We make fun games, with a purpose. They are often a direct response to a brief or commissioning opportunity, linked to learning or communication objectives and targeted to specific audiences. If you think that sounds boring, you are wrong! It’s awesome.

One of my all time design heroes Raph Koster tweeted this earlier in the year:

I love this quote. Its now my favourite way to describe what WE do - 'games that are about something'.

A fair proportion of our games are commissioned by broadcasters, educators and not-for-profit organisations, such as the BBC, Turner, Channel 4, Wellcome Trust, Tate and the Science Museum. The 'about' in these games is the history, the science, the learning message - essentially the communication objective of the project - and all our games, start with it.

This post captures some thoughts on our approach to creating games that fuse a project's objectives into the ...

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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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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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