Tulketh Mill is one of the landmarks featuring in the new mobile game

Preston landmarks including Tulketh Mill, Miller Arcade and St Walburge’s Church will be featured in a new computer game celebrating the upcoming Preston Guild.

Cotton Pops is a brand new mobile app which is set in the city and takes its inspiration from Preston’s industrial heritage.

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The game is built by students from the University of Central Lancashire and Lancaster University. The app challenges you to pop balls of cotton, triggering reactions to move players up a level.

The idea came from Georgina Cronshaw, Will Davies and James Burton who all study games design at UCLan.

Black Bull Studios and RM Productions then got involved to help select a winning design and two students at Lancaster University, James Briers and Will Moorhouse, used their programming skills to code the game.

Cotton Pops is a warm up app for the Guild Key, a puzzle-based interactive treasure hunt which will launch next year.

Peter Melling, one of the directors of Black Bull Studios, and founding co-director of RM Productions, said: “Black Bull Studios has been supporting the Games Design Course at UCLan for five years now, mentoring the students and challenging them to enter our annual competition to design a game with an innovative concept.

“With the Preston Guild 2012 very much on everyone’s minds, this year we asked them to come up with a game that would relate to the Preston Guild and leave a legacy long after 2012 had passed.

“We were overwhelmed by the standard of the entries, but eventually Cotton Pops was chosen as the winning concept.”

Lancashire County Council supported the development of the game, saying it helped showcase Preston’s creative talent.

Andrew Leeming, senior projects officer for Lancashire County Developments, said: “This initiative gives talented and creative students the opportunity to immerse themselves in some of the real world disciplines that employees and businesses are crying out for.

“It also presents a unique opportunity to mark something up on their CV and point potential employers to real evidence of a job well done.”

The game will launch worldwide in January on iTunes and will cost 69p. It is designed for iPhone 4 and iPad.

Until December 12th the game can be played online at www.guildkey.net

What do you think of the game? Will you be downloading it? Let us know what you think in the comments below