Project:
Gal to Gal Foundation Virtual Walk website.
URL:
Synopsis:
The goal of this project is to raise money for stage 4 breast cancer patients through a virtual 'walk'. You can join the site and donate $3 (or more) to create a 'gal' that will randomly show up on the home page as part of the walk. You can also log in after you have created a gal to see her displayed as the 'champion', up front and center. Clicking on individual gals shows who created them along with a short personal message they entered.
Why it is cool (to a Flash developer):
- SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end and database. This enabled the rapid development timeline, and made the process of storing and passing data through PHP seamless. I haven't seen any other true sites built with SWX, but rather small mash-ups and widgets, so I believe this is a first for the SWX project.
- The entire site was built in about 1 1/2 weeks.
- There are over 302,400 possible combinations when creating your 'gal': 2 body types x 2 skin tones x 9 hair styles x 5 hair colors x 2 expression choices x 2 expression/lip colors x 2 eye types x 3 eye colors x 70+ outfits. Trust me, this equates to a lot of assets!
- The background changes with each day as the walk progresses across the US. To see the progress, click on the map at the bottom of the site. Note that the walk starts on Oct. 1st, so until then all you will see is the warm-up (Day 0) and race start background. Click the book at the bottom right to learn about each city as the walk progresses.
- Martha Stewart has a tv show and she recorded a segment about the site that will air on her show on October 1st. Can't say I have ever seen her show, but the national TV exposure should really test the limits of SWX.
- The foundation is expecting $1+ million in donations during the month of October, so the site was optimized to handle the heavy load. It is being hosted on three load-balanced servers to alleviate the crunch times as much as possible.
- The site is built for broadband connections, so we were able to load in higher-quality (and lots of) assets. The total overall load is about 2.3 MB and then each set of assets only get loaded when necessary.
- I contracted with Curiosity Group on this project, who's talented designers concepted and designed the site.
- A huge thanks also goes out to Jason McCoskery who jumped in to help out as the timeline kept shrinking and was instrumental in us meeting the deadline.
[Update: Check out Aral Balkan's post on the project and our use of SWX as well!]
