Stijn and I happily participated in Regenerate Game Jam organised by IGDA Climate SIG during the weekend of 19-22 march.

“REGENERATE Game Jam is back, this time with a focus on Sustainable Futures! The future is not predetermined, but to achieve change, we have to be able to imagine it first! Let’s make games that celebrate futures that are sustainable, democratic and equitable.” 

The theme this year was WORLD BUILDING and the organisers provided The Game Developer’s Guide to Sustainable Futures that contained four domains of the future to focus on
1. Politics and the importance of democracy
2. Nature-people values and relationships
3. Economy on a finite planet
4. The role of technology

With all that in mind – and a day late because I failed to recognize that the Game Jam would start on Friday in the New Zealand timezone – we began brainstorming. Using the same structure I use for my Game Frame workshops.
After many hours and many good & bad ideas we settled on the idea of being able to write with flowers in public spaces like graffiti: GROWFFITI. In a future world where such art and greenery in public spaces would be welcomed, or even requested.

As the world moves in a different direction some now industrial spaces will become vacant and shared public space will shift in usage. We selected two such local environments as our play area: an unused landing strip at Schiphol and a differently used wall in Bijenkorf (biggest mall in Amsterdam).
We envisioned two modes of play: one where you can draw something and capture this in a picture and one unending zen growing mode. The flowers used should be local wildflowers to not clash with local ecology and we imagined that such plants/seeds/flowers would be freely available at a kiosk in your local park.
Stijn started building the basic interaction of growing something over your screen and I created a storyboard / screens overview. We discussed options for interaction and settled on following the mouse to direct growth and popping up flowers in screen that the player could grow over to select. Stijn continued working on the growing interaction and built a flower editor that I filled with assets of various common Dutch wildflowers: Madelief (daisy) Boerenwormkruid (tansy) Korenbloem (corn flower) and Amandelwolfsmelk (wood spurge). I painted everything on paper and we digitized these into the game. Sadly we did not have enough time to make the picture-taking play mode so we are left with the zen of endless growing.

Please take a moment to play with GROWFITTI

I hope that we will find time to improve GROWFITTI with
> the intended second play mode where you grow for about a minute and get a picture of your GROWFITTI
> add more Dutch wildflowers
> prepare the game and flower editor such that it can be easily be adapted to local circumstances anywhere by adding different local wildflowers
> better sensititivy in directing growth with your mouse
> adding ASDW interaction
> bigger area to grown on
and if you are interested in using or doing something with GROWFFITI please get in touch.

There are many interesting games/interactions that were made over the weekend – 20 in total. Some are interactive stories, some are adapted platformers, there are tiny strategy games and resource management puzzles. The aesthetics and approaches vary wildly but they are all trying to imagine a better future and somehow managed to pour this grand abstraction into a neat little game.

Play all the games from Regenerate Game Jam 2026 HERE