Adriaan de Jongh
Game designer

Adriaan de Jongh is a Dutch game designer best known for his work on the indie game hit Hidden Folks, a hand-drawn interactive searching game. Adriaan is also known for designing experimental games that move people out of the normal space of video games by challenging players to dance together, touch hands, or share other social interactions.

At the age of eighteen, Adriaan taught himself to code to turn his ideas into prototypes. One of those prototypes stood out and led him and a colleague to found Game Oven in 2011. For almost four years, Adriaan designed and marketed all the experimental games the studio released. When Game Oven closed doors, Adriaan continued to make prototypes and find the right collaborators for each project. In February 2017, Adriaan released the hand-drawn interactive searching game Hidden Folks together with illustrator Sylvain Tegroeg, which was received overwhelmingly positive by players and critics. He continued working on Hidden Folks for a few years, collaborated with Sokpop's Aran Koning to create the Scrabble-like puzzle game wurdweb, and is currently making the headphone party game Secret Shuffle.

Beside making and selling games, Adriaan actively contributed to the Dutch and international game developer community. Among his initiatives are: Midgame Fund, a group of Dutch game developers reinvesting their success in other Dutch games; docontract.com, a free plain-English agreement generator for game developers; playdev.club, a Dutch meetup for playtesting each others games in progress; and the Dutch Game Industry Directory, a directory that aims to list all games and companies in the Netherlands. Adriaan was board member of the Dutch Games Association and has been part of many juries and committees, such as the Creative Industries NL's Digital Culture Fund advisory committee, the Flanders Audiovisual Fund advisory committee, and the Independent Games Festival's Nuovo jury.

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