Setgo

29th June 2010

Facebook, Hi5, Standalone

Sadly, as is the fate of a browser based game that was created to act as a demonstration for the company’s analytics software, nothing really exists of this game any more. Castaways was created by a start up company called Setgo, which also no longer exists.

Created using Java for the gameplay and HTML & CSS for the look it was a typical style of Facebook game at the time. Players would follow a story about being a castaway, where they’d have to collect items to complete tasks that took anything from minutes to hours to days for the progress bar to fill up. There were daily prizes for continued play and you were able to add your Facebook friends to compare player level against. We eventually moved the game to the competing social media platform Hi5 and also to a standalone site.

I was tasked with created the daily challenge minigame, friends section and other front end facing gameplay. A lot of this position was about implementing UI and padding out gameplay.

Alas, Castaways was not a commercial success and the already small company downsized in order to concentrate on the creation of their platform agnostic analytics software.