Collaboration with Save the City

Save the City: Hardenberg

Team: Sarah van Coevorden

Collaborated with: Bas Kluft | Stanley Kelder | Lucas Lumeij

Stakeholders: Save the City and Municipality Hardenberg

Year: 2022

Challenge

‘Save the City’ is an escape room app that needs its user to save the city. Through games, puzzles and stories, the app makes it’s users discover fascinating locations while completing quests. The creators of the ‘Save the City’ app asked me to help them with the storybuilding and visual design of the app for the city of Hardenberg.

Approach

This project was approached by visiting the city of Hardenberg and immersing ourselves in its history, characteristics, culture, and people. Through multiple iterations and regular meetings with the Save the City team and Municipality Hardenberg, the app was developed. My specific responsibilities included storytelling and visual design.

Impact

The collaboration allowed the Save the City team to successfully launch a new escape room app for the city of Hardenberg. This app is enriched with a completely new story, a captivating storyteller, and a refreshed visual design to align with the narrative.

Discovering Hardenberg

The ‘Save the City’ team visited Hardenberg to get to know the city, scout for interesting locations and learn about its history. This visit inspired the quests, and location of the quests and gave insight into the story that should be told through this game. The main message to leave behind:

The warmth of coming together

Telling a story through colours

The ‘Save the City’ team already created an app for the city of Dordrecht. They worked with a different designer at the time, but they still wanted to keep a similar style for continuity and brand recognition. Therefore, we decided to stick with a similar color palette. But we decided to make some changes to fit the characteristics and history of the city with a slighty more cozy color palette and a different storyteller that guides the user through their quests.

Storyteller: Lubbekop

Like the ‘Save the City’ app Dordrecht, this app needed a storyteller to guide the users through their quests. Together with the Gemeente Hardenberg and the ‘Save the City’ team, we decided to let this game be guided by Lubbekop.

Lubbekop was a well-known beggar in Hardenberg in the 1800s. He was an interesting person with an intriguing history and a lasting impact on the city.