The older you get the more difficult simple daily tasks become, like standing up.

The question the GGZE had for us (a group of students from the Fontys ICT (ICT & Game Design) & Fontys ACI (Marketing & Communication) was: Can a game help elderly (60-80 years) people to stay in shape so that they can still do all these daily tasks when they get older?

To get an answer to this question we first needed to know what all these daily tasks were. Once we had a list of all these tasks we focused on 2-3 tasks to create games for. But while looking at things that were allready made for this market, the only thing we could really find was a bundle of mini-games with all kinds of themes from swimming with tropical fish to jumping with kangaroos. Our idea was to have a main-theme to cover all these mini-games and we came up with the shopping street theme where the elderly could keep the connection with the real world while unnkowingly moving their arms and legs.

The first mini-game to enter our street was the supermarket, a place where you will go and collect a certain number of items from different positions on the screen by moving your arms around. The faster you are the further out these items will go so that you will have to move your arms a little bit more.

This way we added a couple of other games, the bakery (where you would could bread moving your arm back and forth), the music shop (picking up records with your arms to put on the trackplayer and listen to some music) and lastly the shoe store where you can change your shoes (these will be the shoes the character wears in the rest of the game aswell) using your legs.

On this project I spend most of my time with the music shop, the persistence of the user progress between scenes and playsession and the main scene decoration and character interaction. In the main scene there are characters who walk around and sometimes stop to talk to the player or to another NPC, they talk in form of images similar to how sims communicates.

The main challenge of all the tasks was to make it so that elderly people understand what to do and are capable of preforming the actions needed to play the game. I also spent time working with the Kinect setting up a prototype for the game, but the only problem with this was that kinect didn't work on my laptop so I had to borrow someone elses for the tests. Therefor someone else worked on Kinect for the rest of the project.

This project was really great to do because I got to work with a large group containing artists, programmers and business managers. We also got to deliver the game to GGZE and we hope to see it in practice once they implemented it in their systems.