Week 5, wow. Amazing to think I'm halfway through. I wish I had longer, and not just because I'm running out of time for my study. This week we've been hammering out our quest and getting material ready for the study, a lot of time going into group meetings and discussions. The graphic above is just a little something I threw together to give our quest a more complete feel. It's been hard trying to develop a level that doesn't tie into a greater game and is only supposed to take about 15 minutes to play. Makes me sort of sad of see all this effort going into building this mini-games only to have them discarded at the end of the summer, once the data is gathered.
Here's a more detailed look at what we've done this week with the quest. Amanda, Alex and I have nearly completed one version of the quest. The dialogue tree interfaces are finished and now Amanda is just adding in some treasure for players to hunt for and some creatures they can kill, while Alex is trying to polish up the plot a bit. I've been working on building the second version of the quest that uses multiple choice and a cross between fill in the blanks and Mad libs for the interfaces. Amanda has been pounding out the multiple choice part, though we're having some troubles with users getting in with all the scrolls. What I'm talking about is that in order to get into the Catacombs, the player has to find the correct Scroll of Unlocking. The problem is the player can just pick up all the scrolls and use them, instead of finding the right one and using it. Amanda's trying to figure out a way to kill the player if they come to the door with more then one scroll, though, so we should have that problem solved by next week.
We've also had a few meetings this week about researching for the study and the paper we're supposed to be writing. the professors are planning on submiting our papers to a conference and are hoping they get published. All six of us have to write our own papers this summer, then we're going to combine them into a super paper for submission. It's going to be very, very difficult to find time to research and work in the next few weeks, though, because a group of Koreans are coming to the university and three of us are required to act as their guides. It is going to reduce our work power by a considerable amount, considering they're taking the project's three full-time interns, who have been working on this project a lot longer than those of us in DMP. We're all crossing our fingers, though.
Just to make sure I have it written somewhere, next week I plan on finishing the quest completely and start digging into research. This weekend I also need to write and submit my mid-report to the DMP, and I need to add some new pages to this website.
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