Overview
Site Coach: Fall Hazards is a seek-and-find game that challenges players to identify fall hazards on a detailed construction site, engaging attention to detail and risk awareness in a dynamic, interactive environment.

I designed and implemented levels, wrote all descriptive and feedback text, guided art direction, and collaborated closely with subject matter experts to ensure scenarios accurately represented safe and unsafe practices. I also developed scoring, tutorial systems, and accessibility features, iterating through playtests to align gameplay with learning objectives.

Across randomized sessions, players inspect workers, objects, and equipment, marking hazards while exploring nearly 90 unique safety issues, building real-world awareness of fall risks in a high-replayability framework.

A Large-Scale Environmental Puzzle for Workplace Training

4-min read

This page covers:

• Designing a complex, seek-and-find puzzle environment

• Collaborating with SMEs to ensure accuracy and authenticity

• Creating the asset pipeline, rules, and logic behind hazard identification

• Accessibility-minded UI design

• Iterative playtesting and refinement

Concept & Objective
This game was designed as a training tool to help workers develop strong hazard identification skills, especially around fall hazards. Fall hazards are one of the most common causes of injury and death in the construction industry.

Our goals were to:

• Encourage deeper observation and situational awareness

• Provide a realistic representations of common hazards

• Offer a playful, exploratory way to practice safety skills

• Reinforce learning through repetition, comparison, and surprise

Before production, I drafted an extensive list of fall hazards based on my prior experience working on construction safety titles. SMEs reviewed and refined the list, ensuring everything was realistic, appropriate, and consistent with safety standards.

Environment & Asset Prototyping

The game’s signature challenge was designing a huge environment that could support dozens of potential issues that resonated with the experiences of actual people in the commercial construction trades.

I grayboxed and iterated on a modular construction site that could flexibly support:

• Varying scaffolding setups

• Ladders, lifts, rigs, tools, and materials

• Unfinished floors, railings, and edges

• A variety of worker positions and poses

• Operating equipment hazards, especially related to boom lifts.

Because assets needed to support both safe and unsafe variants, I helped define the art pipeline and visual rules so that:

• Safe vs. unsafe scenarios were readable at a distance

• The 2.5D aesthetic remained consistent across modular pieces

• Workers and objects could be swapped out without breaking the scene

• Complex structures and scenarios were depicted correctly

Throughout development, I worked closely with SMEs to confirm visual details, clarify ambiguous scenarios, and ensure plausibility.

Designing Scenarios & Interaction

A recurring design challenge was determining what exactly the player interacts with. If someone is standing on an unprotected ledge, is the issue the person or the edge?

The solution leveraged natural player behavior:

Players are more likely to tap an object or person than an empty space.

So the design reframed hazards through interactable objects or workers, never negative space. If nobody is standing on an unsafe ledge, then for the purposes of the game, that ledge is not considered a present risk. I worked with SMEs to confirm that this aligned with interpretations of workplace safety code.

I also aimed to make sure that at least one object in each category demonstrated the safe, correct behavior. Direct comparison, for example between safe and unsafe ladder setups, helps reinforce learning, rewards exploration, and encourages players to double-check assumptions.

Content & Systems Implementation

I handled a wide range of design and implementation tasks, including:

• Writing all descriptive text, including:

  • What the player sees when inspecting a scenario

  • Messages for correctly found hazards

  • Messages for false positives

  • Messages for missed hazards

• Managing and implementing assets

• Building the level layout

• Hooking up interactive logic for each object

Designing the scoring system

I was responsible for designing this system. The scoring system discourages “mark everything as unsafe” behavior. It accounts for:

• Missed hazards

• Incorrectly identified hazards

• Correct identifications

The result is a system that rewards accuracy and careful consideration.

UI, Indicators & Accessibility

The game’s hazard markers were intentionally designed to be:

• Highly visible through animation

• Identifiable through shape + color, not color alone

• Clear at multiple zoom levels

I also designed the menu as a tutorial. To begin the game, players must interact with objects in a simplified “menu level,” making onboarding active and hands-on.

Future accessibility considerations include:

• Optional text-to-speech

• Clearer prompts during early onboarding

• Improved end-of-round UX (a common point of confusion)

Playtesting & Insights

Playtesting revealed strong engagement and genuine moments of surprise:

• Many players said things like, “I can’t believe I missed that!”

• Scenarios featuring distracted workers on their phone were extremely relatable

• Some hazards were still unclear, suggesting the need for better examples or prompts

• Some players were confused by the tutorial requiring unprompted interaction

• Ending a round wasn’t always intuitive

• Zoom and pan controls could feel smoother

Overall, testers enjoyed discovering both what they caught and what they overlooked.

Iteration & Opportunities

Some opportunities for future improvement include:

• Breaking the massive environment into smaller levels. This could result in more onboarding and a sense of progression. It could also help reduce the overwhelming amount of feedback that appears at the end of a session.

• Creating pre-made, trainer-selected scenarios to support structured learning. Because the game randomly generates level content, it can be difficult to show a specific scenario. Although the randomized scenes add replayability, they make it harder for instructors to guide learners through specific scenarios and for players to demonstrate understanding of an issue.

• Improving environmental navigation and camera feel

• Incorporating stronger audio cues, feedback, and audio design.

Key Takeaways

• Early prompts and onboarding prevent confusion and frustration.

• Highly dense, randomized scenes challenge players but can overwhelm them without careful UX. Less is often more.

• Audio can make a game feel alive. Lack of audio can make a game feel dead.

CONTACT

blagania@gmail.com
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