A new game developed for Channel 4 and to support the upcoming ‘Bloody Foreigners‘ series. We were commissioned to produce a historically accurate yet fun game to accompany the episode on the Battle of Trafalgar, in particular to highlight the fact that the crew of the British Navy vessels at the time, were likely to be a mixture of men from all over the world.

I was in charge of the GUI and Facebook integration, and overall project structure. The project is built around a custom implementation of PureMVC, with the game engine (developed by the awesome Luke at Preloaded) making use of Red5 and Box2D.

This is the first time we’ve fully integrated Facebook into a Flash application and it was not without it’s headaches. The Facebook API is an unwieldy beast and the implementation forces a long callback chain for simple events like logging in that is liable to fall over fairly frequently. It feels very much like an unfinished product. Still, it will be interesting to compare with 1066 play stats and see if integrating FB is worth the headaches.

Check out Trafalgar – Origins here.

2 Responses to “Channel 4 – Trafalgar Origins”

  1. michael
    7 May 2010 at 11:42 pm #

    The idead of this game is great!

    However, 2 big flaws that will keep me form playing it!

    You can’t see ships when they shoot at you because the zoom is way to tight and the info blogs flip too quickly to read.

    Back to the first complant

    How can you shoot something that in off the sceen and !!!!! how can something off the screen shoot you???????? even games that have bad grrapics, no sound, and no fun follow basic rules. So, because I can’t target invisible ships, I will not be able to play your game even though I really want to.

    Also, If you were the creators of 1066 you need to do some work on that game as well.

  2. user
    12 May 2010 at 2:54 am #

    The tightness of the Zoom is an issue.