The NMSI Christmas Game

Last week I launched my first public project in my new job as a web developer for the Science Museum: The NMSI Christmas Game.

NMSI is the family of museums consisting of the Science Museum, the National Railway Museum (York), the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television, Locomotion : The National Railway Museum at Shildon and Wroughton. The web-based Christmas card is an annual tradition, commissioned by the corporate communications department. This year, I wanted to do a game.

The game is a fairly traditional puzzle game - you score points by swapping two adjacent blocks so as to make a column or row of three or more of the same coloured blocks. The blocks then disappear, with the blocks above falling down to replace them. There’s a countdown timer for each level, but exploding blocks adds seconds to the timer. Reaching the level target score sends you on to the next level.

Of course, there’s a slight museum twist in that the seven differently coloured blocks feature illustrations of seven objects from the collections of the different museums. So we have a train, a car, a jumper made from the wool of Dolly the Sheep, the original BBC clapometer, a spooky stuffed dog used to collect money on trains, and a couple of others. Between each level there’s a brief explanation of these objects that click through to a more extended description and a link to the museum that houses it. I guess this is ‘the educational bit’, although I’d like to think of it being more just a bit of added interest.

Of course, there’s also a scoreboard (most important for any timewasting internet game). Just a week after launch, the scores were way higher than anything I managed to achieve whilst testing it.

Internally, there’s a small CMS which can be used by staff members to send an HTML e-mail card to their contacts containing a christmas message and a link to the game. If you play the game first, it even sends your contacts your highest score and ‘challenges’ them to beat it.

It’s not the biggest project in the world (we’ve certainly got some bigger ones in the pipeline), but a fun thing to do for Christmas. The good people at ico design agency did the design and implementation, including those great illustrations.

Enjoy the game, and happy christmas!

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