Developing Interactive Experiences for Museums and More with GDevelop

Today, we have another guest post by a GDevelop user. This time, Posh Industries' Farid Al-Ghussein talks us through how his agency uses GDevelop to create experiences for museums, amusement parks and corporate clients. Exciting stuff! Take it away, Farid.

-

My name is Farid and I run the agency Posh Industries in Sweden. We have been producing games and interactive content for exhibitions, fairs and museums since 1995. We have worked with most development tools on the market and have gone all the way from Macromedia Director and Mtropolis to Flash/Air and Unity, to now create almost all our interactive content in GDevelop.

Although we are a small company, we are involved in the entire chain from idea to complete installation. The fact that we are responsible for the entire process has proven to provide significantly greater value for our customers compared to hiring us as a subcontractor, for example a communications agency or a publishing house.

Jenni Pulli, Front-End Developer at Posh.

Thanks to being involved already at the idea stage, we can design the apps with the production tools in mind. We master all stages of the production chain.

GDevelop is an extremely efficient tool for developing games and apps and enables us to “code” without having to hire external game developers. Also we are amazed by how few limits we stumble upon. GDevelop works for almost any 2D games.

Why did we choose GDevelop?

When Adobe Air and Flash died, we started developing in Unity. The basics in Unity are fairly simple, but as soon as you want more specific functionality, it becomes complicated. We became dependent on external experts in the field and had trouble designing apps effectively, as we didn't really know how complicated it would be to bring our ideas to life.

The market for interactive elements in exhibitions, such as games and simulators, is surprisingly unexplored and budgets are often quite limited. Therefore, it is important to work cost-effectively. This is probably one of the reasons why interactive solutions in public environments are often very simple or of poor quality. For us, GDevelop has raised the quality of our productions considerably.

Open Source

Over the years, we have many times bitterly learned that proprietary development tools from big companies have developed in the wrong direction, been bought out or shut down.

Since GDevelop is open source, we don't have to worry about what the stock market demands, but we can safely trust that our colleagues in the GDevelop community are doing what is best for us game developers. In the best of worlds, we can also contribute ourselves to lifting GDevelop to new levels.

Freedom

Another reason why we chose GDevelop is the great freedom. It is as easy to produce a game for Windows, Linux, MacOS as it is for the Internet (HTML5). In addition, you can produce for Android and iOS, although it seems a bit more complicated.

Furthermore, it is a big plus that GDevelop is based on JavaScript. We can thus expand the large variety of built in GD actions with JavaScript, either as small snippets or as GD extensions.

Simplicity

Personally, I hadn't programmed in many years when I started using GDevelop in 2019. I also never felt completely comfortable with traditional programming.

It turned out to be incredibly fast for me to get started with GDevelop. Already after following a single tutorial, I was up and running with my first game, which eventually became quite advanced for a beginner. We managed to simulate a simple 3D game in GDevelop that we could publish online. It was a saving grace during the pandemic, when there was a shortage of commissions for exhibitions.

Finally I must say that I am deeply impressed and grateful for all the help I have received on the GDevelop forum.

Examples

Below I show some example videos of games we have made or are working on right now, for exhibitions. All of them are made in GDevelop.

BSSC Skansen

The video shows examples of games and interactive apps for the Baltic Sea Science Center at the Skansen museum in Sweden. We have produced for large touch screens, and used both GDevelop, Arduino, mechanics and UWB (Ultra Wide Positioning) in combination. Here we also used GDevelop's extension MQTT to connect to the UWB system.

Boliden Mining

The video shows examples of games we have made for Boliden Mining for their showroom in Sweden. We have produced large touch screens, and used both GDevelop, Arduino, mechanics and other technology in combination. We created the entire exhibition including scenography.

Shoplifting

We would have made a game for a fair to show politicians what problems Swedish stores have with shoplifting. But due to Covid we moved the game online. This is the first game we made in GDevelop. It was great that we could make HTML5 games as easily as an app, in GDevelop, once the game was complete. What a rescue!

Google Deepfake

We were commissioned by Google to show how easily you can be deceived on the Internet by, for example, deepfake videos. We made a quiz with physical buttons where the visitors had to guess which videos were fake and which were genuine. Here we used deepfake tools, Arduino and of course GDevelop.

HP Omen at Dreamhack

For the gaming event Dreamhack, we made an escape room in the form of a giant Omen computer for the computer manufacturer HP.

-

Would you like to use GDevelop to create exhibitions and apps? Open the web editor and get started today!