Florossoneri 2011

The Florossoneri, the team I play for, 2009/10 Hackney And Leyton Football League Division Four champs.

Only took five years or so to get a proper team photo…

Shambles.

Me and my XBox Avatar, not much difference between myself and virtual self…

I’m nothing like my Xbox avatar…
Got the stormtrooper helmet on the left as a present. Paid £4 for the one on the right…
The trackie top – £40 in real life, £2 on the XBox…
How is this any different to buying Street Fighter 2 for Megadrive/PS1/PS2/PS3/XBox and iPhone?

In 2010 I liked The Black Keys (discovered them through FIFA 11 – despite my mate Jack loving them for years), Best Coast and some of The Arcade Fire album. Bit of a poor year.

I finished Red Dead Redemption (didn’t like the zombie version), Assasin’s Creed 2 (nice engine, but got bored of it), Heavy Rain (Jason! Jason! Jason!). Downloaded Ilomilo and got a little freaked out by the giant spiders and the dead kid in Limbo…

I bought some Star Wars trainers.

I took too many photos with Hipstomatic…

Finally got Mad Men, devoured all four seasons in the space of a month. Who is Don Draper? Still haven’t finished Season Two of The Wire. Got well caught up in Downton Abbey and very excited about what’s going to happen this year there…

Got hooked on The Walking Dead, love that nobody is ever safe and also that no other comic book has made me gasp out loud whilst reading it. Just when you think it couldn’t get any darker it always does. Who are ‘the walking dead’? The zombies or the survivors?

Despite my part-time job as kid being on the fish counter at Tescos, I finally started liking fish, especially Monkfish and the fish finger sandwiches…

Discovered my addiction to Falafels, regularly getting lunch from King Of Falafel on Leather Lane market…

I scored a goal for The Florossoneri (after four seasons), it helped us win the Hackney & Leyton Football League Division 4 Title and made it into the paper…

Finally I managed to get my real name on a couple of web sites:
www.flavors.me/markowen
www.vimeo.com/markowen

Here are some doodles that helped shaped the minigames in the game,  some made it in to the final version, others got tweaked, others didn’t make it at all…

Playerthree created the mini games, from shaving Kevin’s tache, stealing Derek’s gnomes, dodging trams, completing families, punching Mike Baldwin in The Rovers and many more…

Link: Corrie Arcade on ITV.com

I run a football team that plays in Hackney & Leyton Football League. We’re a pub team, and we’re not a bad football team… Anyways I had a play about in my notepad at designing a badge for the team… Our nickname is The Florossoneri (we play in black and red like Milan and we play out of The Florist Arms pub), so it’s very heavily influenced from a couple of Italian teams badges… It started off as a bit of a project to teach myself Illustrator, but then with a little help from a couple of pals I turned it into a proper badge… Essentially I’m a bit of a big kid… Just without a Maths book to doodle in the back of now…

So England weren’t much cop, but during the World Cup I’ve been taking pictures of hand drawn World Cups used to advertise matches being seen in pubs. Enjoy…

Clive Tyldesley is your host as you try to master the dark art of taking a free kick and beat the World.

The aim was to make the web’s best free kick game, challenge players to ‘Bend It Better Than Beckham’ and then let them easily shout about scores across Facebook and Twitter. You can also challenge your pals to beat your score with Facebook Connect…

Game geniuses Playerthree played a blinder and built an awesome game that is pretty simple to play, kind of hard to master and has a bit of a cheeky underbelly. At the end of the day

Link: Free Kick Frenzy on ITV.com

I don’t care that they’re the equivalent of Barbie trainers for adults. I got a pair of adidas skywalkers and the force is strong in them…

Working closely with the boys’ people and their production team, it was decided it would best to create animated versions of Ant & Dec that would host the game and encourage and entertain players of the game.

The game was also ITV.com’s first use of Facebook Connect on site…

The illustrations and animation of the boys was done by the brilliant Ben Mounsey, check out the rest of his work on www.greenglasses.co.uk.

Design and build of the game was done by Ralph

Also below follow the link to play the game, you can see how the game compared to my original sketches and the final designs…

Link: Ant & Dec’s Push the Button online game

They’re the equivalent of the Barbie trainers you used to get in Woolies, but I really want a couple of pairs…