We flew to Shenzhen for 2 weeks… to build a kitten game for the elderly

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We were 4 weeks into building a little tabletop game that helps spot early memory loss in seniors.

The problem is, not a single senior had ever touched our game before.

And we were about to put it in front of 40 real users at Buxin Elderly Care Centre for the first time.

The 4 of us had been in the weeds of brainstorming, designing and building all this time, stuck in our own echo chamber. Did we make something fun, or completely boring?

The day before, our game looked incomplete (according to our mentors). White background, san-serif text, basic animations, it looked like an eye test honestly.

So we got to work, changing the UI/UX frame by frame into a cute 8-bit cat-feeding concept, while fixing scanning issues of our tokens. All within 24 hours.

When we reached Buxin, it felt like the moment of truth.

Thankfully, we had our first win when a lady in a green dress sat down to play.

The whole time, she counted herself down, “3, 2, 1, start”, racing to beat her own time. Her energy was magnetic. It pulled a crowd over who lined up to play our game. The more excited she got, the more energy I got too.

Even our mentors were surprised the seniors enjoyed this memory game so much.

But the same day humbled us as well.

We’d built a tutorial page to teach seniors to watch for the blue light that confirms a scan. One senior thought the tutorial was the whole game, just dropping tokens as fast as she could, ignoring the screen.

The tutorial actually made her misunderstand the game.

The bigger surprise was that seniors didn’t want to play alone.

We’d designed for solo, independent play, and what they actually loved was being walked through it while talking to us young folks. Our users don’t think the way we do, and I only learned that by standing right next to them.

The other half of this trip was Shenzhen itself.

Walking through Huaqiangbei with the rows of stalls overflowing with wires and chips, then touring the factories behind our own components… there’s this whole industrial layer we don’t get to see back in Singapore.

My favourite moment was spending a day at Creality, the world’s second-biggest 3D-printing company for consumers.

I never expected this massive corporation would lend us their workshop to learn 3D print for the first time. I was fascinated, and eventually ended up going down the rabbit hole and becoming the “3D-printing guy” of my team.

It wasn’t a smooth journey though. At the Chai Huo makerspace, I printed the same ramp 9 times, using the wrong material on the wrong machine, before it finally worked. The mentor helping me said “you only really learn when it goes wrong” and he was right.

It might be cliche, but my biggest takeaway is this: iterate with intention.

Iterate alongside real users.

Iterate in a safe space to fail fast and cheap.

And iterate without falling in love with old assumptions.

Shenzhen is right up there with my favourite sidequests of 2026 so far.