Following my work with Sean Oxspring from Hitpoint Games on Natural Election which was hosted by the Nottingham Video Game Arcade (NVA). The NVA commissioned Hitpoint Games to try make #RobinHoodDay more engaging via social media.

The Idea

Our idea was to try and fire an arrow around the world, from Sherwood and Back Again.

Using the same idea as Natural Election players would be able to watch the progress of the arrow from inside the NVA or live from a stream on Twitch.

Any tweet using the hashtag #RobinHoodDay would be included and added to the total number of tweets. The more of which there were, the further the arrow would fly.

The Implementation

The game would scan Twitter periodically for #RobinHoodDay tweets and add them to a waiting list. These tweets would appear in the game view around the giant bow and arrow, using Twitter avatars as the faces for the characters.

The arrow would then fire every five minutes, hopefully making it a little further each time!

The Result

It took around 9 hours but we managed to fire the arrow around the world!

You can read more about Sherwood and Back Again and #RobinHoodDay on the School of Computer Science (SoCS) blog or Experience Nottinghamshire.