Most children stop wetting the bed after a certain age, but sadly, some don’t. These children might have a condition known as LUTS (Lower urinary tract symptoms). For them, the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital in Utrecht has a special training program, to help them control their bladder. The training programs range in severity from a few days, to an 11-week program. To support these children during their training, we created three different games.
The first game we built was LUTS & De Mispissers, for use during the 11-week program. The goal was to keep the children motivated during that time. During the training, the children need to keep a diary of whether they were wet or dry, and how often they peed. They can fill out this information in the game. In the game, the players guide a little robot called Luts on a journey to save his friend Mina from Evil Luts. To do that, they have to battle a monster every day for 11 weeks, until finally coming face to face with his evil self, and thus defeating his own bladder problems. By staying dry and peeing often enough, the game gives you bonuses to upgrade Luts and to help you during the battles. The better you train, the better you become in-game as well, and the higher the rewards.
The other two apps are shorter variations of the first game, to be used either during a shorter training, or during a stay in the hospital.
All three games were built in the MonkeyEngine, with the first one, De Mispissers, being the first game built in the engine. For that, the entire engine was built, with support for rendering on iOS, touch input, audio, DragonBones animations, save data, and more. Android support was added in a later version. For the other two apps, support was added for multiple screen configurations and aspect ratios, localisation for English, HTTP support to upload images to Dropbox, an mp4 movie player, and easy scene transitions with animations.