I was working on this at the start of the year, but I wasn’t allowed to tell people. Muddle Earth is Children’s BBC series based on a popular book, which in turn is inspired by The Lord of the Rings. The BBC has been working with Dubit to make an online world and game for the series. You get to wonder round the world you've read about and seen in the series and get challenged to do various quests and play several smaller mini games. This was all made using Flash and can be played in a web browser.

One of the things that make the whole online world so fab is the quality of the illustration. It was a joy to be working with such good graphics and it makes the game really stand out. The finished product is wonderful and one of my friend’s kids is totally hooked on it. The game is huge, my bit is relatively small, but I think it's brilliant. Dubit brought me in to create one of the mini games that you can play to get magic points.

My game is called Spell Making. You fire magical runes of different colours onto a game board. When four or more of the same colour touch they are removed from the board and you get points. You can also play with another player to get even more points.

One of the most challenging parts for me was getting the two player version working and testing it. Messages need to be sent between the games and varied network delays caused problems early on.

Another unforeseen problem I found was that the game ended up being quite addictive and I spent far more time ‘testing’ it than I really needed to. That’s got to be a good thing in the end though.

If you want to check it out go to www.muddleearthworld.com (Update: Sadly the site is no longer live).

You might need to play for a while till you find the Spell Making game. If you find Newt he may challenge you to it, or you can go to Maud’s bar in Goblin Town and play it.