Serious games
Building serious games and digital learning experiences in a leading creative studio — from early concepts and prototypes to polished releases, with hands-on technical leadership.
Since 2005, both as an employee and as a freelancer at &Ranj, I’ve contributed to over a hundred serious games and digital learning experiences: narrative games, simulations, coaching apps and more. I work across disciplinary boundaries, thinking along with designers, developers and product owners while bringing a strong technical perspective and ownership. I communicate openly, challenge assumptions and raise difficult questions when I see weak spots, helping the team make better-informed decisions.
The work spans a wide range of clients and industries, from smaller organisations to multinationals and NGOs, across sectors including healthcare, pharma, finance, energy, academia, retail, consultancy, government and recruitment. It involves adapting to different teams, technologies and client requirements, collaborating closely with client-side technical teams, and managing complex or constrained integrations. I’ve worked on every part of development: technical design, backend and integrations, localisation, tooling and devops, engines and editors, analytics and app store releases. My heart is in the frontend.
Selected work
Tech lead · LMS integration · Engine & tooling
Narrative games: engine, implementation, integration
As tech lead, I built many of &Ranj’s narrative serious games: interactive case studies in which players work through realistic scenarios. Clients include Johns Hopkins, PwC, Johnson & Johnson and PeaceNexus, plus many more whose games are under NDA.
These games rarely stand on their own. Most run inside a client’s learning management system, so I integrated them using standards such as SCORM and xAPI, platforms such as Cornerstone, and a variety of custom-built systems. These backends are often not suitable for games, making integration without loss of functionality a challenge.
Underneath the games is the engine, together with a game template, a suite of editors and devops tooling. I helped develop and maintained these over the years. The template gives every new game a solid starting point. The editors let designers and writers create and refine scenarios without needing a developer. Tooling streamlined a lot of peripheral tasks such as localization, tests and CI/CD.
Cross-discipline · Client collaboration · Data validation
Assessment games, designed together with the client
Recruitment agency Equalture uses short games to give insight into how candidates think and work. Their scientific models are only as good as the data behind them, so together with Equalture’s tech team we designed how every play session is tracked, which makes it possible to validate those models.
Beside developing the games, I had a real say in the game design and the interface. It’s the kind of project I enjoy most: close collaboration across disciplines on something that has become an ongoing success for the client.
Interaction prototyping · Browser performance
A recruitment game that pushed the browser
What would you choose? is a small web game that introduces ING to potential new colleagues. Small, but not simple: we went through many quick prototypes to find interactions that would surprise players yet feel natural right away.
The visual ambition asked a lot of the browser in 2016. To keep it smooth I dug into how browsers decode and render images, profiling and tweaking until it ran fluently.
Pioneering integration · Technical stakeholders
A pioneering game on an emerging eHealth standard
KickASS, a game that helps adolescents with autism explore strategies for difficult social situations, was the first game to connect to Koppeltaal, the Dutch standard for linking eHealth applications, while the platform itself was still taking shape. A game asks different things of a platform than a questionnaire or an e-learning module does, so our integration stretched what Koppeltaal could do at the time.
The main part of my work was thinking along with the platform’s various technical stakeholders: working out together what was needed to integrate our game and similar interventions that followed.
Measurement strategy · Data insights
Data Analysis & Visualization
Across projects, I helped teams and clients decide what to measure, analyze the resulting data, and turn it into meaningful insights through visualizations. My work ranged from shaping measurement approaches to building data pipelines and implementing data transformations that brought disparate data into a consistent, usable structure.