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!

“A Ken Loach Soap-Opera, Improvised by Robots.”

We’ve launched our next project for Channel 4 Education. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a decade, but it has taken some serious planetary alignment to make real. And because of the the brains making it, it’s way better than I ever thought possible. So we’re pretty excited.

We’re telling stories—primarily on linear video—using a video game engine (The Sims™ 3).  It’s a tale of four housemates and their ups and downs; their ambitions and their dreams.

So, machinima, right?

Wrong.

Machinima sees people using game engines as cinema soundstages. You write the script, you make a storyboard showing how every shot will be positioned, you position the actors and cameras and you keep shooting until you’ve got the footage you need. It’s using game characters as puppets, mastered by humans.

We are doing something completely different. Something fitting the driving spirit Will Wright built into his pioneering simulation games—emergence.

There’s no plot in a simulation game; or rather, no pre-planned story. Instead, dramatic gameplay emerges from the complex interactions between the algorithmic expressions of personalities, ambitions, and human foibles. It’s how life works. The game we’re using to tell stories is a version of life tuned to create simulated drama.

A game designer of sensitivity and talent—like Robin Burkinshaw—can carefully sculpt characters and situations and let them run, interpreting their actions in a beautiful and human way. This is what he did in the extraordinarily moving Alice and Kev (the story of two homeless people in a video game) and we’re delighted he’s doing the same on our new project.

Our project is nothing less than the first ever drama improvised by robots.

We’ve cast our characters carefully, given them very detailed character notes, ambitions and motivations and created a dramatic context. Now we’ll let them live their parts for six weeks. It’s more like Ken Loach directing virtual actors.

In keeping with the emergent nature of the drama we are also exploring a Darwinian approach to storytelling. From the same starting point every day we can run different versions of reality on different machines, each of which will mutate in different ways. The one showing the best adaptation to our dramatic needs is deemed most fit to become tomorrow’s starting point—although we sadly won’t be doing that this time round!

It’s whole new way of telling stories and we’ve had to invent many new methods of production for a different kind of drama; there are elements of ‘constructed reality’ and observational documentary as well as a sensitivity to the affordances of software as a collaborative partner. There are entirely different job positions we’re filling and some interesting technical hurdles to surmount (for example, we’ll need over 130TB of storage space at the project’s peak — which is a lot).

For the script-writing part of the project, we’ve drawn inspiration from The Magic Roundabout. When the BBC bought Serge Danot’s series back in the 1960′s they realised too late they had only bought the pictures—not the scripts. So Eric Thompson looked at the pictures and made up new ones. We have the advantage of Robin being the world’s best “AI Whisperer,” who will be interpreting our characters actions. This way we can make sure what goes to the final edit and the script will be fantastic drama—even though the plot lines are emergent. It worked beautifully in the pilot anyway! [edit: it's working beautifully in the real thing — check the link below!]

The final, glorious, piece here is that the project has a positive payload: mindfulness. The series was created as part of our continuing work exploring teaching techniques of resilience for teens.

The SuperMes forms a part of our SuperMe content system for Channel 4 education, commissioned by Jo Twist. Inspired by Alice and Kev by Robin Burkinshaw, it was devised by myself (Paul Bennun) and Jo Roach. Sean Coleman is producing the series and Ian Sharpe from Somethin’ Else is the exec.

Find out more at at http://facebook.com/playsuperme

Nightmare high is a new kind of game for Channel 4.

There’s always plenty of digital chatter about development of new formats for a new media landscape and the progress of 360 commissioning—but few people who engage in that conversation have the opportunity to work on ambitious projects that move beyond the limitations of brand-owners’ vision and some broadcasters’ risk-averse behaviour. The vision of the commissioning team over at Channel 4 coupled with the company-wide support of Somethin’ Else has allowed me to launch some wonderful products over the last three years, but Nightmare High builds on all of those to be the one I’m most proud of.

Working across brilliantly cutting-edge projects like Routes, SuperMe and E4′s Misfits I was able to gain invaluable experience which all helped to make Nightmare High a cohesive multimedia game which is fun to play but most importantly one that strikes the balance between education and entertainment in a way that resonates with tweens. An 11-year-old can’t play this game without laughing out loud but they also can’t fail to miss the core learning: big changes are exciting and scary, and there are things you can do to make them easier and to develop into a more resilient young person.

Nightmare High is a story-based web game. You, the player, just joined a new school and on your first day everything has gone terribly, horribly wrong. You’ve got no mates, you screw up in class, you sit in the wrong seat and by lunchtime even your sister is blanking you. Worse still, your pathetic meltdown in Expressive Arts ends up on YouTube.  At the end of your first day you find yourself sucked into a comic-book unreality where everything is upside-down and back-to-front. Reality has imploded and it’s your fault.

And so you enter a fantasy school full of zombie teachers, skyrockets and a terrifying darkness that creeps ever closer to your classroom. The only safe place is the infamous Secret Toilet: where there is a never-ending supply of bogroll and you don’t have to fear somebody peeping over the top of the cubicle. Your job is to fix up reality with the help of your sidekick, D’Mentor, and get home in time for tea. As you explore the school you stumble across various celebrities: in the basement, in the bike sheds and cooking up jam lasagna in the canteen; as they share memories of their school days your score improves, your friendships improve and you begin to understand more about how people really work underneath the labels (bully, popular, geek and so on) and how to make good friends.

The story is told with many different devices and media, and those were selected to work for the audience and story, and obviously with one eye on the budget. Dramatic video, minigames, applications which reflect the players real life skills, celebrity videos and comic strips all feature. It was a challenge to make an hour of fictional gameplay on the budget of a couple of TV programmes. After all, if this were a TV drama it would have cost millions, so our approach had to be adaptive. The system design incorporates collectibles which relate directly to the learning, known as your FIXT score — Friendship, Independence, X-Ray and Transformation. Those collectibles relate very directly to resilience learnings more commonly known to academics as support networks, personal agency, reflection and adaptability.

The drama was confined to the real world (a multi-location epilogue and prologue, and studio-based shorts which feature your friend D’Mentor). Without the option of an animated 3D interface to navigate the school we opted for a static clickable illustration for the main interface (quick to load, easy to use) which slowly fills up with content. We also used interactive comic strips to sew together pieces of narrative, which have already proved very popular among the young game testers.

What I’m most proud of is the seamless movement through multiple content types as players navigate through the thirteen episodes. Nothing feels forced, not the ‘type’ of content and certainly not the educational content. The learning is integrated into the scripts and the fabric of the interface. Your transition journey is part of your story as communicated by your in-game friends, and players are given the option to explore that as much or as little as they like.

As with SuperMe before it, the critical decisions that formed this project came from our work with schools in the project definition phase. Taking a story-based approach, choosing a fantastical and silly world and exposing the reasons why kids label each other so quickly were all inspired by the work that Tassos Stevens of Coney led with our six partner schools. By spending so much time focussed on our potential players we got the chance to talk to educators and experts working in the area of transition and it became clear that now more than ever teachers need this kind of resource, as transition-focussed support staff become harder to provide in-school. We were able to take initiatives that were being used in schools and write those into our game (for example, D’Mentor was inspired by the buddy system which many secondary schools use for incoming students). In addition we embedded core resilience strategies, like getting the players to write a letter back to themselves in order to accurately reflect on what they’d learned by playing. The great thing about this is that we’re also able to use that real advice for incoming players and make it part of the story.

So we really hope you enjoy the game, and that you play it to the end. We welcome and invite feedback — send it here. Finally, I’d like to thank a few people without whom the team wouldn’t have had the opportunity to make such a great piece of work: Alice Taylor, Matt Locke, Jo Twist & Gemma Brady at (or previously at) Channel Four, Poppy Nash at the University of York, Sam Hawkins at Bancrofts School, Paul Bennun at Somethin’ Else and all of our brilliant game testers. And of course hats off to a team who went the extra mile at every step. Thank you!

Nightmare High lives at www.nightmarehigh.com

The game is designed to help 10-13 year olds as they move up to big school, and with life transitions in general.  Unfortunately for the players the game starts seconds before reality explodes and they end up in the worst type of big school imaginable. Their mission is to fix reality by playing through fourteen episodes of brilliant chaos, with the help of some fanciful friends and terrifying teachers (thanks to @neillieb and Neil Richards, the script and story-writers).

Directed and Executive Produced by Jo “The” Roach, the character design and illustration style was conceived by Ben Steers at Fiasco Design, and further developed by Playerthree. The game launches in September 2011, just in time for the new school year.

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)

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.

We’re rather happy.

The project in question is a content system we built for Channel 4 — it brings together games, linear video, text and interactive playthings together within a game framework. Its objective is to show teens how much power they have over their own resilience.

There’s a lot more information about this great project right about here …

… or go and have a play at www.playsuperme.com!

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!

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

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

We’re not done yet — more games using the Papa Sangre engine are planned, and Somethin’ Else needs more people to join the team.

Specifically, we’re after a a junior-ish producer to manage parts of our development process. You’ll know how software is made; you’ll love games (and ideally have some experience making them). You’ll be technical AND creative, with an eye for detail and not be fazed by hard deadlines.

You’ll have an innate knack for working with technologists and designers (sound, graphics, text and so on). You’ll hate bugs like we hate bugs.

Is that you?

Email Paul Bennun.