Monster Rebellion
(2017)
Monster Rebellion was a mobile app created for a special department of the local government of Utrecht, Goedopweg. They want to stimulate a healthier city environment by means of stimulating bike or walking routes. Monster Rebellions motivates elementary school children to leave the car at home. Using GPS-locations the game stimulates student to go to school by foot or bike. Both in going to school and going back home. In the meantime, the app locks all GPS-locations during schooltime, so students won’t go wondering off the school grounds.
Worked for
Worked with
Building a mini-Utrecht
The idea was to replicate iconic buildings in Utrecht in the game world. By mirroring the real-world children would be motivated to visit or find real world locations and walk or cycle that extra mile. Therefore, I had the amazing task to start rebuilding iconic features of Utrecht or more general, Dutch urban features. All the features formed tiles which were added to an isometric city map in the form of tiles. I ended up modelling 36 unique buildings that are also unlockable locations in the game. But I also made renders because you could visit these locations. Meaning that you must find the real-world location to unlock the location in the app. However, to create the entire city I also modelled 14 different map tiles, but all with 5 different states! These versions where needed to show the decay of the city. If the players were doing a poor job of stopping (capturing) monsters the city will slowly decay. While if they would catch a lot of monsters the city would flourish and become cooler than the starting (normal) situation!
The bigger picture
Goedopweg goal is to improve the mobility in the city of Utrecht. Utrecht is not only a city with a crowded historical centre but is also one of the fasted growing regions in The Netherlands. To ensure that traffic remains safe and to improve the well-being of its citizens, Goedopweg tries to motivate walking and biking as much as possible. Data analysis showed that around schools a lot of accidents happen brining kids to school, causing more and more parents to bring their kids to school by car. Only amplifying the problem. This cycle had to be stopped, and they thought gaming would be the ideal solution to motivate kids, but maybe even parents to change their habits and go to school while leaving the car at home.