Week 4

We started the week by making some last adjustments to our proposal presentation slides, and did a couple of runthroughs with Professor Gooch to help us prepare. We presented on Tuesday to the Graphics Group. The presentation went very well, and we received some great feedback and some new idea to explore.
There was mention of some computer science games that were made for programming practice and entertainment, like Crobots and Corewars. We investigated these games, and discovered that they were created for more advanced user, players who already had experience programming. Our game is aimed more towards elementary users, and students who have never used pointers before. These games are good examples of educational computer games, but not the type of game we are hoping to implement.
For our presentation, we also managed to customize a fight scene using RPG Maker, so we were able to give an example of the flexibility of the software.

The rest of our week was devoted to the storyline for our game. To get an idea of an intriguing story, we looked at the plots of some popular video and computer games. We want our game to be educational, but to also have a certain allure and appeal. First, we determined that the game will have 5 major sections, or 'worlds', consisting of 2 or 3 Quests in each world. Each one of the Quests will cover a topic in that section.
There will be to be 2 main parties in this game, and the player will have a chance to play both at the beginning of the game (female and male). However, the player will be able to choose which one he/she would like to continue playing through the rest of the game.
Second, we discussed what kind of events we would like to take place in our world. Finally, we combined both lists, and determined what events would best fit the information we were trying to convey in that Quest.
Please refer to our Storyline if you would like more information.
We believe we have a good outline of our story and the events, and are currently working on special characters to integrate into these worlds.

Debugging Sementation Faults and Pointer Problems

Here's a site we can use as a reference (if we are going to stick with our idea of having the player be a debugger, and him/her moving back through the code to set everything right).
It lists the possible errors causing segfault, and some examples.
This will be helpful later on, so we are not repeating ourselves (introducing the same problems over and over again to the user)

Storyline Ideas

We've added a new section to the bottom of the page that will help us track our characters and the events of the game's storyline

Proposal Presentation

We gave our proposal presentation today using the slides that Elyse designed and that we spent some time last night and this morning modifying and ordering.

I think it went really well -- way more people showed up for the graphics meeting then I was expecting.

We got some interesting questions. Sven pointed us towards something called "Diamond Age" that we were looking for in the lab later this afternoon, and we got some good ideas of how to map our in-game skills to real-world skills to prove that our game does what we say it is going to do. We will have to add some of this information to our game design document. We already had this idea, but now we're definitely set on have a pre- and post-test for our game testers.

Another game we need to search for is "Core Wars", which apparently integrate some computer science concepts in them.