Tech Ed
(2008)
Tech-Ed is an educational game for schoolchildren to learn more about basic technical principles such as weight distribution, pulleys, gears, levers, lifts and basics of electrics. The game was developed for OTIB (now ‘Wij Techniek’) which wanted to stimulate technical interests/carreers among students while creating more engaging techical education. This also meant that Tech-Ed had to have a ‘cool’ image and move beyond a schoolisch attitude or experience. We not only did that by emedding all the educational content into a platform game, but also through the awesome animations and tunes created by HocusPocus animation studio.
My role
UI desinger
Webdesiger
Tester
(junior) Level designer
Software
Illustrator
Photoshop
Flash
Related links
Worked for
Worked with
Nitty-gritty
Let’s make one thing clear, while I did design all the UI-screen for the game I was most certainly not the lead artist. That honour goes to Marc Reekers who was the lead designer on this project and helped me out tremendously in translating his style intro the UI.
The premise of the game is that technical stuff needs to be a bit scary or even dangerous! Translating this in the art style was to add a lot of weird nuts, bolts, wires, batteries, copper handles, buttons, relay’s, resistors etc. into one big incoherent mess. Almost a scary mess. Which off course, Ed should be able to conquer!
Scary Technology
Tech-Ed plays with children’s feelings of resentment towards techniques. How do batteries work? Why do pully’s make things easier? These topics can be a bit overwhelming for a 9-year old. Ed has these feelings into the extreme, he fears technical stuff. You have to overcome this fear with Ed and rescue his family and friends from the machines!
UI Design
I made the ingame UI screens + de webdesign for the landing page (which was later revised to the great succes of the game).