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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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 ...

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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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