I've decided that the game will have 3 goals. The first goal is simply that the game ought to be fun for both kids and grown-ups. The second goal is highlight the beauty and eccentricity of the real Nowhere Road as it winds through Madison, Jackson, and Clarke Counties in Northeast Georgia. I wanted the game to authentically replicate my daily bike ride to and from work. Third, the game is to teach about bicycle safety, but in a way that does not interfere with the fun elements of the game. I see this as an instructional design opportunity rather than a design problem.

I consider the "acid test" of the game's final design to be whether a fifth or sixth grader would actually want to play and then continue to play the game. Of course, saying that the game teaches bicycle safety immediately sends a strong boring signal to 10- and 40- and 60-something year olds along the lines of "beware, the following software package may actually teach you something". (Parent to child: "If you don't behave, Santa will only bring you educational toys.") After all, we all know that it can't be good for you and taste good at the same time. (That's almost as un-American as suggesting one ought to exercise and eat less to lose weight!) So, my thinking is to keep the focus on Nowhere Road and use its eccentricity and the interactivity of a bicycle ride to keep the player entertained and challenged. Bicycle safety will be interjected along the way. I also see other wonderful learning opportunities, such as geography (map reading, map projection) and stuff that I haven't thought of yet.

Designing the interface

I like to start building a prototype as soon as possible and I have found Authorware to be a great tool for this. So, I began this game by playing around with an idea of how to mimic the experience of pedaling a bicycle: pressing two keys in rapid succession. It turned out to be very easy to do with Authorware. Within about 20 minutes I had built a simple interface where a small red dot moved along a (hastily) constructed "bird's eye view" of Nowhere Road. The dot moved only while 'pedaling'.

I wanted to reinforce the illusion that the player was pedaling a bicycle while pressing the two keys in succession. I have a children's animation program called "Amazing Animation" that includes a variety of clip animations, including an 8-frame sequence of a biker pedaling away. I was able to import this animation into Authorware (with a little ingenuity) and tied the pedaling action (via the keyboard) to the animation. I think it creates an effective interface. The only downside is that it depicts a "white male" as the biker. Ideally, I would eventually like the player to be able to choose a graphic that comes closer to including their own cultural group. Of course, the guy in this clip animation seems to have orange hair, a small nose, and is a little too fit, so he doesn't quite capture either my Polish-German-Slovak (i.e. American mutt), accordion-playing, love-the-Pirates-hate-the-Yankees, eat-like-there's-no-tomorrow cultural group.

Unfortunately, after playing this prototype for a little while, I found my two fingers getting tired! I decided to build an alternative input strategy of just pressing the left mouse button rapidly. This was a little tricky because at first the bicycle pedaled itself when you just held the mouse button down! (I guess this would be OK as a throttle for a motorcycle -- I'll keep this in mind for other games.)

Finally, I stumbled across one of those "Whowhere" web sites where you can get a map for any street address in the world. Yep, my street address on Nowhere Road was there. I copied and pasted this map for use in my game. This was an important step because the animation path taken by the red dot must be manually constructed. It's a pain to redo this. I'm comfortable with the look and feel of this map.

Back-Burner Design Ideas

1. It would be great to give the player control over which two keys control the pedaling action. I'm not exactly sure how to program this, but I don't think it would be that big a deal.

Technical Problems & Solutions

1. Getting the bicyclist movie to work. Authorware is now a Windows only product, but the clip animation of the bicyclist was a special Macintosh file called a PICS animation. There is no equivalent file type on the Windows platform. Instead, one has to download the individual frames as a sequence of separate BMP files, each named in a special way (i.e. biker0001, biker0002, etc.). I've done this before, but I ran into a snag. Authorware can only import these BMP files into the Digital Movie icon if they are saved at the correct "depth" (i.e. 8 bit). I was using Macromedia Director to create the BMP sequence by first importing the PICS animation into the Mac version of Director and saving the file, then reopening the Director file on the Windows platform (which worked great). Unfortunately, I had trouble saving the BMP sequence at the right depth. Even though this option can be controlled in Director before saving, Authorware continued to fail to recognize the sequence. The problem was that the Windows display itself must be reset to 256 colors at the system level. Unfortunately, I could only use Director in a Windows lab on my building's floor at UGA where this feature had been disabled by the system administrator. I had to send several e-mails and wait about 2 weeks to finally get access to this control! While I waited, I converted the animation to an AVI movie. Although the interaction worked, the overall performance was less than adequate -- because AVI movies are external to the file, there was a significant time delay for the movie to update its current frame position. As a result, the "pedaling action" was rough, jerky and not in sync with the two fingers. As soon as I was able to successfully import the BMP sequence into Authorware, I abandoned the AVI movie approach.

Post Script

My first prototype represents about two hours of work. Interestingly, I have spent far more time documenting my design than on programming the game!