Puzzle Around is a puzzle adventure game in which multiple puzzles are combined into one game by an overarching story about a father and a son travelling through Europe. There are three puzzle games included:

1. A simplified and semi-automated variant of Freecell.

2. A piling up game, where the player has to stack up a wobbly tower. A mix between Tetris and arcade crane machines.

3. A game where the player has to colour a set of tiles in specific colour
patterns which is loosely inspired by Bejeweled.

It was made to be very accessible and can be controlled with only two buttons.

Puzzle Around was made in cooperation with a client: Domien who wanted us to to make an accessible game that his son Jeroen, who is differently able and among other disabilities can only use two buttons as input for his computer.

To make this work we started with research on how to address his needs. Fortunately, nowadays you can find a lot of information through the internet, for example at gameaccessibilityguidelines.com which offer a variety of references as to what features to include in the game, as well as several Forums that help establish contact to your target audience. Most importantly however was our client, as he had direct contact to our target audience and could ask his son and his friends directly for feedback. With his help we set up a lot of rules, e.g. how long the response time should be and how fast animations can be.

A more personal request of his was, that we recreate his sons favourite game, Freecell, and modernize it which we accepted. Using that as a starting point we thought of games that are similar but break the card game theme.

My part of the development was lead game designer and programmer. As game designer I came up with the story, the modernisations for Freecell and the colouring game. As programmer I programmed Freecell and the Colouring game.