VdBuijs School

Van den Buijs Installaties, a Dutch building-services and installation company, wanted a recruitment tool aimed at kids in the last years of primary school and the first years of secondary school, the age where they start thinking about which direction to take. The goal was to make installation work (ventilation, gas, plumbing, fire safety, energy) feel tangible and interesting instead of abstract, and to plant the idea early that it could be a career.

The game had to run well on both mobile and desktop, since it would be shared and played anywhere, not just on one type of device.

The player takes on the role of a maintenance technician walking through a school, fixing ten different facility problems (bad ventilation, no gas in the chemistry lab, leaking taps, fire hazards, energy waste, and more) within a simulated 8:00 to 16:00 workday. Each problem follows the same three-step flow: get the NPC's description of the issue, choose between a few possible solutions (each showing its cost, time, and effect up front), then check what tools the fix requires and buy anything missing before confirming. Every accepted solution spends time and money, adds comfort points, and nudges the player's score along one of three tracks (Efficient, Sustainable, or Client-focused). At the end, the highest track decides which of three technician "personality types" the player gets profiled as, with an option to email the result to themselves.

All of that content, every NPC, problem, solution, cost, and required tool, lives in one data object, so the whole game reads from a single source instead of scattered logic. If the player buys tools inside a solution screen and then backs out without confirming, the purchase needs to undo cleanly: I built a snapshot system that saves money and inventory state before a purchase and rolls it back if the player cancels.

The mobile/desktop requirement shaped the layout more than anything else: I sized the main play area to match mobile width, so on a phone the game fills the screen edge to edge, and on desktop it sits centered instead of stretching into a cluttered full-width layout. All UI motion (the idle NPC bob, the attention-icon pop-in when a problem needs attention, money and comfort counters ticking up, the tool shop drawer sliding open) runs through tweened animations rather than baked clips, which kept the interactions consistent and easy to adjust.

Design and content (the artwork, icons, and problem/solution writing) came from a colleague at Enversed Studios. I built the game itself solo: the state machine driving the day, the shop and inventory, the tutorial and popup systems, the clock and scoring, and the end-screen profiling.

A live browser game at vandenbuijs.nl/game: a full school-day loop across ten technician problems, a tool shop with a working purchase/rollback system, a day clock that caps how much a player can get through, and a personality-profile end screen with email opt-in. Built solo on the development side, on top of a colleague's art and content.

The game was well received and is still in use as part of Van den Buijs Installaties' recruitment efforts toward students considering a technical trade.