Introducing… Snackville! The newest kid on the realtime simulation block! Actually, that doesn’t sound much fun, does it? But then again, neither did ‘realtime farm simulation’ and look how that worked out!

Snackville is the spiritual successor to the hugely successful Yoobot, which attracted over 2+ million registered players and is still going strong!

Players are set up with a virtual school to look after. They are given a little cash, a stock room full of tasty, healthy snacks, and a selection of vending machines to buy, stock and service.

Over time players earn points by stocking and selling the healthiest goods, levelling up to access better machines and even more stock! They can study the food groups, traffic light systems, keep track on sales through in-game cash reporting, keep track of trends by following the students tweets, spend money on advertising to increase their brand awareness and expand their empire with more schools and even more powerful vending machines!

And to top it all off, players earn badges for in-game achievements, from the innocently named “Sweet Enough” badge, the “Conan the Carbarian” achievement (hint – you need to sell a lot of pasta for this one!) and the ominously titled “Nearly Unobtainable”…!

The game has been developed over a 12-month period and features hundreds of stock items, all lovingly recreated in miniature virtual world form, with real-world accurate nutritional values, displayed using the traffic light system for players to study.

The game is currently being trialed in 30 schools across the UK, with students playing and competing for real-world prizes.

During this extended play-testing period, we’ve been busy optimising and perfecting the play experience, and are now even busier than ever adding yet more features, mini-games, and polish galore, in preparation for the world-wide debut this June!!

The game is still in SCHOOLS ONLY mode at the moment, but will be launching in the summer. We can’t wait to share this labour of love with you and look forward to seeing you all in Snackville real soon!!

www.snackville.org.uk

Client:

Children in the UK today are eating too much sugar, fat and salt, whilst 80% of children are not getting their 5-a-day.

Television advertising regulators recognise that children are highly vulnerable to the influences of advertising – with a ban in place on junk food being marketed during children’s programmes.

Yet ambiguous rules allow unhealthy foods and drinks to continue to be directly marketed to children online.

The British Heart Foundation asked us to help them encourage people to take action and help close this loophole.

Introducing…

The 5 Steps to Junk Food Marketing Success! Our take on the tactics most widely employed by junk food peddlers when targeting young people in the UK.

The British Heart Foundation commissioned an in-depth study of 100 junk food companies to identify and highlight the methods through which they are able to bypass current regulations and peddle their wares to Britain’s youth.

The 5 Steps to Junk Food Marketing Success takes a satirical swipe at the five most widely-used marketing tactics, with the help of our protagonist “Corporal Charlie”!

Join us on a journey of discovery and see how many real-world brands you can spot in our new site for fictitious choccy treat, “Lardbar”.

The 5 Steps to Junk Food Marketing Success

Client:

2011 saw Bloc Media expand its portfolio of leading entertainment broadcast clients – and one project in particular stands out as having been a lot of fun.

Bloc was approached by Endemol UK and tasked with producing a suite of exciting and engaging Flash games, for the latest series of their popular CBeebies pre-school cookery series I Can Cook – fronted by Katy Ashworth. The games were required to mirror the series’ educational undertones of provenance, basic cookery techniques and healthy eating.

Bloc’s response was to produce a side-scroller driving game, in which players must collect ingredients from a variety of factually accurate locations – whilst avoiding unnecessary items, which will cause Katy’s van to stall. Two further activities included a utensils game, which sees players hunting through suitcases to locate cookery items as Katy requires them, and a decoration game, which allows youngsters to lay a table complete with party paraphernalia – ready for a big feast.

What initially appeared to be a straightforward task soon saw the team (accompanied by a delightful focus-group of under 5’s) having to meticulously navigate their wide-eyed way through the BBC’s extensive, strict editorial standards and compliance guidelines. This proved a challenging and fascinating process; one which saw tears, tantrums, toys thrown from prams, and repeated echoes of “are we nearly there yet?”… and that was just the grown-ups. Producing games for pre-schoolers is a lot more demanding than one might initially think!

The production period that followed proved to be an entertaining journey of discovery through intuitive UI, careful scripting, accessibility, V/O, subtitling, exciting location-shoots and enough Football Falafels to feed an entire primary school – as the team were required to mentally regress (with a couple of exceptions) to see the world through the inquisitive eyes of the under 5’s.

Working alongside a fantastic team at Endemol and the BBC, Bloc were able to work closely with the series’ production team to ensure that the games truly feel like compelling extensions of the broadcast programme. In this manner, the I Can Cook brand provides a seamless virtuous circle experience for youngsters between on-air and online.

A small selection of sprites from the game:

Bloc’s Founder, Rick Palmer said:

“Working alongside first-class international broadcast production partners, on a project which will be enjoyed by millions of people, is always exciting and the I Can Cook production was no exception. I’m incredibly proud of my team and can’t wait to share the games with my young children.”

It was reported one week after the I Can Cook  driving game’s launch that it was the second most-played  game on the CBeebies website, for that period – a very promising start. We will keep you updated on the games’ success over the next few months.

The Bloc team relished the opportunity to collaborate with Endemol and the BBC. We are very proud of the finished suite of games -which went live on the CBeebies website in November 2011, and very much hope that children will enjoy playing them for many years to come. The good news is that they are equally as addictive for kids and big-kids alike, so, go on… you know you want to.

Click here to play

Clients:

The last 6 months have seen the Bloc team swatting up on the features and functions of vending machines, the inner workings of the school system and the nutritional values of endless foods, with nutritionalists, teachers and and a whole host of other experts. It can only mean one thing… the long awaited, highly-anticipated, and thoroughly awesome sequel to the British Heart Foundation’s Food4Thought online game Yoobot is almost upon us!

Back in 2009, The British Heart Foundation, together with Grey London, approached Bloc with a brief to create a social game for children, that would simultaneously teach them about healthy eating whilst keeping them entertained for months on end. The resulting online game, Yoobot, went on to attract over 2 million registered players, including over 50% of the UK’s 11-13 year olds (our target audience).  Yoobot was recommissioned in 2010 and Yoobot 2, ‘Yoobot vs Yoonot’, went on to both receive critical and audience acclaim, picking up a slew of awards and hundreds of thousands of new players in the process.

Earlier this year, the BHF, in preparation for this year’s Food4Thought campaign, pitched out the digital component to multiple agencies, with an open brief to either further develop Yoobot, or take an entirely different, if not complimentary, approach. Bloc took up the challenge and responded with a brand new, online social game concept that we couldn’t be more excited about.

Fortunately BHF shared in our vision and commissioned us to bring the idea to life – and we’re now in the final throws of development before the first Beta players will be able to get their hands on our latest gaming creation.

In late January, a lucky selection of some 30 schools will kick start the Beta trial, introducing their students to the game and competing against one another for a smorgasbord of prizes. All going well, we will then be able to open up registration to the rest of the world in Q2 2012 and the rest of you will finally get the chance to jump in to a whole new world of snack-based learning!

We can’t say too much about the game just yet, but we can say that it will strive to continue the great work of Yoobot, teaching children about healthy-eating in a super-fun, gaming environment. And this year one major component of the game-world will physically manifest itself in the school buildings! But more on that later…

We wish we could share more right now, but rest assured, as soon as we can, we will!

For now, stay tuned, and get ready for some tasty announcements, early next year!

Nom nom…

The long-awaited sequel to the award-winning F1 2010 game from Codemasters was released in September 2011 and Bloc helped with the launch with a fresh new website and online ad campaign featuring custom creative for many of the UK’s best gaming sites.

The new website is fully content-managed, offering full control on a local level to each country manager, and also includes Facebook, Twitter and Youtube deep integration, allowing content to be pulled in from across the web.

The online advertising creative features montage images, constructed using the F1 2011 Facebook App (also created by Bloc – please see the separate case study for this work), built into rich media banners, served via the Flashtalking platform.

With a new focus on multiplayer gaming, including co-op Championships and split-screen mode, F1 2011 will invite players to ‘Be The Driver, Live the Life, Go Compete’ with a range of innovations, improvements and enhancements on and off the track. Set to be the most enthralling season yet, the 2011 FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP features two new circuits in India and Germany, new drivers, rules, tyres as Sebastian Vettel seeks to defend his title.

Visit the new website here

Client:

July 2011 saw the launch of Bloc TV – a dedicated transmedia production arm of Bloc Media Productions. The launch followed Bloc’s acquisition of the business of Inside Media Group – a boutique production company and talent agency, with clients including The National Environment Research Council, BBC Radio One and Israeli telecommunications giant, Amdocs.

The aim of this exciting venture is to marry the outstanding digital and gaming heritage that Bloc has amassed over the last decade – with the broad production experience of Inside Media Group – who’s MD, Tim Dixon, joined Bloc as Director of Production. A bold and timely step for Bloc – as the age of the connected set rapidly approaches.

Whilst Bloc TV is a new dedicated department, Bloc has been actively producing outstanding production content for over eleven years – amassing an impressive array of over 100 awards, including two BAFTA nominations. All Bloc’s production work to date is now housed on the bloc.tv website, built in-house by our award-winning digital creatives.

Visit Bloc.tv

Working closely with the game developers, we developed a matrix of game data to interrogate YouTube’s public API in order to offer custom DiRT3 gameplay searches, thus creating DiRT3 TV.

Players of DiRT3 can choose to record their gameplay using in-game video recording options. The resulting video can then be saved direct to YouTube using the player’s YouTube account log-in details. This action saves the video with a unique and hidden developer key, into the YouTube system and available to view via the account holder’s YouTube profile.

The video is also tagged with the location, vehicle type and other game info, allowing us to re-categorise and sort video saves into the official DiRT3 TV channel.

On the front-end, PHP is used to interrogate the API and offer viewers the chance to sort and search YouTube videos, using the the same in-game options available to DiRT3 players, such as Discipline, Location and Track data.

DiRT3 TV transforms the console game into a true multi-platform entertainment experience.

Visit DiRT3 TV

Client:

We continued our role as the UI / UX digital design agency for Grey London working on their Brother printers account this year.

We were responsible for the UI / UX work on the new Brother 141 website, as well as creating the rich, animated banners, under the art direction of the Grey London creative team, as part of the European-wide 2011 campaign.

The work involved full UI / UX (user interface / user experience) design for the website as well as design and build for the online ad campaign – featuring a wealth of original character animations, created by our digital creative team.

Once the website design was complete, all artwork was delivered to Brother’s global technical agency for development and integrated into the global content-managed Brother web presence.

The online advertising work involved 5 sets of creative, each including a unique animated story relating to various features, functions and benefits of the Brother 141 printer range.

You can view the live website here

Clients:

The official F1 2011 Wall of Fame Facebook App invited F1 fans to add their Facebook profile pics to the F1 2011 poster.

Reflecting the official artwork for the game, the app dynamically creates a montage image based on the pictures uploaded.

Pictures submitted are past through a custom built backend, allowing Codemasters to approve them, prior to their use in print, and online as part of the online advertising campaign (also created by Bloc).

Over 23,000 people submitted their photos to the campaign, reaching an estimated 3 million people on Facebook.

View the app here

Client: