This is one of the projects I did in my minor and the idea was to get people between 12-21 years old back to the forest using a game.

We did this in collaboration with "Staatsbosbeheer" who own most of the nature in The Netherlands and who try to keep the nature in shape. They noticed that people from the age-group mentioned earlier don't often visit the forest and wanted to see if we (us students from Fontys ICT & Game Design together with students from Fontys ACI (Academy for Creative Industries)) could create a game to get them back to the forest more often.

We started this course of with lectures and created a bunch of ideas based off of different ways of designing (starting from an emotion, starting from an action). Out of all the ideas 5 were chosen and created by a different group of students (ICT & ACI combined). Most of the ideas used GPS as in most parts of the forest there was no internet.

The general idea of the game I started working on was a minesweeper stratego. There is 2 teams of 3 people, each team lays down 3 bombs in locations on their half of the map. The goal would be to cross the map and reach the other players's base. The team that reached the other players base first won. There were also some randomly placed bombs that neither of the teams knew of. If a player would step on a bomb, the bomb would be revealed to his team and the player that stepped on it would have to return to base.

The game we created started out as a minesweeper/stratego combination and ended up to be a search and find treasures game with a metal detector-like app on your phone. We immideately stepped off of stratego combined with minesweeper because out in the open forest this made much less sense than its paper prototype on which it was introduced at first.

Later on we solely kept the mines and the idea of the game became to lay down your mines on GPS locations in the forest, another person would have to go looking and as soon as it got near the mine the phone would start beeping. The closer you got to the mine the faster the phone started to beep. Ultimately you could defuse the mine as you came close enough. However defusing the mines itself was not really fun. Secondly the idea of it being mines in the forest wasn't really a positive thing so we changed the mines into treasures.

We also removed the need to defuse, as defusing treasure doesn't make sense. Instead you would have to get close enough to the treasure to collect it and you had a certain amount of time to collect all treasure.

This turned out to be much more fun and the phone now became less of a magnet for the players eyes and more a guiding assistant where players were looking around listening to the device trying to think of the places the treasures could have been layed down in the actual environment

In the last 2 weeks of this course we had a group of 12 year olds and a group of 14 year olds test our games, we got a lot of feedback from this to improve our game. The best part about this was to see them all running through the forest in search of the digital treasure but somehow wondering if there was physical treasure aswell. Unfortunately we weren't able to test the team setup we had in mind, where each team would lay down his/her treasures and then give the device to the other to search/find the treasures.

Below there is a video of the impression of the whole course: