Project
City of Kotka commissioned Part of Noise to participate in COOL Kotka — a program aimed at promoting a sustainable lifestyle among city residents, with a particular focus on energy conservation. In November 2024 we facilitated a Godot game engine workshop and game jam in Kotka Lyseo highschool.
You can play all the games produced during the project here:
COOL Kotka itch page
Workshop
Together with the fine arts teacher Marjut Siro from Kotka Lyseo highschool we organized an over-night game jam for 27 students. The event was fully booked immediately after it was announced. Only a few of the students had previous experience of making games and we kicked off with an introduction to the game engine Godot by making a simple version of Flappy Bird so that every student got help if needed with the different stages. After that we announced the jam theme and the students were divided into groups and the teams started working continuing into the late night. The groups used different creative methods to create game assets. Next day the teams presented their game by playing it for the whole group.
It was amazing to see how each group managed to create a playful interaction with narratives and sounds in the short time we had. The overall feedback from the students was very positive and many wished for a similar event in the future.
Game
Energeezer is a browser game that promotes energy conservation. The player helps the titular Energeezer to learn how to be less wasteful with energy by taking them (quite literally) by the hand and turning off unneeded appliances inside their home. Sometimes the player needs to be fast as some appliances might be timed. Answering the ringing phone will give the player tips about energy saving. Fill the energy meter enough times and Energeezer will use their newly learned skills on the whole city of Kotka.
We wanted to combine factual information about household energy use with easy-to-approach gameplay. One of our core design pillars was “accidental learning”: by having the player engage with the educational content non-directly we hope that learning also happens indirectly, as if by accident. This was our way of steering far enough from the common problem with educational games: they are too focused on delivering information to be interesting (or fun!) as games. The facts given via the in-game phone calls act as a more direct way of teaching but are not forced upon the player. Instead they follow the idea of “depth by demand”, allowing the player to choose if they want to engage with a certain aspect of the game or not.
