Digg Design, a subsidiary of Ottawa-based production and new media facility General Assembly, is bustling with a full slate of consumer multimedia projects in development for 1996/97.

Digg’s previous cd-rom projects had consisted of sponsored titles for clients like Stentor and cd-rom games for educational institutions, but the three-year-old company is now looking to develop commercial projects and eventually cd-rom ‘interactive documentaries.’

Digg’s first project is a World Wide Web mystery game called Hotel Geneva. The game will feature a new mystery each month with participants logging on daily for clues, which will be presented in different formats, like video clips taken from security cameras, segments of wiretaps or printed documents.

Mark Ury, head of development at Digg, says the game is playable with normal Internet connections. ‘We’re not asking people to download huge files,’ he says. ‘The game is interesting because you’re getting a number of different media elements together and trying to figure out how they connect.’

Development costs for the game are estimated at about $100,000 per episode and the prototype is expected to be completed in the spring.

Ury says the plan is to have media companies buy the game and use it to promote their own businesses as well as rent out advertising which is embedded in the game. The game is free to players, but Ury says Digg is looking at different user pay scenarios such as optional fees for players to acquire additional game clues.

Digg has a core of six staff working on multimedia projects and is working on the game with Ottawa writing firm Stiff Sentences. Ury says the concept has drawn interest from a number of large media companies, which are being pitched to sponsor the game and the prizes offered to online sleuths who unravel the skullduggery.

Digg’s first commercial cd title, tentatively titled Monster Making Mansion, is aimed at five- to nine-year-olds, and allows children to create an array of monstrous characters and insert them into various scenarios. The cd, which will cost about $400,000 to develop, is a collaboration of Digg and Ottawa animation company KLA Visual Productions. It is expected to be completed in the fall of this year.

A Canadian history title is also being undertaken with Ottawa production company tvlt and documentary producer Rob McBride. Programmer Rob Corrigan used Macromedia Director, an authoring tool, and Macromedia’s Sound Edit 16 to create the titles. Most of the development work is done on a Power Mac with a Radius video vision card for capturing digital video and still grabs, with some components completed in Windows. Corrigan says the titles will likely run on both platforms.

Ury says the cd titles have garnered interest from publishers and distributors but ink has yet to be spilled.

Digg will likely be heading in the direction of non-fiction ‘interactive documentaries,’ now in the conceptual design phase.

SHOAH – A Family Remembers the Holocaust is the first idea for an interactive fact-based cd title, which Ury says will be taken to publishers this spring.

Digg is also developing Behind the Scenes: The Making Of (plug in name of feature film here). The title will follow the production process on a feature film, and will include original edited footage and script bits. It will allow users to confirm their long-held notions that they can direct a better film than (insert name of wildly famous director here).

Ury says as the multimedia market becomes more accessible it will become broader, and Digg’s goal is to develop interesting, niche-oriented products.

‘As distribution channels open up and broadband connections over the Net increase, there will be more opportunities to create interesting projects,’ says Ury. ‘People will be looking for products that aren’t necessarily testosterone-based action-adventure games.’