We’ve gone and done it! CipherCities is now open for business.

Last Friday at Game On was a blast. The audience was lively (thanks guys!) and we got plenty of people to play our Game On trivia quiz.

The quiz is not just for playing at Game On. Anyone anywhere can enjoy it! If you’re not a member you can play via SMS by texting !join to 0429357459 (if you’re in Australia) or +61429357459 if you’re outside Australia.

We’ll write up a more detailed summary in time to come!

In the next 48 hours we will be publishing an all new look for CipherCities.

Above is an example of the new postcard artwork… you will soon recognise it in the new look interfaces… !!!

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 designed CipherCities to be enjoyed by everyone, so the builder is really flexible. You can pretty much stick anything you want into it (limited by characters of course).

That said, look at our example below:

Say you’re a big fan of Geocaching. Geocaching is basically seeking out caches, but with CipherCities, you can add a whole story around your caches. Just put give your players a series of waypoints that they can use to navigate from Cache to Cache.

It’s really quite easy. We’ll be putting up more tips, so keep reading!

CipherCities can help make your christmas party a lot more interesting!

Build quizzes that the whole family can play together, or scavenger hunts to keep the kids occupied.

With just a little bit of imagination, you could come up with all sorts of clever ideas for games. Give it a go! We’re sure everyone will enjoy it!

Share some of your ideas in our forum! The Cipher Crew will be more than happy to talk to you about them.

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!

Congratulations to atroche! His game Rescue Tina! is still available for play. If you’re in Newcastle Australia anytime, SMS !join 89 to 61429357459 to play his game.

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!

!join gameid

You’re now ready to go!

This is an evolving feature so feel free to discuss it in our Forums.

The Electrofringe Competition is now on! Newcastle, Oct 2-6, 2008. Check out our Competition page for details!

Electrofringe - A Festival of Electronic Arts and Culture