About

Txt-and-click is a new concept developed by Jonathan Tyreman, a final year multimedia student at The University of Huddersfield, for bringing back the slightly outdated Point-and-Click style of video games, a way of submerging the gamer further into the virtual world of the game.

The gamer plays through the video game like any other Point-and-Click style game, the difference being that at certain points throughout the game, the game will interact with the gamer’s mobile phone.

With 97% of the developed world owning mobile phones and with more and more of these having capabilities beyond the basics of calling and texting, mobile phones are now being used for; listening to music, streaming video from the Internet, sending and receiving emails, keeping friends up to date with daily activities on social network web site and gaming, to name a few. So why not have video games to interact with the gamers own mobile phone?

Txt-and-click works by installing a small Java program on the gamer’s mobile phone and then making use of the phones Internet connection to communicate to the video game via an external server. So with the gamer’s mobile phone knowing where they are in the video game at any moment, puzzles can then be launched on the phone which when completed will then let the gamer proceed with the video game. With a lot of Point-and-Click adventure games, the main character will generally have a mobile phone or PDA in their inventory to use to solve puzzles, so why not transform this mobile device from virtual to real?

To this puzzles concept a SMS gateway server can then be added so to receive real SMS text messages from key characters in the game world and with a little artificial intelligence thrown in as well have short conversations via text messages to these characters either while playing the video game or even way from it. Imagine grabbing a coffee while in a break from work and getting a text message to your phone from a character in the current adventure game that you are playing.

The future

Currently the projects has just looked at the use of mobile phones within Point-and-Click adventure games, with Revolution Software giving the go ahead for the use of characters and locations from their Broken Sword series of games to be used in prototyping. But this concept could be applied to other genres of video games with phones used in them, take Rockstars Grand Theft Auto series for an example.

More info

For more info, please you the contact page. Or for more about the person behind the idea of Txt-and-Click, take a look at www.jonathantyreman.com