Here’s a novel twist. A developer who makes games who, wait for it, wants to donate the proceeds to charity. How unusual I hear you cry, but how refreshing.
BeepCloud is a new company who’s mission statement is to ‘build creative new sources of revenue to help fund charities worth helping.’ Marvellous idea. It’s the brainchild of two men, one hailing from Vietnam, the other from Ukraine. They have released their first game on iOS called ‘Turtle Rock’. It’s a free download.
The game will be familiar to the myriad ‘Flappy Birds’ clones, or to anyone who grew up playing computer games in the 1980s. In fact, unless I’d known otherwise I would have thought I had been transported back to the era when music was great. Alas not. The graphics are, putting it bluntly, a little basic. The idea of the game is rather simple: by tapping on the left or right hand edges of the screen you move your yellow blob (it’s unclear what it’s supposed to be) and avoid crashing it into other, similarly ambiguous blobs. Very simple, very frustrating, and very boring.
The way it works is that the in-game ads provide revenue for the charities supported. Although the game is utterly awful, the developers should be congratulated and encouraged, and it’s worth downloading and playing just to raise a bit of money. I found the best way to satisfy my conscience was to start the game whilst doing something else and let it run without even looking at it. Quite how much my three minutes of attention raised is anyone’s guess, but I certainly feel like I have done a good deed for the day.