Freude Quest – spread the happiness! Practice it in a videogame.

Written by Lubica Drangova on August 30, 2015

I am really excited and proud to introduce you a little bit of our new videogame Freude Quest, which we are creating for Goethe-Institut in Bratislava. Let me tell you the story behind it.

“We know from daily life that we exist for other people first of all, for whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.”

Albert Einstein

Well, honestly, today’s world quite sucks. All those ridiculous world-wide issues and traumas we read about every day. Problems and light depression is spreading through media and we are touched by things that happen on the other side of the world. All the time I open newspapers I feel sad. And things are getting even worse.

As somebody said, what we really can influence are our close relationships and people around us. I am always positively surprised when a shop assistant is nice to me. It can make such a difference to how I see my day. Kids are really good in this. They are not infected by our strange habits like looking straight in the street and thinking about work all the time. They smile at strangers, homeless person, people. For them it doesn’t matter which colour you are or which language you speak. Kids are not judging and they smile even more when they see you react and return the smile on them.

Goethe-Institut Bratislava approached us with a request to make an event as a side program of Spieltrieb – a travelling German exhibition. Our answer is Spiel-Institut, a video games exhibition, where we will introduce our own game Freude Quest! So what is the game about? As we were touched by recent events, we decided to remind people of the power a simple smile has. In a game your task is quite easy – share yout smile with sad pedestrians in German cities. As you make more people happy, the city unfolds in front of you. You are a small powerful girl and you can make a big difference. Let’s feel it!

Since we like beautiful things, we decided for a cooperation with Owl Illustration Agency. They suggested Jan Sramek, an illustrator, who did a great work for us. He can really capture the genius loci of a town.

Freude Quest will have a premiere on 17th September at Goethe-Institut Bratislava. Join us! There is a Facebook event as well. You will be able to choose from three towns (I won’t disclose which ones). After the exhibition, the game will be accessible online (yes, we are developing it in HTML5!) and controlled using standard input devices, but in the Goethe-Institut people will control the game with Leap motion.

Want a small sneak peek? Ok, here’s the sky! Its really relaxing to see it in motion.

Our aim is to remind people of important things as well as promote a bit couple of German towns. All of them are very specific with their atmosphere and history.

Stay tuned, give us feedback and come try it! <3 Thanks.