Terralever Silverlight 1.0 game on Miniclip.com

February 4, 2008 at 10:21 am · Filed under Games

Last year Terralever took on the challenge of creating a game with Silverlight. In doing so, our overall goal was to release something compelling that coincided with Silverlight’s public coming-out party; establishing that casual gaming was a viable usage of the Silverlight platform. That game was called Zero Gravity, and it received a warm welcome from both casual gamers and the development community.

Zombomatic Swap the conductors to connect them into a path for the electricity to flow.

Play this free game now!!

A few months ago Terralever was again approached with a Silverlight game design and developement challenge: Create a casual/twitch game for Miniclip.com utilizing Silverlight 1.0. To be clear, Silverlight has evolved. The Silverlight team has released a more advanced Silverlight plug-in which allows far more flexibility in development. That said, Miniclip wasn’t looking to leverage that version of the plug-in. The game would need to be built with for the 1.0 plug-in.

Leveraging lessons learned from Zero Gravity, a team of Terralever designers, developers, and multimedia artists produced Zombomatic 3000, an addicting puzzle game. The game was created under an incredible time constraint, but the team wasn’t willing to push the game out until they were fully satisfied with the overall user experience.

 I did not have much involvement in this project, and have to say I was surprised (in a good way) at the resulting game. The extra effort the entire team put into “getting it right” shows. Zombomatic serves as a confident marker in the casual gaming space as the first Silverlight game to appear on Miniclip.com, one of the world’s largest causal gaming web sites.

Congratulations to The Terralever Zombomatic 3000 team (alphabetical order):

• Craig Budwitz
• Chris Hill
• April Holle
• Jen Johnson
• Robert Neal
• Joel Neubeck
• Shannon Owen
• Ryan Plemons
• Casey Rayl

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This game will help end world hunger. Literally.

November 21, 2007 at 12:23 pm · Filed under On the Web, Advertising

Keeping it simple can make a difference, and Poverty.com’s sister site FreeRice is a perfect example. FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

Execution against these goals resulted in a very casual online word game which, for each correctly answered multiple-choice question, contributes 10 grains of rice to end world hunger.

In a quick session (that actually became somewhat of a contest with my wife) we contributed several hundred grains. It doesn’t sound like much, but it all adds up—between October 7th (when the program launched) and yesterday (November 20th) over 3 billion world-hunger-ending grains of rice have been racked up. Yesterday alone FreeRice donated over 218 million grains.

Wondering who is paying for all this? There are small advertisements placed on the FreeRice site. The money generated by the advertisements buys the rice. Thankfully the ads are placed on the site in a restrained manner. A ClickZ blog posting notes that Apple, American Express, Toshiba and Macy’s are among the participating advertisers.

The game itself (while incredibly simple) is fun, has an addictive quality, and provides an assessment of your progress by way of 50 game ‘levels.’ The game was designed with everyone in mind:

FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level. You then determine a more exact level for yourself as you play. When you get a word wrong, you go to an easier level. When you get three words in a row right, you go to a harder level. This one-to-three ratio is best for keeping you at the “outer fringe” of your vocabulary, where learning can take place.

There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.

Ready to test your vocabulary? Go help end world hunger! Report back with what level you made it to!

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