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 ...

Read more

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 ...

Read more

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 ...

Read more

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.

Read more

At The Story 2012, Tom and I presented The End, and the challenges of designing a game about death. In preparing for that presentation we uncovered some really interesting stats from the game's players, so we thought we'd publish them all here. 

We've blogged lots about this game, so to avoid repeating ourselves, anyone who is unfamiliar with the game is advised to read the introductory blog post or even the game's casestudy. 

For those that know, at the heart of the game is the 'death dial' - the philosophy mechanic which reads our players and gets them closer to the game's content. As the player progresses through the game world, they are asked questions which require a binary response, and it is these answers that shift our players around the death dial's polar axis. Moving between four thought-quadrants (Truth Teller, Mystic, Awakener and Crusader ...

Read more