Museum.exe is a project I facilitated and directed as a game design student. It is a game that combines game design and museum design to a great extent - something that hasn't been done before, and which is a work I'm proud of the most.
It is also a thesis project I worked on together with a team of 5 - all game design students at Uppsala University. It earned us a pass with distinction for the course and it was awarded "Jury Spotlight" at the Gotland Game Conference 2024.
Team: 5 People Software: Unity, Draw.io, Jira Roles: Facilitation, Management, Research, Design, Testing Duration: 17 Weeks
A GAME IS A GAME IS
Museum.exe is an interactive museum experience that showcases the best of the indie games industry and talks about gamemaking - how it started and how it is done today. The game contains a selection of 30+ games, scattered across themed exhibitions filled with puzzles and secret locations. No goals or objectives - explore it at your pace, any way you like!
A GAME IS A GAME IS
My Roles
Producer
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I found and recruited team members and presented a vision to work with.
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Established a team contract to follow for meetings, communication, and scheduling.
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Created a high-level plan to set deadlines and keep track of the deliverables.
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Conducted all Scrum rituals.
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Maintained a Jira board, created stories, and evaluated them with the team.
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Was always on the lookout for improving the team dynamic, workflow, and organization.
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Found voice actors and directed the voice lines needed for the game.
Vision Holder
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I created and maintained the concept document throughout the development.
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Curated the list of the presented games and categorized them into 5 exhibitions.
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Designed and implemented exhibits during both the ideation and closing phases.
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Conducted research and wrote the description of each game and explained in-depth why they are important for the game industry.
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Worked on the layout of the museum and its environment.
Additional: Playtest Coordinator
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I gathered participants and organized most of the playtest sessions.
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Created surveys, held interviews, and collected and analyzed feedback.
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Tracked and maintained the bug list.
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Facilitation
Being inspired by games like Monuments to Guilt, Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, and others, I wanted to make something that doesn't fit a typical definition of a game. I wanted to work with concepts that are unrelated to games and that can be explored by the general public through the game medium. Kind of like video essays on YouTube (that I greatly enjoy), except you also get to do something, though not mechanically intense.
Some team members, like myself, had a vast knowledge of indie games in particular, which helped with choosing the theme of the project. Besides, making a game about a familiar topic also allowed everyone to creatively contribute - while following a vision that was clear and concise.
Ventilation presentation of Museum.exe and our thesis work.
A GAME IS A GAME IS
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Design
All team members contributed to the game's design in some way or another. My design work was mostly dedicated to the general structure and the textual content of the game rather than its individual parts. Despite this, here are some examples of my work that set the pipeline for the project:
The Exhibits
Manifold Garden (2019)
A game about infinite structures and puzzles that revolve around gravity. While we didn't have the resources to depict "infinity" in our museum, I created a puzzle inspired by its core mechanics. It includes two cubes that have different gravitational pulls and a "box platform" on the wall. The catch is that the cube that fits it falls on the ground, so one would need to use the second cube that falls on the wall for the first cube to stay in one place.
The Stanley Parable (2013)
This masterpiece of a comedy game is not particularly famous for its mechanics, which is why the exhibit for it was not interactive. Instead, my installation intended to depict its unique aesthetic, which we later aligned with the museum's identity. I then worked with someone who could do voice acting and came up with lines to deliver. Now, if you stand close enough to the exhibit, you can hear the "Narrator" speaking to you.
This is a bonus exhibit I created for a game that perhaps matters more than any other. Its approach to exploration does not match any other such titles, and so I wanted to convey this design within the established puzzle vocabulary of our game. This exhibit abuses a small bug we discovered that allows players to fly upwards. While they can learn about it on their own, this exhibit gives them a hint in a similar fashion to how Outer Wilds does it, allowing them to reach the space on top and see the installation.
Outer Wilds (2019)
1. Find the dialogue between the museum visitors about the bug.
2. Locate the Outer Wilds exhibit on top.
3. Reach the area by replicating the bug.
4. Place one of your available cubes on the platform to "light up" the supernova.
The Museum Layouts
The layout of "Museum.exe" was something that had been improved upon throughout the game's development. We first created a vertical slice of the project to see how a typical "museum space" of our game would look, and then I used it to plan genre sections the game might have. There are 6 iterations total, each trying to find a balance between realistic rooms and engaging gamified environments.
Iteration 1
Iteration 3
Final Layout
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Management
There was a lot of management and documentation work done on my part to keep track of the conference deadlines, keep thesis research organized, and make working on the project more efficient. The project roadmap was maintained in diagram software and the backlog was always kept updated in Jira.
Project Documents
This link leads to the diagram software I used throughout the development. It contains high-level planning, all of our deadlines and milestones. It also contains layouts I created that mostly served us as guidance.
The document outlines our initial thoughts when we dived into the project. It has descriptions of the vision statement, the general aesthetic, and the core principles I wanted to be realized in the project.
This spreadsheet has everything from research papers to QA, the assets and the game selection. It was our main way to track and evaluate all of our data. (Note: this document is a team effort)
Since I had a lot of experience with Scrum, I chose to use it as our main framework for the project, as it fits best a project that requires a lot of experimentation. We followed the Scrum guide thoroughly but didn't keep our sprints fixed-length. When the design was less apparent, I kept the sprints 1 week long, and when the design was figured out and the remaining work required less frequent communication, we agreed on 2-week sprints.
One thing I'm proud of regarding executing scrum was planning poker. In my experience, planning poker does not motivate the team to ask questions by itself, which is why I believe asking about the first steps toward finishing a task can manifest a proactive mindset. This is useful even if the developer and the task they evaluate are not related (f.e. an artist evaluating a programming task) because this approach doesn't postpone working on the problem until after the meeting and encourages everyone to think about it now - a skill often attributed to senior developers.
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Conclusion
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This is the most significant project I worked on throughout my university education. While there were larger projects I took part in, they were facilitated by others, and I was usually given the role of a manager or designer. Museum.exe wasn't an exception to that, yet here, I was also able to direct my own ideas and iterate on them. Despite this, I can't say that it went without flaw: while the project received lots of positive feedback, we could've certainly spent more time aligning it with our core pillars. Games are never released the way they are envisioned from the start, especially those with a large budget, and I cannot stress the importance of experiencing that first-hand enough.
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Throughout the development of Museum.exe, we also reached out to some of the developers who worked on the games we showcased. While some appreciated their game being included in our project, Steve Gaynor - the creator of Gone Home, Tacoma, and other games - enjoyed our project the most. He sent us a lot of feedback on what could be improved or done better. He mentioned a "high conceptual and implementation quality" but he also explained in detail how the in-game text looked unprofessional in comparison. Since I worked on the text the most, I can't avoid saying that his feedback was one of my main takeaways as well. Check out his newsletter where he talks about our game here!