We are so excitied about our big launch event next week…

We have some wonderful friends helping us out from different corners of the CipherCities Globe… Come and meet them…

Caryl Shaw, Producer and Designer for SPORE (San Francisco),

Chad Chetterton, World Designer at Funcom (Oslo), and

Helen Stuckey, curator Games Lab ACMI (Melbourne)

will be joining the CipherCities Crew (Deb Polson, Yang Wong, Sherwin Huang, Colleen Morgan, Shu-Min Heng and Dave Wallace) for the Gamers Discussion Panel at the Cipher Cities Launch on Friday Dec 5

Check the CipherCities Blog for details… EVERYONE IS WELCOME

It will be a big party at the Game On exhibition with bands, games and a cash bar.

We’ve come a long way since we opened up the site for alpha stage testing in June. In the months since then we’ve spoken to some of you and taken your feedback into consideration, all this while keeping Cipher Cities under wraps.

Come December 5th, we’ll finally be launching internationally at the Game On exhibition here in Brisbane. It’s going to be huge!

Caryl Shaw, producer of SPORE will be here giving us a hand with the launch, and there will be a competition coming, the details of which will only be revealed closer to the 5th of December. Just know that there’s going to be something really interesting in store for you.

Keep watching for updates as we move closer to the date!

In the meantime, here’s the launch page!

Yang, Colleen and I have just returned from Newcastle where we ran a workshop and competition for Electrofringe 2008.

We arrived the day before the workshop and quickly built a game for the workshop which we got participants to go out and play. For this game in particular we decided to be sneaky and hide clues and parts of the game in plain sight.

The workshop was first on the list on the first day of festival, which is usually quite a slow day. People started turning up and very quickly we had a few groups out and about playing the game we built.

I followed a group around as they searched for our chalk markings…

hunted down our hidden can of tuna (which kept getting stolen)…

and disemboweled pillows.

Thanks to everyone for turning up so early on such a hot day and running around with us!

If you want more ideas for a game of your own, visit our forum or build one of your own now!