Serious Games
Co-creation and Game Design with and for Yemeni Youth

Since 2011, Yemen has been in a state of political crisis starting with street protests against poverty, unemployment, corruption, and president Saleh's plan to amend Yemen's constitution and eliminate the presidential term limit, in effect making him president for life.

Because of the protests, President Saleh stepped down and the powers of the presidency were transferred to Vice President Hadi, formally elected in a one-man election.

In September 2014, the Houthis took over Sana'a with the help of the ousted president Saleh, later declaring themselves in control of the Country after a coup d'état; Saleh was shot dead by a sniper in Sana'a in December 2017.

This resulted in a new civil war and a Saudi Arabia-led military intervention aimed at restoring the status quo. The war has blocked food imports, leading to a famine that is affecting 17 million people.
[Wikipedia]

A smart phone, Wi-Fi, and a bit of a wild plan

How to get in touch with the the youth in Yemen, unreachable to NGOs since the 2015-present conflict?

The project started to develop on the understanding that, today, children and teenagers worldwide largely get to own or have access to a smartphone -perhaps belonging to a parent or an older sibling.

Bomburo came into the picture once commissioned by social innovation studio Butterfly Works, on the initiative of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), to collaborate as game designers for a series of mobile games, as a way to reach through to young Yemenis.

The ongoing project, currently spanning 3 years, is being developed in close co-creation with a team in Sana'a, whom we keep daily contact with.

Each application delicately aims at funnelling different positive messages, chosen by our Yemeni partners, such as: questioning power and status in relation to weapons, highlighting the potential of education, supporting women and community organizing.

Yemeni illustrators, writers, designers, and developers together handle narrative, illustration, sound design, as well as acting as a consultancy team to guarantee the relevance and cultural accuracy of the project.

Bomburo's responsibilities range from the co-creation of the game design documents and functional requirements, to animation, UI design and sound briefs.

Butterfly Works organized a co-creation workshop held simultaneously in 2 locations: Sana’a, Yemen, and Amman, Jordan, together with a group of authors, bloggers and artists from Yemen.

Main project challenges:

• Keeping it fun and entertaining, while emphasising the underlying messages and stimulating behavioral change.
• Gettting the point across without being too pedagogic and trite.
• Talking about sensitive subjects during a very turbulent period in the history of Yemen, with ongoing internal conflicts, as well as military interventions from abroad.
• Delivering quality within a very tight timeframe.
• Appealing to all youth in a wide and very diverse Country, with different subcultural references, accents, architecture, cuisine, traditions, and religions.
• Localisation (the game had to be developed in Arabic and English).
• Internet reliability in a Country with a disrupted power system.

Why co-creation is essential

Our perspectives, limited by our own cultural background, are not enough to grasp, let alone propose solutions for, complexities we never had to experience; co-creation is essential for this kind of work and, through the years, Butterfly Works has developed a pretty solid method.

By co-creating with stakeholders, every solution aims to be based on shared values with the people who actually experience the problem in person. It may sound as an obvious concept, but it's a critical shift of perspective only recently beginning to be accepted and implemented as an indispensable design practice in the international non-profit design community.

Flowcharts, diagrams and sheets

During the workshop, we started to create game flow charts, which guided us in writing the GDD (Game Design Documents). Everything was created by or in close contact with the consultancy group.

We discussed issues in real time, through shared online documents, weekly calls and chats, polishing the content together as well as solving creative problems and always checking in on all relevant matters.

Flowcharts, lists and sketches were shared online to facilitate understanding from the many parties involved between Yemen, The Netherlands, Jordan, Egypt, Greece, the UK and Germany.

An almost complete list of Bomburo's responsibilities

• Initiating the game design documents, providing a structure upon which the whole team could build.
• Keeping the game documents updated and coherent while everyone is working on them.
• Creating briefs and providing technical guidance.
• Creating sketches of scenes, puzzles and characters.
• Creating animated prototypes.
• Designing puzzles logic.
• Designing game levels, in collaboration with the developers.
• Creating storyboards.
• Integrating the overall message in co-operation with our partners.
• Writing placeholder dialogues to be improved, translated and approved by the Consultancy team.

The five games all have very different aesthetics, relative to the age of the audience they are trying to appeal to. Art Direction was not in our hands but we worked closely with the artists to provide technical assistance and support.

A big part of our work was to create prototypes, model and blueprints for every aspect of the games. Every screen and puzzle was sketched out and tested, before being handed over to the art team and to the developers for the next steps.

In many cases we also created follow up sketches, to further elaborate on various technical aspects of the games, and to show how all of these different components would tie together in the final product.

A rough prototype is better than a thousand words

The combination of detailed flow charts, written functional requirements and sketched out screens, helped us align with the whole team in terms of what needed to be done. These documents gave the developers a clear overview of their tasks, and to the artists a starting point for their work.

We found out quickly that visualising as many aspects of the game as possible at an early stage, helped everyone better understand the mechanics and narratives we were going after, as well as pre-empting more expensive mistakes later in the production.

In engine animation

We created all the characters animations, cutscenes, special effects and UI for each game.

Early in the process, we decided to make all the animations inside the game engine. This allowed us to save time, since changes and improvements in an animation or graphical asset would be instantly reflected inside the game.

In addition, not working with sprite sheets helped us increase performance and lower the weight of the final builds - an imperative, considering the currently fickle internet signal in Yemen.

Character animation

Each game presented its own challenges when animating. The "point and click" adventure Secrets of Arabia Felix I&II had realistic characters, and the limitations of the 2D rig had to be taken into account when trying to create realistic motion.

The more abstract characters of Eduo Run allowed us to experiment with different types of motion. We started with a character who was sliding and surfing across the landscape, only to realise, through trial and error that a running motion looked more fluid and fun.

Arwa's World and The Republic of Sheeba required more attention to the characters' personality traits. Arwa's animations were created to suggest the way the character changes through every stage of her life. From a happy toddler she turns from into a smart, competent ruler.

The Queen of Sheeba, on the other hand, has a more humble and friendly personality, in direct contrast with her title. In the game she supports and encourages the player. Our animation here was focused on accentuating and revealing these characteristics.

A lot of attention went into making sure the motion stays fluid in every moment of the game. Whether you are jumping or landing, crashing or flying, we tweaked the animations to blend into each other.

We experimented with speed, weight and traction values to make the character feel grounded, but not too heavy. We made sure that, when crashing, the impact with the ground felt dramatic and realistic.

UI animation and special effects

Aside from animating the characters, we also created UI transitions and special effects for every aspect of the games. We designed and implemented visual feedback when the player interacts with the games' interface.

This meant animating buttons, opening and closing panels, popping up gameplay elements, designing particle effects and sounds to make every tap on the screen as delightful as possible.

The more of these details we added, the more lively the games felt. Every interaction is meant to give the player rich visual and audio feedback, in line with the look and feel of each game.

Cutscenes

Following the same method applied to the character animations, we created cutscenes inside the game engine, using the same visual assets as the gameplay. In some cases we created new scene compositions from scratch, re-arranging the existing artwork to better tell the story.

We designed the interface of 4 of the games and we created the user flow for all 5.

For the action driven Eduo Run and Eduo Quest, the consultancy team guided us towards a more glistening and young branding.

In contraposition to the darker Secrets of Arabia Felix, which has a more handcrafted and refined iconography inspired by the decoration on the traditional Yemeni jambiya belts.

We wrote briefs for the foley artist, listing and describing each sound we needed, sharing with them loop animations of the game, sketches and early builts of the applications.

Most time we ended up having odd calls with each other to clarify if it really was a “bip” or more of a “biiiip” what was needed.

We followed a similar process with the composer. It was essential for the soundtrack to have a distinctive Yemeni feeling, and the artist managed to incorporate regional elements to create layered, evocative and energizing pieces.

We worked within an extremely tight deadline, developing four games in what was less than a year. Some of the quality assurance is still in progress, however we spent  as much time as possible taking care of the following tasks between others:

• Reporting bugs and, in many cases, implementing fixes.
• Checking UI and artwork implementation and correcting it when possible.
• Refining and adding feedback animations to improve game experience.
• Creating missing assets.
• Improving character animations.

We'd like to thank everyone in the team for the lessons that we learned together and in particular the team in Yemen, who never lost their patience, enthusiasm or dedication while facing day by day far bigger challenges in their Country.