GRIP - a health game

Grip is the first serious videogame
(as in something that actually got played by people instead of my little sister) for which I had the opportunity of doing all the artwork. This was right before I started working fulltime on videogames and was trying to pay the bills by selling good music in a good music store... fulltime. So the game had to be made in the spare evening hours and the weekends. Quite some killertime considering fact numbero uno: I totally underrestimated the ammount of time it would take to make a simple platformgame like this... but the project got done, people were pleased and I had a job Ranj Serious Games.

GRIP is a serious health game linked to an interactive web-based self management system for children with diabetes and their parents. By connecting personalized information from the electronic patient dossier (EPS) to a game, children learn to make decisions and develop skills based on their own current health situation. Parents and the attending physician can monitor the patients condition on a daily basis.

PLAY GRIP

So consider this situation: you have a child and it turns out to be having diabetes. You and your family are stepping into a quite new world and have to be learning a lot of new actions that have to become a part of every day life. You'll get advice from doctors and dietists and depending on the age of your child it will not always immediately understand the consequences of, say, all the different bloodsugar levels. So Grip will be a tool for them to play around with what they eat, what they do and how much insuline they should be injecting.

The setting is a silly spy story with ofcours an evil genius professor named Doctor Gluco. He is a constant menace to the Health Agency for which you will be working. In the platform game for example he stole all the files from the agency concerning diabets. So it is up to the player to retrieve the documents... which lay scattered on the roofs...

While all this running, ducking and jumping is going on the player will have to keep track of his or her blood sugar level. If it gets to high or to low it will inflict the gameplay, making it harder to get to the end. They manage their blood sugar level by eating different kind of foods or injecting a certain amount of insuline. The game was made for the Health Agency here in Holland so the game is in dutch, but I will be linking to a version of the game without text.