FunOrb is a casual gaming

Casual game

A casual game is a video game targeted at or used by a mass audience of casual gamers. Casual games can have any type of gameplay, and fit in any genre. They are typically distinguished by their simple rules and lack of commitment required in contrast to more complex hardcore games...

 site created by Jagex Games Studio

Jagex

Jagex Games Studio, based in Cambridge, is the UK’s largest independent developer and publisher of online games. Jagex is best known for RuneScape, the world's largest free-to-play MMORPG....

. Launched on 27 February 2008, it was the company's first major release after their successful MMORPG

MMORPG

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....

, RuneScape

RuneScape

RuneScape is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game released in January 2001 by Andrew and Paul Gower, and developed and published by Jagex Games Studio. It is a graphical browser game implemented on the client-side in Java, and incorporates 3D rendering...

. All of the games are programmed in Java.

Jagex has announced that this site is targeted towards the "hard casual", "deep casual" or "time-pressured" gamer market (specifically over-18s) and that it intends to expand into the mobile phone

Mobile phone

A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

 games market. On 3 December 2009, Jagex released its first mobile phone game, Bouncedown, for the iPhone

IPhone

The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

 and iPod touch

IPod touch

The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...

, followed by StarCannon on 15 April 2010, Miner Disturbance on 8 June 2010, and Undercroft on 23 September 2010.

Summary

FunOrb offers single-player and multiplayer games. Multiplayer games allow players to communicate with each other through a public lobby, game chat, which can be used while playing in a game, or through private chat, which can be used to talk to people on RuneScape, and vice versa. In all current multiplayer games, players receive a separate rating for each game, which symbolises their experience with the games and can rise or fall based on their rated game performance. In all current multiplayer games, with the exception of the persistent-world

Persistent world

A persistent world is a virtual world that continues to exist even after a user exits the world and that user-made changes to its state are, to some extent, permanent...

 game, Dungeon Assault, players may play "rated" games, which finds random opponents and adjusts their rating based on their performance, or they can play unrated games with people of their choice, which have no effect on their rating.

The site includes an achievement system which gives awards for completing challenges in single-player and multiplayer games. These include "Orb Coins", which players are able to spend on a variety of game content including desktop wallpapers, music, icons, and more. Also awarded are "Orb Points", which can be compared to those of other players. The site has been launched in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 and Brazilian Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese is a group of Portuguese dialects written and spoken by most of the 190 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Canada, Japan and Paraguay....

, with more languages planned.

Jagex have stated that FunOrb will be updated every two weeks, either with a new game, an update to a game or an updated site feature, though the last website update was on 15 September 2010. Currently, only Jagex games are available on the site, but Jagex have stated that they are considering adding third party games to the site.

Cost

Limited versions of all FunOrb games are available for free, with costs covered by advertising

Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

. Some games are completely free, with the exception of fullscreen mode. Players have the option of becoming paying

Pay to Play

Pay to play, sometimes pay for play, is a phrase used for a variety of situations in which money is exchanged for services or the privilege to engage in certain activities...

 subscribers, which gives them access to more ingame content, among other things the option to play games in fullscreen mode and an increased amount of achievements. Subscribers are also granted immediate access to the FunOrb forums

Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

, whereas non-subscribers are required to have obtained at least 42 achievements before being allowed to post.

Holiday events

From 22 October 2008 to 5 November 2008, special Halloween

Halloween

Hallowe'en , also known as Halloween or All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the night before All Saints' Day...

 Achievements were spread across 10 games, with each of those games having a temporary Halloween theme. These were re-released on 28 October 2009, along with Achievements and Halloween themes for several other games.

On 18 December 2008, an update for the game Arcanists was released in celebration of Christmas

Christmas

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...

, in the form of several costumes that players could buy with Orb Coins.

Current games

There are currently 43 games in total:

Name	Category	Single-player or multiplayer?
Ace of Skies	Action	Single-player
Arcanists	Strategy	Multiplayer
Armies of Gielinor	Strategy	Both
Bachelor Fridge	Strategy	Multiplayer
Bouncedown	Arcade	Both
Brick-À-Brac	Arcade	Both
Chess Chess Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...	Strategy	Multiplayer
Crazy Crystals	Puzzle	Single-player
Deko Bloko	Arcade	Both
Dr. P. Saves the Earth	Shooter	Single-player
Dungeon Assault	Strategy	Multiplayer
Escape Vector	Arcade	Single-player
Flea Circus	Puzzle	Single-player
Geoblox	Arcade	Single-player
Hold the Line	Racer	Single-player
Hostile Spawn	Shooter	Single-player
Kickabout League	Sport	Multiplayer
Lexicominos	Word	Single-player
Miner Disturbance	Arcade	Single-player
Monkey Puzzle 2	Arcade	Single-player
Orb Defence Tower defense Tower defense is a subgenre of real-time strategy computer games.The goal of tower defense games is to try to stop enemies from crossing a map by building towers which shoot at them as they pass. Enemies and towers usually have varied abilities, costs, and ability costs...	Arcade	Single-player
Pixelate	Puzzle	Both
Pool Pocket billiards Pool, also more formally known as pocket billiards or pool billiards , is the family of cue sports and games played on a pool table having six receptacles called pockets along the , into which balls are deposited as the main goal of play. Popular versions include eight-ball and nine-ball...	Sport	Both
Shattered Plans	Strategy	Multiplayer
Sol-Knight	Arcade	Single-player
StarCannon	Shooter	Single-player
Steel Sentinels	Strategy	Both
Stellar Shard	Arcade	Single-player
Sumoblitz	Action	Single-player
TerraPhoenix	Strategy	Single-player
TetraLink Connect Four Connect Four is a two-player game in which the players first choose a color and then take turns dropping their colored discs from the top into a seven-column, six-row vertically-suspended grid...	Strategy	Multiplayer
The Track Controller	Puzzle	Single-player
Thirty-Six Card Trick Concentration (game) Concentration, also known as Memory, Pelmanism, Shinkei-suijaku, Pexeso or simply Pairs, is a card game in which all of the cards are laid face down on a surface and two cards are flipped face up over each turn. The object of the game is to turn over pairs of matching cards...	Puzzle	Single-player
Tomb Racer	Action	Both
Tor Challenge	Platform	Single-player
Torquing	Platform	Single-player
Transmogrify	Word	Single-player
Vertigo 2	Platform	Both
Virogrid Ataxx Ataxx is a board game that first appeared in 1990 as an arcade video game by The Leland Corporation. It also appeared in 1990 as the video game Spot and later as the Microscope Puzzle from the 1993 CD-ROM game The 7th Guest...	Strategy	Multiplayer
Void Hunters	Action	Both
Wizard Run	Platform	Single-player
Zombie Dawn	Strategy	Single-player
Zombie Dawn Multiplayer	Strategy	Multiplayer