Genre – Serious Game, Educational, Puzzle
Team – Dice Kayser, Kai Jaeschke, Alexander Kappen, Zhi Len Ng, Kosan Aziz, Robert Michrowsky
Created – BA6 Collaborative Project
My Part – Lead Programmer, Systems & Gameplay Programmer
Step into the role of Sam: Visit the university, meet lecturers and fellow students, and experience the world of Beyond the Chalkboard.
Encounter limitations caused by environmental barriers, the reactions of others, as well as Sam’s anxieties and feelings of depression.
Beyond the Chalkboard is a game that was created as part of the Accessible Teaching project of the TH Köln. The goal was for it to act as a teaching tool to allow professors to see the potential stress and worries of their students and how they, often unknowingly, contribute to their worsening mental health.
You play as Sam, a regular university student who struggles with anxiety and depression in their day-to-day life. As the player navigates the university scenarios and collects more tasks and worries throughout the day, they have to shuffle it all around in their ‘Mindspace’ to ensure that they don’t forget anything. Then, to actually take care of their new tasks, they place them into their schedule.
If a task is not completed on time, it will grow in size and take up more space in Sam’s mindspace. It is purposefully made to be impossible to not run out of space sooner or later as the game goes on, to show that without the right support, it is hard—if not impossible—to completely keep track of ever-increasing worries and tasks.
After the completion of this project on our end, it was taken over by another team and has since then been fully completed. You can find more information and play the game here
For my part of the project, I worked on most of the gameplay mechanics. This included the character pathing, moving from space to space, and most importantly, the notebook, which acted as the central gameplay system. Almost everything else in the game was influenced or influenced the tiles in the notebook in one way, and making it all fit together neatly while preserving all the important information was an interesting endeavour.
