Hellink (0)

Hellink was developed by a collaboration between librarians and video games veterans.

Librarians teach how to have a critical analysis of the information that we see everyday, to make the difference between fake news and reliable info. The head of the librarians/teachers at Sorbonne Université (the most important French university), Myriam Gorsse, wished to create a game to better teach this subject. Knowing that many educational games fail because they are not developed by game professionnals and lack sufficient budget, she recruited Thomas Planques, who had been working in the industry for 10 years, on games such as Final Fantasy XI by Square Enix, I am alive by Darkworks/Ubisoft, Game of Thrones by Cyanide and Remember Me by DONTNOD Entertainment.

They quickly realized that the game had the potential to be used not only for teaching to university students, but to a wider audience: in an era where information is more and more privatized, where fake news are used as propaganda by extreme right wing political parties, and where everyone gives away their personal data to GAFAM and other corporations, they believe that understanding what is at stake concerning the business of information is crucial for every citizen.

That is why they aimed to develop a game of a quality similar to that of the indie scene, in order to raise awareness about those themes, but also to take their part in proving that games that teach something to their audience can be a great experience, and to advocate for more progressive games.

Their goal, fundamentally, was to put games in the service of the population.

They recruited a team of a dozen developers, artists, scriptwriter and designers to develop the game. The development lasted from September 2015 to December 2018, and the game was released to the general audience on 25 January 2019 on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1020520/Hellink/), itch.io (https://ikigai-games.itch.io/hellink) and its own website (http://hellink.fr/).

The game in only in French for now but it will be localized in English during 2019. It has been released on Windows, Mac and Linux and will be released on Android and iOS as well by mid-2019.

After this first successful experience, in 2019 the team moves on to develop Ikigai (http://www.ikigai.games/), an educational games platform which still focuses on creating games of quality comparable to the indie scene.