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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After last night's fun at LUUG we thought we'd put up a summary of our talk...

The 2012 paralympics are on the horizon. As the official broadcaster, Channel 4 are gearing up to deliver a broad range of digital content to support the events, including several games. We were lucky enough to win a pitch for Boccia (pronounced 'botcha'), a ball game played in the Paralympics with rules similar to French bowls. Even luckier, our proposal to make it in Unity was approved.

Unity seemed like a good fit for three reasons. Firstly, we just knew that Boccia was a game that would work best in 3D. Secondly, the game would need a lot of ball-physics which could be handled easily with Unity’s powerful PhysX engine. And finally, we’d been looking for a project of a suitable scale to use Unity for the first time.

To ...

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Our port of Linkem went live on the App Store today! You can download it from it's website here. (Direct links: UK here, outside the UK here).

For those of you that don’t know, Linkem is one of a suite of award-winning Flash games we developed for SomethinElse last year as part of Channel 4 Education's SuperMe project. This post sums up the challenges we faced, and we hope, will provide a useful checklist of things to consider when creating an iOS app. 

The original Flash version of Linkem

The game logic

Linkem is a deceptively ‘simple’ game.

The lack of complexity on the surface of Linkem is in stark contrast to the amount of logic going on behind the scenes and the almost infinite possible combination of moves. Communicating the board logic to the player, in clear stages, through animations was one of the biggest challenges ...

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In the early stages of The End we decided that the game would consist of one main platformer which housed a secondary card-battle game. At the time we’d all been playing a lot of Puzzle Quest, and wanted to create something similar for our card game. A ‘game within a game’, simple-yet-addictive, with gradually increasing complexity.

We researched a variety of card games, including LOGOS Collectibles in Second Life, Carcossonne, and Triple Triad in Final Fantasy VIII. What we really loved about Triple Triad was the simple flipping mechanic, which seemed to fit well with our light-and-shadow theme. We experimented with our own rendition of the game, played on a hexagonal board and 14 two-sided counters.

The starting rule-set was as follows:

• Each player must place one piece per turn.
• One player plays as ‘light’ colour pieces, the other ‘dark’.
• A placed piece flips any adjacent opponent pieces that ...

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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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