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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Over the last few months we’ve been working with Tate Kids and a clever neuroscientist on a very exciting project, Wondermind. This project infuses the themes within Lewis Caroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, art and the amazing way the brains works. We have created a collection of awesome games all about the mind and the way it works and I’m going to give you a little peek at the artwork for Wondermind. 

I’m Catherine and my job at Preloaded is to draw things and make them move. I created all the art and animations for Wondermind, which shaped the way the game looks and feels.

As soon as I knew I would be working on a game based on Alice in Wonderland, I instantly felt inspired. If anything could spark the imagination, Lewis Carroll's story (full of bizarre lands, fantastical characters and Rabbit holes) would certainly ...

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The End is taking shape - Alpha was delivered last week and for the first time we're beginning to see all the game elements (Platformer, Death Cards and Thinker profile) as one complete experience - it's looking real nice.

We've also been busy telling people about it - I showed some screenshots at Winter World of Love, Paul talked about it in a recent Observer article and Edge kindly covered it in their recent feature on new game studios. It's seems to be going down really well and as a result lots of people have been asking to play it. To buy some time until the private Beta release I thought I'd post some of the game art we've lovingly crafting over the past few months.

The chosen one

The mighty Luke Pearson won the paid pitch to do the game art in mid 2010. We don ...

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Every project allows us to build on previous experience and try out new things. Trafalgar Origins was no exception, giving us the opportunity to evolve the multiplayer system used in 1066 as well as take our first big step into the muddy world of Facebook Connect.

Facebook integration was an integral part of Trafalgar Origins but was developed as a separate set of components that could be used by other Channel 4 indies in future commissions. We wanted to demonstrate by example, best practice with the heady ambition of it ultimately unifying how future Channel 4 projects integrate with Facebook.

This blog post is all about the learning from this process and the reasons behind the specific implementation of their new system.

Socialising the game design

Our biggest inspiration for single-player socially connected gaming was Trials HD. Being a firm studio favourite, it motivates play by showing your score in ...

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