BBH London 56 Sage Street
10.06.15 – When 56 Sage Street begins, you have just arrived in the city, with only 4 £ in your pocket and a headful of dreams. To make it in the city you’ll have to be smart about your actions and keep your eyes open for opportunities. In this immersive game, produced in collaboration with BBH London for Barclays, you get important financial lessons as you make your way through the city.
In this collaboration with BBH London for Barlcays, the idea was to create a game to improve teenagers’ understanding of banking. Barclays had done a successful educational board game previously, and BBH was out to create an updated digital version.
From the outset we understood we’d need to create something that had depth and wasn’t just a quick & fun game – it had to properly integrate key financial lessons and also provide a game experience that was more complex and layered than anything we had done before.
In a collaborative and iterative process we worked together with BBH to define the game. The challenge was to create an overarching game design that was both fun and appropriate for Barclays, as well as finding the smaller, more immediate game elements that would draw players into the game.
The production involved a ton of 3D work to create the game world. Working with references was an indispensable tool to find the right tonality locking in the style for our different neighborhoods.
By creating some general game rules and separating all the level data from functionality we were able to fairly painlessly work on the levels in parallel with development. This allowed us and BBH to play the game, tweaking it as we were going along. Our goal was to have a wealth of options and paths forward at the same time as we wanted a real direction in the storytelling.