Interactive educational game for the Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė Public Library
The client
Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė Public Library is located in Panevėžys County. It is the main library with the largest universal collection in the northeastern region of Lithuania, which develops various cultural activities. It is a modern center of innovation in literary activities in the region, providing an attractive environment and equal opportunities for learning, creating, and discovering. It ensures the implementation of the state library development programs. Serving users, providing opportunities to meet the needs of culture, informal learning, and education, to cultivate the traditions of the ethnographic regions, and to increase the spread of cultural and art services.The problem
Our client has been seeking ways to encourage the younger generation to take a greater interest in books. The desire to increase the popularity of books and to raise awareness about their educational benefits has led to a search for innovative tools to meet the needs of young explorers. The library aimed to create an interactive and engaging solution that children in our country could easily access, relate to, and identify with.The solution
We have partnered with the Norwegian creative studio Black Book to convey a creative message using innovative means that resonate with today's generation. Our team at Indeform Interactive has developed the interactive educational game "Draugoteka," which is accessible on mobile devices.The story following the content is told in purposefully recreated library spaces, where the action begins as soon as you enter. People have stopped reading books in the city. This is a time when social media and the internet have taken over more than ever, and the pressure to be constantly accessible is starting to weigh on our children/teenagers. At the beginning of the game, one of the characters, driven by curiosity, unexpectedly discovers an abandoned building, which later turns out to be our main setting - the library. Later on, other characters, called "Book Club" members, will join and will be the characters we will interact with for the rest of the time, with the player becoming the sixth member.
It is a game that develops a storyline, during which you have to carry out missions, interact with our main characters - Jonas, Klaudija, Nijolė, Darius, Adelė, and Lina - and save them by making decisions, playing mini-games, and completing various missions. Later on, the stories of all the characters are starting to get intertwined. The game ends when the player reaches five hearts of friendship with everyone. Once the five hearts have been reached with all the characters, the library takes on an attractive appearance thanks to the efforts made by the player. The city, the characters, and the library are restored through friendship.
The main point of our solution was to emphasize that the characters use the library to find solace for their problems. By exploring books, they find solutions, answers, help, and inner peace, along with strength in a stressful modern world. It also highlights the psychological problems that literature and education are used to prevent. The app wants to emphasize that the difficulties faced by our characters can also be relevant to the players. To do this, we have created the possibility of ordering books so that when children find something relevant or interesting, they can go deeper and read more about it in the real world.