Sophie Sampson

You can’t buy smiles like that, you have to earn them. It was far too hot and sweaty to play an outdoor exploration game, but these guys pushed through and did it anyway. Team Fruitbat won the coveted Master of Space and Time sticker and topped the Time*Trails leaderboard at 910 points. For a game which only had a total of 1070 points available, often extremely well hidden including one 10 point spot you needed security clearance to reach, this was awesome.

We learnt masses about game making doing this, as well as (for me anyway) geeking out about London’s history. Most people played it as a collecting game, rather than doing the story trails, which was the easiest way to get into the game. Lowest possible barrier to entry always good, however fun it is developing characters and sending them off on stories.

I also learnt that a lot of early adopters (and Hide&Seek is a good place to find them) now have Android phones rather than iPhones. And that watching someone get on passworded wifi, download an app and then set up a user profile on it is like raking your fingers down a blackboard – just excruciating. I look forward to having ID chips in our wrists so all this remembering passwords becomes obsolete. Another thing – the app needed to be in the worldwide store, not just the UK Apple store, as we had to turn away people from all over the world. The weekender has an international clientele.

Final thing – people like stickers, and stickers that say Time Ninja in particular. I may have tshirts made.

pics by Michael Dales, not only programmer but also ace photographer

Tate Trumps is now launched and in the app store.

Things I learned writing for this game:

1. Colourfields are rubbish in a fight.
2. There are some extremely menacing artworks in the Tate – I didn’t give out tens lightly, but there are several.
3. Disembodied heads are useless. They can bite ankles and roll at people, but if you’re going to choose anything without a body, always go for arms.
4. There’s two or three really good high cards in each gallery. Richard Serra’s Trip Hammer is my pro tip for Battle Mode.

A couple of games I’ve been working on are nearing completion – the first is Tate Trumps, an iphone app designed to be played with the collection in Tate Modern, which is launching very soon. More about that when it does.

The second is a game about science for Channel 4, codenamed Ada. The very glamorous young lady at the top of this post is Ada herself – see a little more of her world here. What can I tell you about her? She was named for Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, she made those necklaces herself, and her scaly friend has a significant role in the game.

BBC Technology did a great article with boffin Rollo Carpenter of Existor about the chatbots he programmed for 221B. They are quite interesting to play because instead of a choice of several dialogue options to interrogate a suspect, players have free text input and have to actually evaluate what they have already seen and formulate questions on their own. The chatbots have a certain number of scripted answers, they have to, but the number of possible inputs is infinite.

Caitlin Burns at The Social Robot gave the game and associated twitter content a thorough and thoughtful review that made me smile.

The game is afoot – 221B.sh