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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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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