X
Innovation

Ripped from the headlines: inject current events into your phone games

Add relevance to your game by pasting a meteor or a celebrity newsmaker into the action. MultiPlay.io could help game designers earn more by selling 'news injection' rights to news agencies.
Written by Janet Fang, Contributor

British startup MultiPlay.io wants to make gameplay more current while providing new ways for designers and coders to make cash: by selling "news injection" rights to news agencies, TV stations, or newspapers. New Scientist reports.

The company’s mobile-game programing system allows you to introduce 3-D animations of news events into the action in your game. For example, you can paste a meteor explosion into a game of Space Wars.

Similarly, according to company co-founder Ashraf Samy Hegab, if we hear about a millionaire football player getting into a fight with a nightclub bouncer, lookalike avatars could engage in such a brawl as you cruise by in a driving game.

Although news injection is MultiPlay.io's main aim, you can also use the system to expand the game map, or add 3-D vehicles you designed yourself. Watch a video on how to edit and make a game.

The system creates games for Apple iOS, Google Android, and Windows Phone devices. Changes to games can be made in real time, but must be done in a computer browser. Their engine “lets you change the game on the fly, as easy as a drag-and-drop task in a browser," Hegab says, without having to know anything about servers or 3-D programming.

Adding news to make games more relevant is becoming increasingly popular. MultiPlay.io founders are hoping to interest news agencies when Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona later this month.

[Via New Scientist]

Image: MultiPlay.io

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

Editorial standards