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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We've been talking a lot about multi-platform gaming and Unity, so we're thrilled to announce the first one out of the blocks is SuperSight. The game forms part of the ongoing brilliance that is SuperMe -  the award winning content system devised by Somethin' Else and is commissioned by Channel 4 Education.

As with the previous SuperMe games, this project is a close collaboration with Somethin' Else and Coney, making sure what we make is pitch-perfect in terms of content, finely tuned to the audience and dovetailed with the project's other activities. I think we'd all agree it's feeling pretty darn good so far!

The game is being built in Unity, and will be released simultaneously on iOS, Android and browsers early August. Given that’s months away, I thought I'd give a little introduction to the game design and art. 

The Journey

SuperSight is ...

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Here are the slides from my GDC 2012 talk:

Huge thanks to the Games for Change team for asking us along - you can check their write-up of the summit here. For those lucky enough to have access to the awesomeness that is the GDC Vault you can also see a video-cast here.

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Over the past 6 months we’ve been busy making our first Facebook-only game. It's called FootFall.

The game lets a player run their own shoe shop with an emphasis on stock management and window design. It's a C4 Education project for teens, and focusses on two of their core 2011 commissioning themes; entrepreneurship and financial literacy.

The game sets out to demonstrate the social, environmental and financial impact of decisions made when running a business, but most importantly that running a profitable business doesn't mean running an evil empire. We've been calling it a socially-minded social game, which we very much like the sound of!

The anatomy of a social game

Most social games have an economy which balances play, and a daily loop which encourages specific interactions within the game. When you get the relationship between the two just right, you have control of ...

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