GCAP 2017

Stirfire created "Safety Beach" for Surf Live Saving WA to help children learn important rules to keep them safe at the beach. We wanted to demonstrate to the customer that a game of this kind would be effective as well as fun. In developing the game, we focused on the design principle of "procedural rhetoric" to make sure the rules of the game reflected the safety rules of the beach, so it was teaching not just what the rules are, but why they're important. Before releasing the game we did some qualitative testing with children to see whether it really did work as designed. The results were very useful for us as well as for the customer. Stirfire would like to share what we learned to help other studios develop serious games on a tight budget for customers that are perhaps hesitant to go in this direction.