The EDIT Studio Showcase was held on August 5, 1999. This is the focal point of the entire semester. It is one of the first things we talk about at the EDIT Studio Orientation on the first day of class. Everyone knows from the get-go that their work is subject to scrutiny by their professional peers in a public forum. It is a very public event -- we send out invitations to the University, College, and Department. We never know exactly who will show up. I even sent a special invitation to our College's new dean, Dr. Louis Castenell (with a copy to all studio participants). I was looking forward to it; I always do. I think we have the best students of any IT program in the country. They do great work. But, I admit I was also looking forward to the Showcase this particular term because I was eager to show off "Nowhere Road -- The Game." The thought that professionals I don't even know will be reviewing my work is both exciting and unnerving. It pushes you a bit to want to put forward your best work, but it also makes you wonder if what you have done is good enough. I also felt the need to justify my hard work. Fortunately, I think that promoting bicycle safety is a very noble goal.
I finally added photos of Nowhere Road. Personally, I think this adds a great deal to the game. It really situates it, really drives home the context. If you've read earlier journal entries, you know that the programming for these have long been done. I had been worried about how these would increase the size of the file. Fortunately, through the power of PhotoShop, each photo only takes up about 15K of memory. Of course, each photo is very small. I figure I can include larger versions elsewhere in my web site if needed. I have another roll of film to get developed that has additional photos, plus retakes of existing photos (I'm not at all satisfied with the photo of the big old barn). I also took some extra photos of "roadside scenes" to include between the landmarks. All in all, there will be about 20 photos of Nowhere Road when the game is finished. This will add about 300K to the file's size, so my worries about the file's size are still justified (I've internalized the analogy of educational multimedia over the internet as akin to trying to push a brick through a straw). You can be sure I'll be relying on the Authorware function "Netpreload".
woohoo!If you've read earlier journal entries, you know how dissatisfied I've been with both the curve and hill gauges. Yet, I had been unable to come up with a more satisfactory design, given my inability to program in true 3-D. The problem had been festering in my brain for some time. But I made a breakthrough, using an strategy so obvious that I'm truly embarrassed. It occurred to me while biking to work one day when I was trying to pay attention to the twists and turns in the road itself. It is a rather curvy road, you know. When you drive it for the first time, you wonder what lies ahead. Luckily, such questions are foreseen by those who design roads, so they put these things on the road itself to help -- road signs! Indeed, Nowhere Road is full of them. Road signs are interesting displays. Many contain both graphical (e.g. arrows and other symbols) and verbal information (e.g. numbers and words). Most of all, they are designed around standards and conventions. After all, if every community designed with own unique signs for everything, drivers would not be sure what's going on. Anyhow, the real road signs on Nowhere Road accomplish exactly what I was trying to do in my game. So, I incorporated four road signs in my game: left turn approaching, right turn approaching, uphill grade approaching, and downhill grade approaching. To be honest, there really are no uphill or downhill grade signs on Nowhere Road, but I took the license to use them anyway.
I remembered that there was an entire clip art library in ClarisWorks devoted entirely to road signs. I quickly found the ones I needed -- left and right turn and steep grade. I spent a little time resizing these plus a few other creative constructions and was able to easily embed these into my game. The programming was already there, that associated with the next curve or hill.
Now, one might argue that the road signs are still a poor design choice in comparison to adding more natural feedback to the game, such as showing in 3-D the road as it bends, rises, and falls. That may be, but I think the road signs are a huge improvement over the curve and hill gauges. They tap into an existing schema, or mental model, of "roads" for most players. That is, most players have already learned these road sign conventions and all I'm doing is taking advantage of that knowledge. Interestingly, I've come to appreciate a little more the sophistication of road signs as a result of this design effort and am fascinated by a person's road sign "literacy". I'm very pleased by this simple, yet profound, improvement to the game.
I like giving players all the various game options. These allow a player to customize the experience as they wish. Those who just want to learn a little more about Nowhere Road can choose to cruise down the road without the need to pedal. Others can choose the challenge of the bicycling experience complete with those mean country dogs. Finally, others can choose something in-between and get some practice with the various game features. This is all very good. However, as I showed the game to people for the first time, I found myself turning off the same features for the "first ride", and then gradually started turning on features for subsequent trips, culminating in turning on those features which pose the greatest challenge. Since I know I won't be there for most people as they play this game over the Internet, I decided it would be a nice touch to formalize the two ends of the options continuum -- beginner and expert. So, I added two buttons to the options screen titled accordingly that, when clicked, automatically turn on either the beginner or expert options. As I tested this out, I found that the changes were made so quickly as to be not noticeable, so I added a little bit of attention-directing animation to help (red circles around the options that fade slowly away). This feature acts as a kind of coach because players are still free to change individual options as they wish.
I added two questions at the start of each game directly related to bicycle safety. As noted in Journal Entry 3, probably the most important bicycle safety tip is WEAR A HELMET! But, as I also noted then, it's one thing to click a box beside "helmet" in a computer game, and another to choose to wear a helmet when riding. Well, this is only a game after all, so I have to keep my expectations reasonable. I think the best I can do is just raise the level of awareness of the importance of wearing a helmet. I've settled on the simple strategy of forcing the player to declare their intent to wear a helmet or not and to build feedback into the game accordingly. For example, all crashes when the player is wearing a helmet will not result in death, but every accident without a helmet will either result in death or a major injury. Many of you may quickly point out that perhaps I will be reinforcing the wrong behavior here. That is, perhaps my game will make people want to choose to not wear a helmet solely because the feedback they get from the game is far more interesting when the player is not wearing a helmet. I've decided that this is not a problem and, in fact, is aligned with my goal of raising the player's awareness of the consequences involved. This little game will give the player the chance to explore in the safe environment of my little game, what may happen if they choose not to strap on the ol' brain bucket when they decide to zip around the block on their real bike.
I also added a second question asking the player to declare the type of clothing they will wear to raise their level of awareness of being visible on the road. In this prototype, I do not have consequences to this decision, but I will in the final game.
I provide simple feedback to the player as they make their choices and I force the player to make a choice for each before allowing the game to proceed. In this prototype, the feedback I provide is always the same, but it is a simple matter with Authorware to program in a variety of feedback responses that can be displayed at random.
I had been using pull-down menus for the following game functions: directions; restart the game; pause the game; and quit the game. Pull-down menus can be great -- they don't take up screen space and they remain secondary to other screen elements. However, users often just don't notice the pull-down menus at all. I wanted these 4 game functions to be more visible. So, I made screen buttons for each. Unfortunately, I did not have any screen space readily available, other than a narrow strip underneath the map graphic. Not an ideal placement, but not too bad. This has made a huge difference to folks playing my game for the first time.
You know, I think the game is beginning to take shape! Most important, it's to the point now where I don't have to be there to guide people through every feature and decision. It's almost a stand-alone product.
I must confess that this has been of the most difficult journal entries to write. I find the process of writing about my design most arduous ...... and somewhat ironic. What seems to take a few seconds to conceptualize then takes hours to verbalize. The design ideas that I've incorporated into this prototype came to me quickly and I immediately saw the complete design. Implementing the design changes took some time, of course. I know that this phenomenon is not new, that some of the truly great ideas of history were conceived as in a flash of insight; even Einstein talked about how great ideas struck him as a complete whole, followed by him facing the struggle of writing it all down over a period of months. Yes, leave it to me to find something in common with Einstein -- only I could find a way to connect the Special and General Theories of Relativity with Nowhere Road! But I think there is something important, and profound, in suggesting that this phenomenon occurs at the everyday level. Great ideas are, after all, a product of their context, whether that be the secrets of the universe, or the mysteries of Nowhere Road.