The Design Village (TDV) organized a workshop on Game Design with the title “From Near 0 to Hero – Game Design,” with Ellis Bartholomeus, an Interaction Designer, User Experience Designer, Game Developer, and Design Thinker for UG2 students.

During her class, she challenged UG2 students with an inventive exercise aimed at fostering creativity and innovation. The participants were tasked with developing new games while maintaining the core concept of Ellis’s original game, ‘Zero to Hero.’ This exercise not only honed their design skills but also encouraged them to think critically about game mechanics and user engagement.

As participants got better in the game, they fixed their mistakes and aimed to become heroes. One of the teams came up with a rather new name “Near zero to Hero”, where ‘Near zero’ acted as an encouragement for the participants. Showing that there’s hope and room to improve, capturing the game’s changing nature.

Ellis reflected “I think I’m a villager and I consider authenticity to be very important in design but it’s also overrated. So it’s nice to see how one holds onto important things and how to let go. This is also what I learned in these four weeks that I’m in India, being a facilitator is to allow my students to do the work and here they do that greatly. The conversations with the faculty, and the teachers have also been great. Thank you. I think I’m out of words.”

The highlights of the workshop were Ellis’s innovative approach to ethnography research, user research, and context analysis. Participants had the unique opportunity to engage in a neighborhood treasure hunt, giving them real-world experiences and an understanding of user behavior and environmental dynamics, an important foundation for effective game development.