Client: Netherlands Open Air Museum
Role: UX, visual design, developer
Agency: 2keer.nl

Inspiring a trip to the museum through games

The Netherlands Open Air museum is an open-air museum park with buildings of significant historical value to the Netherlands. It is the most visited museum in the Netherlands outside of Amsterdam. I designed and developed two games used in exhibitions and online promotional campaigns.

One of the games I designed and developed focusses around the opening of a new building in the museum: an emergency prefab home used in the North Sea flood disaster of 1953. This prefab home is one of the 326 homes that were donated and airdropped by the Norwegian government to provide shelter for people stuck on various islands during the disaster.

To promote and celebrate the new building the museum wanted to make a promotional game that demonstrated the use of the building and encouraged visitors to visit the museum. Players control an airplane and have to time the right moment to drop the prefab house in 5 levels of increasing difficulty. Players can earn a 5% discount per finished level, and can earn a discount of up to 25% for their ticket to the museum. 

To make sure the game worked in the browser on smartphones the game I designed it in such a way that players only need to tap at the right moment to drop the house. The game was made in HTML5 and works both on a desktop and a mobile browser, and I made a separate version that was built as a facebook app.

Another game I designed and developed was made for the ‘Heroes on the ball’ exposition. The exposition focussed on the history of dutch soccer and legendary Dutch soccer players. To promote the exposition I made a game where players could assemble their own ultimate Dutch soccer team from a pool of legendary football players in the history of Dutch football.

After assembling a team the game shows you which (in)famous Dutch football coach matches the most with you based on the choices you have made. Both the team and coach can be shared on social media to encourage your friends to make their own team.

The game was designed and developed to work on both desktop and smartphone browsers and was also playable on iPads at the exhibition itself. The game was promoted by off- and online ad campaigns and attracted a lot of extra visitors to the museum because players shared their dreamteams on facebook.