Bezint eer ge begint is a relaxed choose your own painting game.

Design

Materials

Below you can see a onepage design of the core idea of the game

Project

Approach

Integrating the Design Thinking Process Guide (which means, a focus on empathizing with the target group)

Locking down the design after a certain point in time, to provide stability during production phase

Clear responsibilities for every teammember

Result / Evaluation

Group design really really is not a thing: only once we decreased the size of the group actively designing the game, were we able to produce results.

We spent too much time finding a good problem definition for the target group, resulting in not having enough time to hone the design of the final product.

I am glad I did not take on the responsilibity of being the project lead, allowing me to focus on both design and programming

Description

The goal for this project was to create a game elderly people could benefit from. This was a project I was thrilled to work on, for two reasons: one, it was the kind of project that I could see myself doing in the future: creating a game to help improve people’s lives and two, all of my teammembers were highly skilled with great mindsets.

So, creating something good would be easy right? Well … no. First of all, the target group proved to be tricky to adequately capture: it turns out old people are a very diverse group. Who would have thought. We needed to zoom in on a single problem, but this was a hard endeavour given the fact that during the earlier stages of the project, all seven! of us were trying to reach consensus about what to zoom in on.

We wanted to find the problem definition just right for our team, the school assignment and the target group.

Finding this exact right problem definition was a slow process. Too slow, in fact, so we split our group, giving just a few people control over the concept. In hindsight, this should have been one of the first things to do. These people could then gather all information and research findings other team members collected, and use that to create a concept. Discussions about this concept should be between a maximum of three people, and not between the whole group of seven.

With our small designer group, we were able to quickly define an approach to the project, supported by the large amount of research we already did.

However, we did not have much time left for production at that point. Fortunately, we weren’t short on artists, and we had created an art-heavy concept to put most of the production work on their shoulders.

I’m quite happy with the end result. We were aiming to create a game that proved games weren’t only an (often violent) means of entertainment, but could be gentle works of art too. Reactions that this “was a peaceful game” and “a bit like a real painting” hint that we may have achieved that goal.

Project Role

Niels de Jong – designer, programmer

Kevin van As – (only a part of the project) designer

Rody Muijers – project lead, artist

Esmeé van ‘t Hoff – artist

Loïs Vehof – artist

Youri Stans – artist

Sabeth van der Voort – art lead, artist

Project Duration

7 weeks

started the 8th of february, 2016

published on the 1st of april, 2016

Play time

5 minutes

Links

This game was originally designed for tablet. As such, it plays best on an android tablet.