Chronic Logic’s award winning game, Bridge Construction Set, is officially for sale in the Ubuntu Software Center. In Bridge Construction Set you build a bridge that hopefully does not break, however having a train plunge into the depths below may be fun for some!

You must use your physics knowledge to build a bridge then test your skills by running a test vehicle over the bridge. If it makes it across you know you have constructed a good bridge. With 40 unique levels one can build suspension bridges, draw bridges, and others with many different types of materials. Bridge Construction Set allows you to test your creation with 15 different test vehicles.

Check out the Bridge Construction Set trailer:

Now go buy it from the Software Center today!

Have a game or application you want to host on Ubuntu? Head over to the Developer pages to see how to add your creation! Contact John Pugh (john dot pugh at canonical dot com) for details on selling your application on the Ubuntu Software Center.

The newest addition to the Ubuntu Software Center is Puzzle Moppet from Garnet Games. The poor little Moppet is lost and all alone in the wilderness. How are you going to help it get out? This interesting game requires you to solve puzzles to help Moppet find it’s way. Puzzle Moppet is a challenging 3D puzzle game featuring a diminutive and apparently mute creature who is lost in a mysterious floating landscape.

With brain melting puzzles you have to guide the Moppet through the vast and eternal void of space, navigating ice blocks, exploding blocks, balloons, elevators and more. Test your brain with over 30 true 3D puzzles ranging from the delightfully docile to the devilishly devious.

The sun blooms as the clouds slowly roll by, a rising sea breeze howls softly as it roams the void. Immerse yourself in the lonely tranquillity of this mysterious other world.

Do you have what it takes to save the Moppet?

Check out the trailer:

Now go buy and install Puzzle Moppet on your Ubuntu desktop!

Save The Moppet!

Braid is the newest addition to the Ubuntu Software Center. Braid is a really cool puzzle game where the player manipulates the flow of time to solve puzzles. Every puzzle in the game is unique. The puzzles give your mind a workout. The player is able to alter reality in the form of manipulation of time which is ingenious. Braid has received numerous accolades and is available on a number of platforms and installable from the Ubuntu Software Center directly.

Take a look at the Braid website and watch the trailer below! Then use this link to install it on your system and do provide a review once you’ve played it a bit!

Keep watching…more to come!

Last week saw the culmination of one of the UK’s most popular TV shows – Britain’s Got Talent. The way in which this show over five series has captured the attention of the British public is quite incredible, with the majority of popular media outlets dedicating significant space to the contestants, the judges, rumours about the format and speculation about who would win.

Such coverage and excitement means that Britain’s Got Talent drives audience and voter engagement to levels that politicians must dream about. Of course there are many ways that the show makes sure it gets our attention, not least of which is having hours of live coverage on prime time television, but, the talented team behind the show are also using many techniques to encourage deeper engagement for a modern audience.

Take for example the Buzz Off game. This is a game with which viewers can play along while watching the show to ‘buzz’ the acts that they don’t like using a mobile or web-based application. The buzzes are stored with a running total kept and shown per act on the website, so that the audience goes from being an passive viewer to an active participant in the show. The Buzz Off game is developed by Livetalkback for the Britain’s Got Talent Team and recently Malcolm Box, CTO of Livetalkback explained to a group of London big data enthusiasts some of the challenges in building and designing an application that is required to scale to almost Facebook like proportions for a short period of time. The full presentation is below, but for convenience some of the key points are:

• The volume of traffic being handled by the Buzz application during a two hour live show is equivalent to 130 billion requests per month – excluding Google, this would put the application as approximately the 2nd largest website in the world behind Facebook.
• To manage this scale, the application is based on Ubuntu Server, MySQL and Cassandra all hosted in the Amazon Public Cloud
• The service uses hundreds of instances that must be brought online very quickly as additional capacity is required and then released as the load declines after the show.

Malcolm and the team at Livetalkback have done an incredible job to put this together in a short space of time and have it work reliably throughout this year’s programme. A cloud-based approach made perfect sense for an application with such specific scaling requirements, and it was vital that the application scaled not only technically but financially as well. This is where Ubuntu on Amazon really proved its worth – customers pay for the resources they use and there are no license fees or royalties to worry about when bringing up new instances. It is the type of efficient driving of engagement that once again Government departments must be in awe of.

Which brings us onto the Cabinet Office. The UK Government is looking for ways to provide cost effective online systems that drive audience engagement. Recently there have been signs that there has been progress  through the Alpha.gov.uk project led by Martha Lane Fox. Alpha.gov.uk is a prototype site that demonstrates how digital services could be delivered more effectively and simply to users through the use of open, agile and cheaper digital technologies. It is only a prototype at the moment but it is significant in that it has been quickly put together and delivers exactly what it is supposed to do in a cost effective way. So how did they do it? Well they decided on a similar architecture to Livetalkback – Open source software based on Ubuntu Server in a public cloud. Full details of the technology used is at:

http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/colophon

British tax payers will take heart form the knowledge that someone in the Cabinet Office is looking at this and hopefully wondering why more Government services can’t be delivered like this. When it comes to engaging an audience and encouraging interaction in a cost effective way, Britain’s Got Talent and the Cabinet Office now have more in common than you’d think.

We added Family Farm to the Software Center last week and I took a few hours (of non-work time!) to have a look at it. Summary is that it’s a fun simulation game for the whole family where your job is to build up your farm.

You start with a small farm and two workers, who carry out all the tasks on the farm. For each season there’s various things you need to accomplish from looking after the animals, clearing land, planting, fishing and harvesting. At the end of the season you sell all your produce and see if you’ve accomplished the goals that were set at the start.

You also have to keep the workers happy by feeding them and making your farm look pretty – all of which costs money. As you progress through the game the number of workers, size of your farm and number of goals you have to achieve increases.

This trailer is a good overview:

Hammerware have done a great job of making the game easy to pick-up and the stories element quickly draws you into trying to improve the farm! If you’re looking for a fun simulation game, or something that the whole family can enjoy together then check out Family Farm.

Family Farm is available through the Ubuntu Software Center, just follow this link. As the game uses 3D Ubuntu users should check if their video drivers are compatible and test first with the demo. If you buy it please review it for the developers in the Software Center, and leave a comment below I’d love to hear what you thought.