The House of Lockwood.

Over the last 12 months or so I have held a number of workshops ranging from mobile app development, WordPress customisation, and effective use of social media for business. During one of the social media workshops we played a simple game using a free Ustream account and our chosen Twitter clients, something which I had seen done before rather crudely, but nevertheless was very enjoyable to play. Basically, somebody would ask questions via a webcam and ‘players’ would answer using a custom hashtag. The game was fun but technically very basic. That simple game idea has returned to my thoughts on a daily basis since then, as I knew it could be the basis of something much bigger.

I am a huge fan of Twitter, it has become part of my working life as I often correspond with, and learn, from others in my industry. It sounds clichéd but I feel a real sense of community between web creatives. The great thing about this community is that people help each other out, they cheer each other up, and sometimes it can just be comforting to know that you are not alone when working from home in a small home office.

So, after mulling over a few ideas I decided to take these twitter games a step further. The early games that we played in the social media workshop were played out via a simple free Ustream profile page and players needed to watch this window in a browser whist shifting between a twitter client or twitter.com to contribute. Obviously, this gaming mechanic had to be changed. Players also found it difficult to keep up with the conversation as the filtered results (a basic search filtering in the chosen hashtag) loaded batches of tweets rather than singular tweets in realtime as they were posted.

Having used Twitter oAuth for some iOS stuff in the past, it seemed logical to make this a Twitter web app with users logging in with Twitter credentials, a backend database would then be used to retain the session. This method allows people to post directly to the twitter stream without having to log in each time they wanted to contribute. So that’s the posting taken care of. I used a simple jQuery twitter feed script to filter out the required hashtag (this was being automatically appended to each post being submitted by the logged in player), this allowed each player to follow what was going in the game. The final part of the gaming mechanism is the live video feed – simple enough, an embedded Ustream or Livestream player would be fine. This feed will be used by the question master who basically makes a tit out of himself on a live camera.  Games can get extremely creative and I am sure there will be plenty of dressing up and live sketching.

So there we have it, the basis for a new kind of social gaming platform.

As this project is intended for web creatives, I was acutely aware that it had to be tied together nicely. The design had to be beautiful and simple to use. Working within the creative industry I am lucky enough to have a huge pool of resources on hand to help out. The good guys at @sevensix_design and @marcheatley design have been particularly generous with their time. General support for the project has been overwhelming and I have received words of encouragement and support from some of the biggest players in the industry.

The advantage of tailoring the games to the creative industries is that the audience are very targeted. With this in mind I have selected a few companies who could benefit from reaching out to this niche audience. I am aware that most of us in the web industry can spot an ad a mile away, so I was very keen to not have ads on the site. Sponsors are given the opportunity to sponsor a round of games via a simple 10 sec video ident between rounds. The offer was simple, “would you like to sponsor a round of games in exchange for some game prizes”. Amazingly, I have lined up some awesome prizes for the games from some of the most respected companies in our industry.

So what does the player get out of this?

25 minutes of fun every friday lunchtime with the chance to interact with others in the same industry, and prizes… awesome prizes. The games are free to play, I am capturing zero user data and everybody is happy!

So that is the big idea. I am just putting the final touches to the design and have started load testing servers to make sure the app will be robust enough for the demand. I have received hundreds of signups within the first 48 hours of a simple teaser page being uploaded over at www.pixelpicnics.com and am itching to get going.