Ghana Plantation at Cadbury World

Ghana Plantation at Cadbury World’s Purple Planet allows you to see chocolate being made like never before. This genesis game guides you through the growth stages of a cocoa plantation and helps you to cultivate your own virtual cocoa tree.

Facing the wall-sized projection screen you'll see the mounds of soil that provide fertile settings for a likely crop of virtual cocoa beans. Using the virtual plantation’s console of buttons you'll soon be tasked with sowing a seed — then keeping it alive.

As the action takes place, buttons flash to inform you, the cyber gardener, about the needs of your plant — and be sharp about it because administering the correct dose of sunlight, shade or water to the plant is vital at the right time. Pushing the right buttons at the right times decides whether your plant will thrive or wilt.

The experience culminates in finding out how strong your plant is by the amount of cocoa beans it manages to produce. You are then rewarded with a message from Cadbury explaining how well you've done, and explaining the real-life challenges of raising plants to their high standards.

The HMC team worked closely with cocoa bean experts to ensure authenticity. The ratio of sunlight to water and shade had to be exactly right, ensuring a healthy virtual plant mirrors a healthy real-life cocoa plant.

HMC Interactive and Newangle worked closely to bring Ghana Plantation to the exhibition. Newangle provided the creative direction while HMC were tasked with writing the software to create computerised organisms that acted like living things. HMC also managed to keep costs low by running three games through one central computer processor.

Exhibition design: Event Communications Design & production: Newangle Software programming: HMC Interactive