Interactive experiences

Safe Place is a meditation you walk through instead of listening to with your eyes shut. You arrive in a quiet landscape and a voice-over keeps you company while you move at your own pace: a meadow, a lake, a waterfall then a Japanese garden. Each place offers one breath and one thing to do with your hands.

We were talking to students on work placements who were juggling school and a job through lockdown and had no time left for themselves. Meditation apps already existed but every one of them asks you to close your eyes. We looked for the opposite: hold the eye long enough for the head to let go. I worked on the audience and on the reference hunt, then on the art direction of the places with the team.

A contemplative experience cannot carry a chatty interface. Navigation comes down to a progress bar showing where you are and which places are still ahead. The name of the current stage sits bottom left and the sound and pause controls sit on the right. Nothing else lands on the image.

The scenery follows the same rule. A soft pink and green palette, gentle volumes, not one hard outline or sharp drop shadow, and cairns left by the side of the path by those who came before. Every element had to hold a long look without ever catching the eye, because one shape too sharp and you were out of the state we were trying to create.

Father Christmas caught a cold on Christmas Eve and can no longer do his round. You are appointed stand-in elf and you have five minutes to leave the presents under the tree, switch off the objects that the magic dust has woken up and eat the cookies left on the table. All of it without waking the family asleep upstairs.

I drew the whole flow before anyone opened Figma: the home screen, the cut scene, the controls, the three missions, the pause and the two endings. That diagram doubles as a contract with the developers because it says in writing which screen leads to which and what happens when you fail.

I also drew the flat’s floor plan then modelled the whole flat, room by room. Lighting took the most attempts because we needed a night dark enough to feel like one and readable enough to find the tree without turning the lights on.

Everything laid over the scene obeys one rule: the interface tucks into the edges or gets out of the way. The timer at the bottom, the objective bubbles top right, the controls shown once then handed back on demand. The briefing arrives by video call from Ada, Father Christmas’ assistant, and even the end screens sit on the set instead of replacing it.

It runs in the browser, inside a flat modelled in 3D and lit by candlelight. Sound carries a lot of the game since it is what warns you when an object is making too much noise.

Mamie needs two eggs for her cake and the shop closes soon. It is up to you to walk her to the supermarket across a town that will not wait for her: cars that do not slow down, lights that change too fast and a clock that keeps running.

The game is played in portrait, in short missions you pick from a board: the meeting, the supermarket then the bakery.

We started by writing our player instead of drawing. She lives in the city, spends a long time commuting, walks and runs in the parks and gives time to a charity. That portrait settled the tone: get it wrong and it is Mamie who comments, which stands in for every error message.

I designed the interface in that spirit, from the home screen to the two end screens. The town stays visible behind every screen, because a thirty-second game cannot afford to send you to a full page.

The logo, the palette, the poster and the neighbourhood all come from the same intent: simple volumes, flat bright colours and no menacing shadow. The threat had to come from the traffic and not from the set, otherwise the game turned into a road safety lesson.