Academiehuis

Academiehuis is a cultural center inside the Grote Kerk, a 600-year-old church in Zwolle, Netherlands. They wanted an interactive experience to make school visits more engaging for kids. The game needed to run on their own tablets, on-site, inside the church, teaching about the building's art, architecture, and history while keeping children moving through the physical space.

The main constraints were real: bad wifi inside a stone church, tablets as the only hardware, and an audience of kids who needed to stay engaged across 9 stops.

The game follows the angel Michael, who has fallen and lost his memory. Kids physically walk through the church, guided by an animated top-down map that shows them where to go next after each puzzle. Between stops, Michael appears in short videos, telling the story and explaining what they are looking at.

I built 6 of the 9 minigames, focusing on the mechanics: what the interaction is, how it maps to the location, and how difficulty is paced. Each game is tied to something physically present at that stop.

The games I built:

• Zerken (gravestones): Decode a numbered cipher to reveal a name. Three attempts before the answer is shown.
• Oudste Muur (oldest wall): A Tetris clone on a 15x8 grid. Stack enough blocks in 60 seconds to rebuild the wall.
• Gedachteniskapel (memorial chapel): Draw a path through a maze without touching the walls. Collision is detected using an invisible pixel-color hitmap canvas instead of a physics engine.
• Koorhek (choir screen): A Simon Says pattern game on a 4x6 grid of stone blocks. Sequences get longer as the player succeeds.
• Klok (clock tower): Stop a timer as close to 10 seconds as possible. Simple mechanic, but the character reacts in real time which makes it fun for kids.
• Schoolbanken (school benches): Carve a sentence into a desk while a teacher's head turns away. Drawing while caught resets your progress. Win by completing 85% of the path.

I also built the reusable drag-and-drop template (polygon-based hitboxes, snap on correct drop, bounce back on wrong) that a colleague used in two of his minigames.

The biggest technical challenge was making the game run reliably on tablets with poor wifi. Michael's narration between puzzles plays as short videos, and there are enough of them that loading them all at startup would crash the app on mobile. I solved this by building a dynamic loading system: videos load 2 puzzles ahead of where the player is, and unload after they pass. This kept memory usage low without the player ever noticing a load.

A web app built in PlayCanvas, delivered as a hosted build running on the Academiehuis tablets. Kids walk through the real church, interact with the game at each physical location, and piece together Michael's lost memories across 9 puzzles.

The game is live and in active use for school groups visiting the church. The client was happy with how it makes the visit more interactive for kids who might otherwise zone out in a historical building.

For me the main takeaway was learning how to build for constrained hardware in a constrained environment. Figuring out that dynamic loading pattern, and making pixel-based collision work on mobile without a physics engine, were problems I had not solved before.