Games

Project “Aoria”

Here I will describe a little about my current project. It is still in an early stage, so for now please don’t expect too much. I will actively post news on it.

Background

It all started with me trying to find some good games for my daughter, for her to play on the little tablet I bought. Struggling to find something at least close to clever, in which a child could also learn something besides tapping wild on the screen to gather random objects for some points, I discovered therre is hardly something on the market worth my daughters time, and also my money (would have been gladly happy to pay for it). And than I thought: it is not possible in an age that cannot conceive a world without electronics that the offer on the market on learning games can be so thin.

Ideea

Than I started to form an idea of a game that still brings the same amount of fun, but should also bring the parents the ease of mind, that the children are using playing as it is intended from the beginning of times: to learn, and prepare oneself for the future life. So not a game, but a game system came in mind, where parents can observe and optionally control what the child should learn in a game. Also the system would be able to detect strengths and weaknesses of a child and as a result trying to support the child to enhance those by constantly adapting the content and difficulty of the game.

The Aoria System

Working closely with someone who knows a lot about educational systems, I now want to develop a game independent system, which is only responsible of keeping track of the child’s progress. The system delivers informations to games on how they should behave, and what they should activate for a certain child. Every parent can keep track of the progress of the child, detailed on every attribute of the childs profile and also suggest what attribute the child should enhance more. Also it should detect areas where the child is especially good at, and enhance those even more

For this I set up a MySql database with tables, views and procs and also php scripts for remote database access. Also procedures have to be implemented which compares a given profile to all other profiles with the same age and location, and detects the current state of the child, and then sends information to games

The first game

For my first game I decided to go with Unity3D. Shiva3D also was an option, or maybe still is. I use Blender for modelling, rigging, skinning and animation. Renoise I use as a music tracker to compose the soundtrack of the game.

The intention of the game is also the biggest challange on the project: to create an adaptive learning game which still makes a lot of fun, and also to teach exactly what a child needs. First the game takes some basic information from the user profile in the Aoria System. With this it initially adapts some parts of the game for the beginning. Now folowing a predefined story with missions and quests, the game constantly adapts, enables, disables little tasks or adapts their difficulty. Like said, the game is in a very early stage …

Some of the game experiments: