Following Disney Fairies: Lost & Found's Christmas release, we thought we’d share how we went about developing it in Unity.

Creating a fun game for young teenaged girls can be serious business. It's hard not to fall into the usual tropes especially when working with a big brand, to a specific set of criteria. The hidden-object genre seemed really applicable to the brief. It was challenging but not stressful, could be played cooperatively with friends and family and they makes use of rich environment artwork. For us, it was also a known technical challenge which felt very important given the short 3 month development timeline. 

Disney liked the idea, and so we began our education in the Hidden Object genre. 

The feature set

The feature set borrows from many of our favourites in the genre, whilst being careful to retain the uniqueness of the proposition. The final features ...

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Following up on our recent LUUG talk, we wanted to commit SuperSight’s art approach to our blog. Check out the trailer below to see the game in action.

How do we take a concept from pencil sketch to animated 3D model? The ambition and scope of concept art can sometimes get lost in the production of final assets, so this post focuses on how we kept the art of SuperSight as close to the original vision as possible.

Putting pen to paper

We tend to create concept art no holds barred, the idea is to formulate an ambitious vision that we then try to realise as closely as possible with the final art assets. The initial concept art will often set and inform colour palettes, character silhouettes and most importantly begin to give a game it’s own voice. 

This initial image shows a direction where we were leaning ...

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Last week our tech team managed to take some time out and attend Unite, the annual developer conference for those working with Unity, in Amsterdam. Over the past year Unity has become an increasingly important part of our technical strategy - we're working on multiple cross-platform Unity titles at the moment - and the huge turnout and enthusiastic atmosphere at Unite showed we're not alone in that respect.

As well as the excellent talks and presentations - more on our favourites later - we were really impressed with the number of Unity staff in attendance and how available and helpful they were. Whether it was an informal chat over coffee or a scheduled hands-on session to help with specific technical questions, there always seemed to be someone at hand. It was a nice touch from a company who seem genuinely interested in maintaining good relations with their developer community.

If you're ...

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Last week, Team Preloaded headed down for our annual seaside trip to Brighton for the 2012 Develop Conference. It was a particularly big year for us this time round as we were very proudly to be featured on the agenda quite heavily!

Preloaded Highlights

Session: "Wellcome Trust Workshop: How Do You Make Science, Play?" 
Danny Birchall, Iain Dodgeon and Martha Henson (Wellcome Trust), Phil Stuart (Preloaded), Tom Rawlings (Auroch Digital)

We were very excited to be asked by the Wellcome Trust to help run a number of game design workshops, explaining how close collaboration between games makers and content specialists can produce great games, such as our recent Wellcome collaboration - Axon.

Session: "More Than Just Fun. Designing Games With Purpose" 
Phil Stuart (Preloaded)
Phil's session covered some of the key principals we use when creating games around specific content goals. If you didn't make it to his session ...

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We’ve talked a lot about making games that are about something but with Axon, our recent game for the Wellcome Collection, we hope to have gone some way to making a game that’s not only about science, but for science too!

Before we explain in detail here’s a little bit of background about the game and its results. The game went live on Wellcome servers on Thursday the 19th March. It rolled on Kongregate, MiniClip and Newgrounds on 22nd March, followed by ArmourGames on 26th March. 

The game hit 3 major peaks:

1. On Saturday 24th March it gained traction (predominantly on Kongregate) with 159,793 games plays. 
2. On Tuesday 27th March the game appeared on ArmorGames pushing total plays to 248,998.
3. On Thursday 29th March Axon was given badges on Kongregate, resulting in homepage promotion and a total of 361,880 plays. 

To date, Friday 18th ...

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