Castle Defender
A historic site people had stopped visiting became a stage: a body-controlled game projected onto the castle itself, inviting passers-by to defend the walls and rediscover the heritage of the place while playing on it.
- Client
- Public heritage site
- What we did
- Game design, development, projection and tracking integration
- Tech
- Microsoft Kinect · Processing · projection mapping
- Methods
- Design thinking sessions, iterative prototyping, public usability testing
- Outcome
- Revived civic engagement, community evenings at the site
Heritage that nobody visits is heritage that fades
The brief was civic: bring people back to a historical site and revive the heritage of the place. Signage and plaques weren't failing for lack of information, they were failing for lack of a reason to show up.
The answer was to make the site itself playable. The castle isn't the backdrop of the game; it is the game. Play turned out to be civic infrastructure: it translated dense heritage planning into something a passer-by can argue with, collaborate over and care about.
Prototype, test, enhance, repeatedly
The final game design came out of multiple design thinking sessions, working prototypes and a lot of usability testing. Public installations get tested by everyone who walks past, not just recruited participants, and every round forced changes to both visuals and code.
- Body tracking via Kinect made the player's movement the controller. No instructions, no hardware to hand out.
- Processing ran the game logic and visuals.
- Projection mapping aligned the play field to the real stones, arches and gate.
No screen, no controller, no tutorial. If you can wave your arms, you're already playing.
interaction principle
Nothing could be faked
The projection had to fit the real wall, the tracking had to survive real crowds, and the game had to be fun in the dark, outdoors, with strangers. Kinect tracking, the Processing runtime and the projection pipeline were combined into one installation that ran unattended through community evenings.
The result did what plaques and consultations couldn't: it made the heritage worth showing up for.
