Gamification, fun and collaboration in developing Mendix apps | CLEVR

This blog is about the 'Finding Treasure with Collaborative Game Design in Mendix​' video.. You can watch the video here.

What will happen if you tell a developer something is impossible? – They make it possible.

This is what Albert Leijenhorst and Daan van der Ham, Mendix developers at Magnus Green, must have been thinking when they wanted to prove that Mendix is more flexible than you might think. And the most fun way to demonstrate that is – naturally – by designing a game. Magnus Green previously demonstrated a game build in Mendix last year during MendixWorld 2019.

This year, the team went a step further in experimenting and pushing the technology by developing a collaborative native mobile treasure hunting pirate puzzle game. By using a generically designed module template, Mendix developers are invited to build their own level for the game that can be imported into the existing app. Leijenhorst and Van der Ham have made this project open for anyone, whether you are relatively new to Mendix or an experienced developer.

What I liked about Magnus Green’s project and their live presentation is the element of collaboration and making things fun. In Duncan Wardle’s Keynote speech, he argued that we need to play more in order to be creative. So what if we implement the idea that not only developing apps should be fun, but also that using apps should be more exciting, perhaps causing new ideas to blossom during the work? A couple of weeks ago, during a hackathon meeting with the SMART Digital Factory Tooling team at CLEVR, senior developer Bart Tolen and I were imagining what could be done to make the Application Code Reviewer tool (ACR) more playful. We came up with gamification elements like collecting points by solving violations, finding Easter eggs, and exchanging your points to vote for new ACR rules. Bart even built a working bonus rule that gave you points if you could spot it between the real ACR rules. By working together and connecting our ideas, our creativity extended way past where we could have gone ourselves. That is something that Leijenhorst and Van der Ham illustrated really well in their live session, and it is what we do with our community. So download the free ACR trial and let us know what you think!

The Pirate Puzzle app is available to play on iOS devices, and apart from the fact that I think it’s a good way to give yourself a little break from your work, I also believe it’s a wonderful project to empower the Mendix community by making it together.