2012 and other Hollywood films. So fun. As the movie draws closer, new flames and particle engines will showcase the unique character of the starring Dragons. You can even use a multiplayer mode, flaming particles across a local WiFi network in real time using UDP.