Plan-It Commander / Game design projects

Plan-It Commander

Role: Game design, Interaction design, Level design, Interactive storytelling, Narrative design

Target audience: Age group 8-12

Released: 2013

For children with ADHD, daily life is not as straightforward as it is for most of us. They tend to have difficulty with things such as time management, planning/organizing and prosocial skills. Together with pharmaceutical firm Janssen Pharmaceutica/Healthy Solutions (part of Johnson & Johnson), the Yulius Academie, a mental health care institute and the Flemish Society for Parents of Children with ADHD, &ranj developed Plan-It Commander. A serious game that aims to improve the skills of children with ADHD so they are able to function better, feel more content and thereby making the lives of these children a little easier.

Plan-It Commander is a sci-fi adventure game in which the players go on interplanetary missions in search of space minerals together with their team. On every planet they visit they encounter problems, which the child learns to solve by practising with time management, planning and prosocial skills like working together. The game is seen as an adjunct to common treatments for ADHD.

How it works

The game takes the form of an adventure game and centres on a situation involving considerable problems, a solution to which must be sought. Within the overall narrative, the player deals with problematic aspects of ADHD in several subgames. Furthermore, the player can learn to enlist the right help from their team at the right time.

To ensure that the children actually train the intended skills, the game was developed in close collaboration with the client and a large team of subject matter experts. To ensure the game was experienced as fun, engaging and challenging by the players, the game was tested with children from within the target group regularly.

Apart from the single player game experience, players can interact with each other in a closed community that is part of the game. Children can check and rate each other’s actions and progress and can help each other by giving advice.

Why it works

While developing the game we worked closely with the target group, asking for their opinion and monitoring them while they were playing the game.

The game was clinically tested with a group of 170 Dutch and Belgian children - mainly boys - with ADHD between the ages of 8 and 12. Half of the children played the game about three times a week for 10 weeks. Their usual treatment for ADHD—usually medication or behavioral therapy—continued. The other half received their usual treatment for ADHD for 10 weeks and then played the game for 10 weeks.

After 10 weeks, it turned out that the group that played Plan-It Commander directly, according to their parents, could handle time better, had a better working memory and behaved more responsibly. The children were also positive about improving their own skills after playing the game. Looking at the group that only started playing Plan-It-Commander after 10 weeks, it was found that they functioned better in the areas of time management, planning and organizing, working memory and social skills, according to parents, teachers and the children themselves. In the group that immediately started with the computer game, positive results were still visible 10 weeks later, according to parents and teachers.

My role

Within this project my role was to write the concepts for most of the sub-games that trained specific skills that people with ADHD have issues with. I also developed all the level designs for these sub-games, built them in the Isometric engine and tested them thoroughly. I was also in close communication with the researcher in order to improve these sub-games between each user-test.

Level design