Plan for Brandon Maness
by Brandon Maness · 07/30/2005 (2:12 pm) · 5 comments
Here is a recent screen shot from the 'Free tutorial' section of the Website.
After quite a few evenings working on the templates and code backend for the tutorial site, everything seems to be working pretty good. The templates really help to speed up tutorial development, and it has really been a joy to be able to produce video content without any major issues. You know, once you've used video in tutorials with html and graphics, you will never be able to go back to standard html again. It's just so fast and descriptive to use video :)
Here is a brief run down of the features implemented into the website so far.
1. vBlog - A video version of a blog with built in voting, results, and forum.
2. quickClips - Short video clips that contain useful tid bits of knowledge.
3. videoPlayer/forums - A CamtasiaStudio flash video player that has been modified to stream in multiple .swf clips live and make it appear as they are all the same clip. Flash forums were then added on top of the player to provide context sensitive access to forums that relate to the actual video you are watching, as well as the entire forum that relates to the video series as a whole.
4. Forums - Standard image, url, bold, code, and quote markup along with email updates on thread changes. All integrated inside a flash player.
5. DynaContent - With the videos broken into multiple steps, and each step broken into multiple clips, it becomes quick and easy to add, or modify existing video tutorials based on user feedback from the integrated forums, etc.
6. Additional Resources - This little feature is added below some video player windows to provide additional information that relates to the current step. It is really a modified vBlog window without the voting system, but was just what was needed to provide additional content that not everyone would want to watch.
7. swf video content - After using every video format available .swf ends up out performing every other media encoder for video tutorial type content. Besides being cross platform, it has file sizes and quality that are simply incredible compared to divx, wma, etc. This is mainly because most tutorials have quite a bit of audio compared to actual action. It's common to have a 30 minute video tutorial using less than 7 meg of space. That makes uploading a breeze!
Well, I'd like to thank everyone for the positive emails, and support. Look forward to a video tutorial 'diary' as I document the 'Method of Discovery' used to explore the inner workings of TGE and related areas of game development.
B--
torque.smdlabs.com
After quite a few evenings working on the templates and code backend for the tutorial site, everything seems to be working pretty good. The templates really help to speed up tutorial development, and it has really been a joy to be able to produce video content without any major issues. You know, once you've used video in tutorials with html and graphics, you will never be able to go back to standard html again. It's just so fast and descriptive to use video :)
Here is a brief run down of the features implemented into the website so far.
1. vBlog - A video version of a blog with built in voting, results, and forum.
2. quickClips - Short video clips that contain useful tid bits of knowledge.
3. videoPlayer/forums - A CamtasiaStudio flash video player that has been modified to stream in multiple .swf clips live and make it appear as they are all the same clip. Flash forums were then added on top of the player to provide context sensitive access to forums that relate to the actual video you are watching, as well as the entire forum that relates to the video series as a whole.
4. Forums - Standard image, url, bold, code, and quote markup along with email updates on thread changes. All integrated inside a flash player.
5. DynaContent - With the videos broken into multiple steps, and each step broken into multiple clips, it becomes quick and easy to add, or modify existing video tutorials based on user feedback from the integrated forums, etc.
6. Additional Resources - This little feature is added below some video player windows to provide additional information that relates to the current step. It is really a modified vBlog window without the voting system, but was just what was needed to provide additional content that not everyone would want to watch.
7. swf video content - After using every video format available .swf ends up out performing every other media encoder for video tutorial type content. Besides being cross platform, it has file sizes and quality that are simply incredible compared to divx, wma, etc. This is mainly because most tutorials have quite a bit of audio compared to actual action. It's common to have a 30 minute video tutorial using less than 7 meg of space. That makes uploading a breeze!
Well, I'd like to thank everyone for the positive emails, and support. Look forward to a video tutorial 'diary' as I document the 'Method of Discovery' used to explore the inner workings of TGE and related areas of game development.
B--
torque.smdlabs.com
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#2
07/30/2005 (2:55 pm)
Brandon, great job on these! I just watched the first video and downloaded Torsion good stuff ;)
#3
07/31/2005 (5:43 am)
Nice, Brandon. Your site is a cool idea and is already helpful. Once you build up a mass of tutorials and info I believe it will be one of the primary sources of information for Torque. Keep it up. :) 
#4
07/31/2005 (12:58 pm)
Very, very cool Brandon. :) 
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