Habits & Moi is a board game for 2-4 players created during an internship with occupational therapists. The players has to dress up a child to earn points. But he must take the weather in consideration, he cannot put a big puffer jacket on a hot summer day, however a tank top will be awarded with lots of points! The game was made in order to help children with disabilities to learn how to dress themselves in the right order and according to the weather. The game was also adapted on PC for 1 player.
my roles:
Game Designer
Accessibility Designer
Programmer
Occupational therapists will use a lot of games during their consultations, especially if they work with kids. Indeed, games are a very efficient and fun way to learn or practice specific skills. Occupational therapy is a very thrilling topic and most of the therapists are using gamification process on everyday tasks. Making a game about dressing up was the idea of the occupational therapist I worked with during this internship. She is using a lot of game with her young patients. However she was complaining about the lack of a game that could teach children how to dress properly. I was looking for an internship and I am very concerned about game accessibility issues, so this project was a perfect opportunity to make my work useful for therapists and children.
When we designed the game, we wanted it to be easy to play with simple rules. The game is made for kids, sometimes with cognitive disabilities and the therapist should not take a lot of time in order to explain the rules. We kept that in mind at every stage of the project. Also, the game should learn how to dress up properly, this means in the right order (no shoes before pants) and according to the weather (no shorts when it's snowy). But those rules should not be very strict, in real life you can put a t-shirt before the underwear if you want, in addition puffer jacket may be perfect for snow, a raincoat can still be an appropriate cloth. Therefore, we designed a layer and accessories system to help the players on memorizing the right order and a scoring system to reward players that find the perfect clothes while allowing clothes that may not be perfect but still appropriate. It was pretty challenging to design "realistic rules" while keeping the game as simple as possible, but I think we found the right balance.
Since the game was made to be played by children with disabilities, the game does not contain any text because some kids are unable to read or struggle a lot doing it. Also the players must hold cards, however it can be very hard for players affected by cerebral palsy or dyspraxia, so we made a game were the cards can be revealed for all players so you don't have to keep cards hidden. In addition, these cards are meant to be placed precisely on a board so we built a small wooden structure in order to facilitate card placement and keep them in place. It was truly interesting to address accessibility issues and I do believe that this experience helped me to become a better designer.
The therapist I worked with needed the game to be adapted on PC for 1 player. So her patient could play alone and she could evaluate their ability to use a computer. So the second month of this internship was the development of this PC adaptation. I worked with a 2D artist who drew all the visual assets. First of all, I needed to work a bit on the game design, I changed some rules in order to adapt the game for 1 player. Then I developed the game, since it is played by drawing cards out of a deck, I needed to create this virtual deck and create shuffle, discard system. Therefore I worked a lot with list, I learned a lot on how to create and use list and it is still very useful in my current projects. Also, the prototype was simple but needed to be polished. Indeed the game was meant to be fully playable at the end of the internship. So I spent a lot of time on UX and visual polish and this was a first-time post-production experience.
Images:
Habits & Moi is a french pun (Clothes & Me / Dress Me)
Habits & Moi is a french pun (Clothes & Me / Dress Me)
The team:
Game Designers
Eliot Ringeval LinkedIn
Game Artists
Laure Vernier LinkedIn