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Flavour is a company that is passionate about improving the world in a playful way. You notice this in the motivation and passion of the team. But also in the products they make themselves. The company stands by its principles and is truly committed to helping people.

I worked at Flavour as a game design intern and later continued as a game design trainee. I thoroughly enjoyed my time working at this amazing company with ambitious people passionate about making the world a better place through play.

I worked on their project called Hackshield as part of the deveopment team.

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Hackshield

HackShield is an exciting game about the dangers of the Internet. It teaches children (online) skills with which they can arm themselves against cybercrime. You can play the game here, sign up is free!

During my time at Flavour I among other things would mainly be working on improving the current game design and helping to design new content. Think, for example, of programming new features, fixing bugs and building new levels. But also lots of testing and keeping close contact with the target audience.

Hackshield in the classroom

When I started working at Flavour, they just launced “Hackshield in the classroom”. Hackshield started as a single player game for kids to play at home. But Hackshield in the classroom elevated its design to be played with entire class of kids and their teacher at school. It’s a bigger quest they play together tackling a larger issue in the world of Hackshield. Think of cyberbullying, disinformation or money mules.

I spent most of my time helping with the development of these quests, and testing them in classrooms. You can play these quests here with a teacher account.

Promoting Hackshield

Alongside working behind my PC in unity, I also worked at events to promote Hackshield and making it available and known to more and more people, so we can help as many people as we can.

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Glossary feature for localization

Hackshield started as a Dutch game, but due to a lot of interest we’re increasingly working on making the game available for other countries and languages. The game has a lot of dialogue text, not only for the story, but also to explain things to the children about a certain topic. As a result, words sometimes come up that the children may not yet know, such as ‘disinformation’. We had added a feature for this in the game. The children could then click on those difficult words and a pop-up would appear with the definition of the word. In the feature we then searched for the word from a list we had made (a dictionary in Unity) so that we could make it ‘clickable’. This worked fine in principle, but as soon as you played the game in another language it stopped working. Words like “Hacker” or “Data” recognized the game in both the Dutch and English versions, because it has the same translation. But words like “Disinformation” would never be found in the Dutch version, because the word “Desinformatie” is literally searched for. I had to solve this.

I did this by using a dictionary in a dictionary. A large dictionary in which we check the language, and based on that we use another dictionary with the correct definitions. Now all the difficult words are clickable for kids in any language!