We had good news from the Flash Developer Challenge yesterday as our new location based game Big Game Huntr took the innovation prize out of 150 entries worldwide. I am particularly pleased to get the innovation prize as I believe the game represents a new generation of mobile gaming designed specifically for the medium and harnessing player creativity in an exciting new direction. I would also acknowledge the hard work of the two students involved Mark Lochrie and Kate Lund in getting it to this point. We are hoping to enter Open Beta testing soon and I look forward to offering it to the community here as first testers.

I have been working on the Mobile Magic Monstervision Machine to improve the functionality and introduce better game play and the following images are screenshots captured during the first full scale trial. I added the holding trap (in a homage to Ghostbusters) to indicate your progress during the game.  When a particular monster has been captured its position is indicated on the map and the time of capture indicated in the holding trap inventory. To aid exploration I introduced a hot, warm, cold metaphor indicated on the Monstervision Machine by snowflake, sun, and flame icons which are triggered by measuring your distance from a  monster (in this trial warm was 30m and hot 20m) which seems to work really well with the players thus far. As an added touch when the Monstervision Machine is hot the phone vibrates and shouts MONSTER which is fun. Finally rather than have a GPS bar I have indicated this as ‘Captoplasm’  as it indicates the importance of having a signal but doesn’t detract from the game concept.

Next week we intend to test the game in London with more REAL people and new user generated monsters .

I have been working on an interesting take on a location based game recently which incorporates user generated content in the form of sketches of monsters. It’s in collaboration with my friend and artist Andrew Wilson who ran a workshop at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where people could sketch there idea of what the London’s monsters might look like.  I met up with Andrew a few of weeks ago at Futuresonic and we hatched a plan to turn the sketches into a mobile location based game called Free London's Monsters to be played around the actual locations where the monsters were envisaged. I had a small team of students (Frank, Laura, Richard, Rebecca, and Tabona) put together a first prototype using some bits of code I had lying around which uses the phone camera as the Magic Monstervision Machine (that’s an S60 phone to the uninitiated) to capture monsters when the players enter their lair. It’s worth noting this was done in less than two weeks with no previous experience of PyS60. Here’s a short video by the students of the prototype in action.

Iam am currently extending the application to include a map, game-time, and capture lists and a few other fun features but the basic functionality will be as shown. We are planning to test the first prototype at the Sandpit event at the end of June (ehich are free and if you in London around RCA pop along) before we hopefully present the more elaborate version at this year’s Hide and Seek festival which introduces social games and playful experiences from 31st July to 2nd August at the Southbank Centre, London.

I think the idea of incorporating the user generated content within the game is very interesting and is likely to greatly enhance the user experience. This concept also forms the basis of another location based game I am working on as I think UGC can be used to great effect in location based games

It’s a sad day for me as the Widsets platform is officially closed which means that the many innovative widgets we produced will suffer the same sad demise. In particular the loss of Bombus and Boom! which finish with 1.5 million users.  I would like to say both thanks to everyone who played the game but also pay a large tribute to the team who developed Widsets which I think was a wonderful piece of work.

We did consider changing the widgets to J2ME an put them on OVI but the requirement to have J2ME applications Java verified (not sure of logic behind this)makes it to costly for us to consider so Bombus and Boom! RIP.