Educational team jam project. The project won the Grand Prix du Jury.
La Veste et le choléra was created during the Les Rendez-vous de l'Histoire game jam, a major French event dedicated to making history accessible to the public. Over three days, our team built an educational game about hygienism in Lyon during the 19th and 20th centuries, using historical research as the foundation for strategic and narrative choices.
The project won the Jury Grand Prize 2025 and was featured in a newspaper article. This award confirmed that my professional goal of connecting History and game design can resonate with players, teachers, and cultural audiences.
Jam objective:
La Veste et le choléra proposes an educational game for the public around hygienism in Lyon during the 19th and 20th centuries. As a team, we translated this historical subject into a balance-based decision game inspired by Plague Inc. and Frostpunk, where the player must modernize the city while avoiding population dissatisfaction, disease spread, and disastrous alternative endings.
The player embodies a decision-maker responsible for making political and social choices. Through dialogues and strategic decisions, the goal is to make Lyon more modern while keeping disease and social dissatisfaction under control.
The design challenge was to avoid turning the subject into a lecture. Instead, historical knowledge became a rule system: dates, places, policies, public reactions, and possible consequences were translated into readable gameplay choices.
Because La Veste et le choléra is above all a narrative game, the writing had to remain coherent, clear, realistic, and educational. We created an Excel document gathering the dialogues, player choices, consequences, event timing, and location/date references to preserve historical accuracy.
Each event was also linked to a value system and a unique ID, making communication between design and programming clearer and helping the team complete the game within the jam timeframe.
The game is based on choices leading to consequences, so each decision needed to be associated with precise values. Since the game includes multiple endings, we designed a system that allowed every outcome to be reachable while keeping the player immersed in the consequences of their actions.
Instead of designing this directly in-engine, which would have been time-consuming for programmers, we prepared an Excel simulation of all possible score outcomes. This made the final integration clearer, faster, and better balanced during the jam.
With my historical background and my desire to combine History with video games, this game jam felt directly aligned with my professional direction. The project showed how historical subjects can become playable systems, meaningful choices, and accessible public-facing experiences.
Winning the Grand Prix du Jury 2025 with a complete educational game strengthened my motivation to keep pursuing this path. It proved that historical transmission can work through game design when research, narrative structure, and system clarity support each other.
