WHATS NEW IN THE WORLD OF CHUGULU?

Does anyone else think that the word ‘chugulu’ sounds like something to do with Sugar? A ‘chugulu’ in English is called a ‘gum ball’ (full of sugar no?)…but initially I had no idea what the equivalent was in French (in fact, I never even thought about it) so the word chugulu to me as an English speaker always sounded like something to do with sugar and I thought it was a really cool name before I saw it written down or knew what it referred to in French.

Anyway, language games and name plays aside, I thought it might be nice to bring you all up-to-date on the world of Chugulu so firstly let’s start by talking about Chugulu Snake… This project is more than a year old and it is the very first ‘autoproduction’ game meaning that it wasn’t developed for a client but rather for Chugulu itself. Chugulu Snake is an example ‘advergame’ business case for advertising agencies so that they can see the capabilities of Chugulu in developing, enhancing, ameliorating and upgrading a known game play. However, there is also an additional reason it has been developed and that is because Chugulu games is a small company therefore it is essential that it is able to develop small projects itself between other missions for larger companies. Chugulu snake is based upon the well-known game snake that I remember being the very first exciting and addictive thing about having a mobile phone. However, they have made the game more modern and more personal. The game has been changed in that there are different colours to eat, an order to follow and it has been adapted so that it is mouse-controlled rather than key controlled and therefore the experience of the game is different. There are also different levels of the game therefore it makes people want to persevere in order to reach the next level. The key target is 10-15 year olds and the game is an efficient flash development with cute and nice graphics. The experience of Chugulu snake has taken a long time in terms of development because there was so much pressure to prove the ability of Chugulu in creating an effective advergame. There remains one more bug to kill but for the moment the game is the most played on the website. However, it is also the game which receives the most promotion on the site as well. This game is a ‘Chugulu’ advergame because there is the Chugulu logo in the background, this logo could essentially be replaced by the logo of any company but it wasn’t produced for this reason but rather as an example of an adapted advergame.

In other news…Chugulu games is also working on a project called Blindtest which is a musical guessing game which is multilayer and therefore much more complicated. Blindtest will eventually be bought by more than one client and the idea is to licence the game on several portals, websites and also on its own stand alone website www.blindtest.com. Also, the game StarBank continues to go well but there are still a lot of technical issues with bugs which are coming from the PrimaPress platform (the platform for the client who is producing Voici Magazine. StarBank currently has 11% of the whole Voici.fr audience using it (aiming for 20% by the end of the year). What is more amazing though is the number of pages per user. Of all the users who have an account at StarBank there is an average of just less than 20 page views compared to other parts of the site where it is 8-9 pages so almost 3 times bigger. And finally not in news about the projects from Chugulu but rather in news about the company, Chugulu is currently in the process of developing a new website. The current site is over two years old as it was created 2006 and then released in 2007 therefore Chugulu will be developing a newer web 2.0 version with social features as well as a chatroom…so no wonder people are cho cho choosing to play chu chu chugulu games!