Tweet Riot #Egypt is live
A week after the Global Game Jam, Tweet Riot is back. Some tweaks were made during the week, and everyone can now play TWEET RIOT.
In Tweet Riot, you help Twitter demonstrators get rid of the political police that infiltrated them. You read real tweets with the hashtag #egypt to find and shoot the fake tweets from the political police. But be careful, if you shoot a real tweet-demonstrator, you lose points. If you want to earn these points back, you have to retweet the tweet-demonstrator you just mistakenly shot.
In terms of concept, the gameplay is similar to Tweet Uranus, but we have returned to the original inspiration, ie the pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt. It's very satisfying to have come full circle on this, as shooting aliens among tweet demonstrators from the Bieber and Tokio Hotel Fan crowd, though fun, didn't carry meaning. You can of course still play Tweet Uranus - and commit social suicide by retweeting Bieber related stuff to your followers.
What amazes me though is the process by which we came to Tweet Riot. Banging our heads for hours at the GGJ trying to make Tweet Riot fun to play was a failure, while taking a real step back eventually brought us to the point when Egypt could be just plugged right back into the concept. Now, we have a good user experience, tweets are good and attention-grabbing, so that cops tend to slip through more. It's balanced, it's fun, and it has a message, something I had come to think was impossible a week ago. Sleeplessness probably didn't help much.
Serge Versille