There is more competition than ever in this space, with some truly exceptional products, so to be recognised in the ‘Best Non-Fiction App’ category is a real honour. The awards night kicked off New York’s Digital Book World conference which, through showcasing some of the best in digital publishing and thinking, was proof (if any were needed) that publishing’s best days are ahead.

This accolade joins last year’s commendation in the FutureBook Innovation Awards and, hot off the press, being voted Best Coffee Table Book App (iOS) in the 2011 Best App Ever Awards.

Download The Magic of Reality for iPad.

Read in depth the production process behind The Magic of Reality for iPad.

The wonderful people at Tate liked one of our ideas a lot, namely turning the history of modern art into a (slightly bonkers) platform game, and as of RIGHT NOW we’re delighted to announce that Race Against Time is available in iOS App Stores worldwide. Hurrah!

You play as a wily chameleon, travelling through the history of modern art in order to defeat evil Dr Greyscale’s plan to remove all the colour from the world. As you race through time from 1890 back to the present day, the background, platforms and enemies change to reflect major art movements and works from the last 121 years of modern art. And if you play the game AT the Tate you can activate ‘turbo mode’, supercharging your jump and unlocking a mighty tongue-attack for zapping baddies.

Our unfairly talented in-house post-production team have also created a bespoke soundtrack for the game, giving each decade a stylistic variant of a main theme using instruments and processing appropriate to the particular era. Phew.

It’s also free, so you don’t have to spend any monet (sorry). It will work beautifully on all iDevices running up-to-date software, but particularly shines on 4th gen iPhone and iPod Touch (retina display).

If you’re in the UK, download Race Against Time here.

Good luck!

Here’s the trailer with that mesmerising Benedict Cumberbatch voice again:

We’re delighted to have worked with Richard Dawkins on the creation of the iPad of version of his new book, “The Magic of Reality,” which features the artwork of Dave McKean. The book is about how incredible the universe is, and why we don’t need to reach for superstition to be awed or to understand our place in it.

The book contains some beautiful myths (illustrated by Dave McKean) which show how our species has explained the ‘hard-to-explain’ over the ages, from Nigerian creation myths to Greek myths about the Milky Way. These are contrasted with The Science in all its glory.

Now: there are plenty of different takes on “how to do the digital book” out there.

These range from the simple portable ePub file—leaving the choice of reader up to the technically proficient user—to the walled garden book simulators such as Kindle or the iBook Store, complete with skeuomorphic page-turning animations. There are also a few generic interactive publishing platforms, and some bespoke software that attempts to take advantage of the affordances of our devices. The most well-known of these are the iPad apps of Alice in Wonderland or Steven Fry’s “The Fry Chronicles.”

We took a fairly fundamental design-led approach to crack our version of the digital book. No surprises: based on the needs of potential users, the specific content of the book and actually understanding what a book is; how it works. That latter was the most interesting part of the project … we have many ideas awaiting their moment. More on that later.

Going back to the fundamental nature of the book led us to blaze our own trail completely, departing from anything we’ve seen. We’ve developed a platform that—we believe—is beautiful and affords more than a tree-based tome, but nevertheless remains true to the nature of printed text.

An author uses words to make things happen in your head. That’s a book. Distract from this and no matter what else you may have, no matter how cool it is, it is less than a book. We knew readability, attractive layout and aesthetic design were fundamentally important before we started.

Now: pages. The corollary of a staying true the nature of the book is taking appropriate advantage of the affordances of the iPad. It’s not made of paper. It doesn’t have pages, but a window on content with a very specific aspect ratio and resolution. Not having pages means we don’t have to chop our content up into a stack of content of equal size. Instead we projected a roll of seamless content behind the screen, which the reader can swipe to reveal new views. We chose to delimit our roll into columns of arbitrary size, each bounded with inertial ratchet point which can frame and reframe the text, retaining legibility and providing great scope for a graphic designer to play with.

Our source material—The Magic of Reality—always wanted to be more than flat text. It wanted to make myths come alive visually via Dave McKean’s drawn, painted and collaged images, memes that (by default) have pushed buttons of mystery and attraction in the human mind since the dawn of language. The book also wanted to make the magic of science incandesce in the reader’s mind through exploration and exciting our natural curiosity. This called for two very different treatments (which I’ll mention below).

For the myths we wanted to create a simple graphical style that provided a style analogous to paper pop-up books. These provide agency to the reader the same as the page-based interface of a book: there’s an analogue relationship between the turn of the page and the state of whatever is popping-up. It’s satisfying and it’s physical. We wanted the same satisfying sense of a new “page” being completed by the agency of the reader, and we fly in images on rails; images of arbitrary shape which make a completed and harmonious picture on a fully revealed view. Images can then gently animate, or animate then loop, stoking the imagination in a gentle way before they lose their focus and the reader starts to read. No hunt-and-peck for interactive gimmicks. We’ve also implemented layers, which move at different speeds and provide a pleasing sense of depth as they come into view.

The science is science. Proper science, simply and accurately illustrated either by static image or by one of a few truly interactive models; breed frogs with long legs, fire cannonballs into orbit, split light up into its constituent colours.

The difference in approach with the myths is absolute and vital to the way our book functions; the myths are stories and no more. Our job is to tell them as well as we can. The science is true, and to understand it better the reader may play with it, with his or her own hands. Our job is to make something understood; the magic of reality should do its own job, start the reader on a journey of imagination more exciting or wonderful as the myths.

A final thanks to Sophie and Dan from Random House, for being fantastic partners on the project, and obviously to Richard Dawkins for his crucial collaborative input into the project.

Better news: Because Linkem was inspired by a 2010 research paper about the psychology of happiness, you don’t need to feel guilty about playing it for hours, and hours, and hours…

Best news: thanks to the lovely folks at Channel 4 It’s FREE if you’re in the UK, and is even free for a limited time if you’re in the rest of the world (after which it’ll go up to $1.99 in the US), so there’s no excuse not to grab it now.

Download Linkem UK

Download Linkem rest-of-the-world

Linkem was commissioned by Channel 4 Education and developed by Preloaded in collaboration with Somethin’ Else and Coney.

(Bonus news: An Android version will go live in August but, until then, you can still play the original Linkem online)

The government-funded Tech City Launchpad 1 competition is designed to foster collaboration and commercial creativity in companies in the Shoreditch/Old St area, and offers matched funding of up to £100,000. In the video Director of Digital Paul Bennun describes what we’d do with the money, including Big Field Mode (which assorted Somethin’ Elsers demonstrate with Oscar-worthy acting) and details of a developer API to spark innovation. We’re also keen to host a gaming hack day where people can find out about the possibilities of the Papa Sangre engine.

If you’ve got ideas for how to make Papa Sangre even better we’d love to hear them – leave a comment on YouTube.

Somethin’ Else is truly delighted to announce we’ve been nominated for what are possibly the most prestigious gaming awards for the industry — the Develop Awards — for our ‘video game with no video’ called Papa Sangre.

Already having nabbed the International Mobile Gaming Award for “Most Innovative Game,” it was one of Apple’s Games of the Week in the App Store, as well as being officially the best reviewed game of December 2010.

These awards are particularly pleasing for us — they’re organised by lovely people, it’s not a racket to extract cash as you don’t have to pay to enter and they are judged by our peers in the game development community.

We’ll be down in Brighton at the Develop conference with our fingers crossed, especially as the competition is fairly staggering!

More about the Develop Awards 2011 here.

It’s a unique project, and we are incredibly proud of it — not just the game itself but the nature of how it came to market. We wanted to share some information about both sides of the game before release.

So: what’s it all about? If you’ve been following @VoiceOfNightjar and her sister ships on Twitter, you’ll know we’re in space. You’re going to find yourself on a dying spaceship, circling a black hole, in all kinds of trouble. The game features the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s terrifying. And it’s our second “video game with no video,” the entire experience rendered in binaural 3D sound.

Producing high-quality games is enormous fun, and it’s also risky and costly. People expect great games, but in the world of iOS, expect to pay very little for them. There was some criticism of Papa Sangre’s launch cost of $5.99 — less than a sandwich, cinema ticket or paperback book — but it took a small and independent team over a year to create an entirely new mode of gameplay, and the technology to drive it. We are dedicated to producing truly beautiful games based on ideas that only an idiot would attempt, because … well, just because, and something had to give or it would never have been made.

So we’re delighted to have worked with AMV BBDO, who enabled The Nightjar to be made by exploring an innovative funding model — effectively really smart collaboration and sponsorship. We had total freedom to make the game we wanted to make, with no artistic compromises whatsoever beyond a terrifyingly short production cycle (10 weeks!), and best of all, the game will be free to download. In return, the game is part of Wrigley’s “The 5 Experience”, which is all about sensory experiences and an obvious match for how our audiogames work.

AMV were more than just a financial partner though. They have been collaborators: the guys who first suggested setting the game in space, and responsible for the stunning graphic identity for the project too, which also fits the 5 Experience look and feel (actually, helped define it).

They also enabled Benedict Cumberbatch to board The Nightjar.

Now, we learned a huge amount about telling stories inside the Papa Platform in our first game. For this new game we wanted not just to knock that particular ball out of the mythical park, but smack the sucker into orbit (sorry). Being able to call on the talent of someone who is surely one of the UK’s best actors has brought something very rare to The Nightjar.

“Dead Space with the lights off” it is not.

It has the presence and intimacy of the very best audiobook or radio play, only the main guy is talking to you. Not to your avatar in a game. You. The pace, the depth, the relationship between story and gameplay — the performance itself — we were able to explore all these things because we knew we had a totally bad-ass actor on the team.

So why is this only available in the UK and Ireland for now? Well, primarily because this kind of true collaborative engagement between a game design studio and brand is very new. Somethin’ Else is doing everything we can to get the game in the hands of our international supporters (who have been pestering us for more Papa Sangre!) as soon as we can. We would like to thank all our international fans for their patience — we truly value your support and positivity, and the excitement many have shown over The Nightjar!

Papa Sangre, our video game with no video, was awarded the prestigious ‘Most Innovative Game‘ at the International Mobile Gaming Awards this month. Launched just before Christmas, it’s been flying off Apple’s virtual shelves and getting rave reviews – we couldn’t be happier when it was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Sadly we were too busy working on a sequel to make it to the continent (you heard it here first!) but our good friend Stefan Magdalinski kindly stepped in to accept on our behalf, whilst the celebrations back at the Palace of Bones went on until the early hours.

Raphaël Goumot, Mobile Games Director at Orange said: “As part of the jury, I saw the hundreds of entries from all over the world. The standard was incredibly high and it is hugely reassuring to know that mobile gaming, which is such an important part of the mobile industry, is in such a healthy and robust state.”

Get Papa Sangre from the App Store now for just £2.99, and go on, follow his musings on Twitter.

That sound you can hear is us, rubbing our hands.

No more to announce right now … apart from the fact it WILL have graphics!