If there is one thing that connects the projects we’ve been working on over the past month, it’s this: finding what works.
A lot of what we do at Off The Beaten Track starts with an idea. But an idea is only a starting point. We spend a lot of time researching, talking to people, running workshops and testing early versions of our games to find out what actually works for the people we are making them for.
That’s particularly important to us because many of our games deal with complex or meaningful topics. Whether we are working on remembrance culture, career orientation or everyday life with a chronic illness, we want to create games that are not only fun to play, but also have a reason to exist.
And sometimes that means discovering that one of our ideas simply doesn’t work. So, here’s a look at what we’ve been researching, testing and building in October.
Different Tracks: Meet Hannah
In the first issue of our devlog we announced that our new main project is “Different Tracks”, a game about the deportations that took place in Hamburg during World War II. Once the overall concept of the game was established, it was time to focus on the game’s most important character: the protagonist. Hannah is a young woman who uses a device that allows her to observe scenes from the past.
One of our earlier concepts already featured a character design we were particularly happy with, so we used it as the foundation for Hannah and developed it further. Her hair quickly became one of the most important elements of the design. We wanted it to stand out visually, making her easy to identify in different environments while also giving the game a distinctive and recognizable look.
We explored a range of different hairstyles, but eventually returned to the original idea: large, voluminous hair with a strong, clearly defined silhouette. At that point, the hair color was still fairly light, so we also experimented with darker tones to find a version that better suited the final design.
Apart from character and story design, we are also focusing on research in this phase – together with our incredible partners, the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centres, our newest team member and in-house historian Markus, but also by deep-diving into books, documentaries and articles. Since we are planning for one of our characters to have worked at the tax office during the war, one particular event was especially relevant to us. The state government of Schleswig-Holstein had commissioned a study on “Disenfranchisement and Exploitation on Behalf of the State,” taking a close look at the role and activities of the tax administration during that period.
The study has now been presented at the Schleswig-Holstein State Parliament. For us, it was an evening filled with valuable insights, many of which will directly inform the development of the character in our game.
SkillSaga: Designing a Game for Young People Living with Chronic Illnesses
We’ve recently started working on SkillSaga, a German-Danish project that aims to improve the quality of life of young people living with chronic illnesses. Together with young people aged 16–19 from both countries, we are developing an analogue game that aims to help them build skills and strategies for managing the challenges of everyday life with a chronic condition.
As with all our projects, we spend a lot of time getting to know our target group and playtesting the game with them. For SkillSaga, we are holding a series of workshops over the course of one year, both in Kiel (Germany) and in Copenhagen (Denmark). The first workshop brought together 10 girls with various chronic illnesses. Through several playful activities like the “Frame Game” and a Bingo game, we got to know them pretty well already, and could verify some of our assumptions as to what the main message of the game that is to be developed should be. The feeling of having an additional weight to carry, making everything in life harder, seemed to unify the participants.
For the next workshop and game iteration we intend to find ways to turn this around and focus the conversations on strengths and strategies they’ve developed along the way, which could also be one of the main messages of the game.
ten2match: Making Career Orientation Playful
We’ve started working on a new project: ten2match, a game-based career orientation platform we are developing together with Landkreis Haßberge.
The idea is to make career orientation more interactive and engaging for young people. Instead of simply filling out a questionnaire, they explore a series of mini-games designed around different skills and abilities. From logical thinking and creativity to memory and spatial reasoning, combined with an interest questionnaire, their interactions help create an individual profile that can be matched with suitable professions and local companies in Haßberge.
We are currently in the early stages of development, working on the game concepts, visual direction and the first playable prototypes. We started things off with a first workshop with a school class in Haßberge, identifying their preferences for game styles and mechanics.
One of our first ideas was to build a game inspired by games like Carcassonne and Dorfromantik. However, the school class completely smashed this idea – they hated it! But that’s why we do these workshops: to find out if our ideas really resonate with the target group, and adjust accordingly. In this case that meant: back to the drawing board, we have to come up with a completely new idea. Hopefully we’ll have something to show for it next month!
There is still plenty to build, test and iterate and we’ll be sharing some of that process in future devlogs. In the meantime, you can learn more about ten2match here.
Off The Beaten Track is switching to Godot
This one has been a long time coming. We’ve been looking at Godot for years now, but never really knew when to make the switch. Since most of our tech stack is based on Open Source already, it only makes sense for us to use Godot. But we’re also deeply rooted in Unity: we have several assets published on the Unity Asset Store (affiliate link), we have a huge framework we use in all our games that really kickstarts development, and we have a custom-built buildserver that builds our games every night and automatically distributes them to the team and our collaborators.
Switching to Godot would mean abandoning or rebuilding all of that.
Which made it hard to find the time to finally switch. And to be honest, we kind of tricked ourselves into it: we wrote into a project application that we would develop the game in Godot if our bid was accepted. And it was accepted. Which finally gave us the little push we needed to start porting our framework, buildserver and everything else. We’ve been loving it so far, wishing we had made the switch sooner. Oh well!
See you next time
A lot of things are still taking shape. Hannah is becoming a little more real with every sketch and every piece of research, SkillSaga is taking shape together with its players, and ten2match has just sent one of our first ideas straight back to the drawing board.
That’s the fun part of making games: you start with an idea, put it in front of people, find out what works and what doesn’t, and then make it better.
Until then – follow us on social media to stay up to date!
