Project Description

Electri-City is a strategy game with a focus on the management of renewable and non-renewable energy. The goal of the game is to provide an educational experience that explains the difference between the two types of energy and the importance each one holds, strapped into a fun and gamified experience.

Electri-City was made as a school project for our clients at the Oyfo Museum located in Hazemeijer, The Netherlands. So as the product needed to be presentable in a museum, our clients insisted that it needed to be playable by all ages (children, teens and adults).

The project spanned 8 weeks long and was made in a multidisciplinary team of engineers, artists and designers (of which I was one) consisting of:

- Three artists

- Three designers

- One engineer

The Mayor and Gaea

Electri-City Gameplay Demo

My Contributions

As there were a total of three designers working on this project, the task distribution was divided with more focus for each one of us. My focus laid more heavily on the narrative side of the game, with me being responsible for the writing and incorporating narrative guidance. I also helped out a bit with some general game design.

My contributions:

Narrative design: My main task for this project was to help and guide the player through our game. This mostly includes creating the tutorial for the game which explains the mechanics to our player while also trying to engage them with our product. I made use of two contrasting characters which represent renewable energy and non-renewable energy respectively.

Writing: I wrote all the character dialogue and in-game messages to convey information and set a tone for the whole game.
As the game was created to be presentable in a museum in the Netherlands, I was obliged to write all the dialogue in Dutch.

Game design: I mainly looked at how to apply fun in the game and grabbing the attention for players to sit through the game. I mainly worked on the following; Problem solving, user experience and of course pairing the narrative with the established gameplay.

Design Thinking: I did research into our target audience regarding the problem they were facing concerning their knowledge, skill and awareness on the topic and how we can bridge that gap. This analysis was done for every age group (children, teens and adults).