Adriaan de Jongh

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, and for designing experimental games like "Bounden" and "Fingle," which move people out of the normal space of video games by challenging players to dance together, touch hands, or share other social interactions. He's also an active community member, as a board member of the Dutch Games Association, or as organizer of initiatives like Midgame Fund to fund game projects.

At the age of eighteen, de Jongh 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, he designed and marketed all the experimental games the studio released. When Game Oven closed doors, de Jongh continued to make prototypes and find the right collaborators for each project. In February 2017, he released the hand-drawn interactive searching game Hidden Folks together with illustrator Sylvain Tegroeg, which was received overwhelmingly positive by players and critics. He is currently making the headphone party game Secret Shuffle and the Scrabble-like puzzle game wurdweb.

Beside making and selling games, de Jongh actively tries to help the Dutch and international game industry. Among his side projects 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 dutchgameindustry.directory, a directory that aims to list all games and companies in the Netherlands. He is currently board member of the Dutch Games Association and advisor for the Flanders Audiovisual Fund, and has been part of many juries and committees in the past, such as the Creative Industries NL's Digital Culture Fund advisory committee and the Independent Games Festival's Nuovo jury.