Time for a city built on chocolate

I had such a great time working with Cadbury World on projects like Chocolate Rain that I was thrilled when they, along with Newangle, asked me to work on a new interactive project for the historic Cadbury Collection.

The Story

Cadbury doesn’t just make great chocolate, Mr Cadbury also designed and built most of area surrounding his factory. He provided houses for the workers, schools, playing fields, sports clubs, and all sorts of other things to make life in Bournville a happy and healthy place to be. Cadbury world wanted to share the idea of building your own, virtual town, and see what it would be like in the future.

The Idea

I was tasked with programming a new interactive game that would take place on a giant interactive table. The game would be a lot like Sim City, where players would create housing, roads, schools, pubs, power plants, and pretty much everything else that you need to build a thriving city. But this game had a twist. Not only did you have to work against time and budget constraints, but you had to work with 3 other friends to help build the city. That means its a 4 player sim city! A very challenging thing to program indeed! But it was a lot of fun.

Each player takes a different side of the table, and must place different buildings down before the time, and the budget run out! Players must work together to make sure that everything is in the right place, as different players will be given different options, keeping the game fast paced and exciting.

Hidden Sensors

Underneath the table were hidden tiny electrostatic sensors that could detect players hands as they waved them over the table. This allowed for fast, large-scale gameplay. Simply by placing your hand on the giant map, a building would be placed under your fingertips.

The average game time lasts around 3 to 4 minutes, and once the buildings are placed in literately thousands of different configurations the camera “zooms out” and shows a realistic view of what that city would look like in 25 years time.

Will it be a thriving metropolis, or a dead end, crime ridden town? Only by working together will you get to find out.

I programmed all the software and the game mechanics, and Electrosonic provided the hardware. The concept was brought to life by Newangle, and Mark Dowsett created the various graphics and hundreds of icons that were used in the game.

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