#sprinttwo

[exergamingforstudents]

Forming and Beginning A Game Design Documentation

One of the most important things when developing a game is creating a Game Design Document. I have recently started one for this project and have started by explaining my desired platform hardware and giving an insight into what games have influenced me and my decisions as a game developer. I have also briefly outlined the main game mechanics and their individual goals at the start of the documentation as a precursor for a more in-depth analysis at a later date.

The Version 0.1 of this documentation can be found here.

[exergamingforstudents]

Reflecting On and Updating the Original Proposal

After the most recent consultation session with Peta, I was able to get some very valuable feedback on how my game could be improved to try and appeal to children over a longer period of time. I was able to corroborate this with the research I did and discovered that although my game targets a niche market it doesn’t do much in the way of introducing a story that would be able to further envelope the player(s). Given the age demographic and how young they are, having a nice story, even a really simple story would be beneficial for the half-life and overall playability of my game.

The Changes Made:

Original:

Originally, I was planning on just having 3 separate games that the player(s) could choose from. At runtime, the player would select a game, play it and be done with it. I was planning this because the entire point of my game at this point was to be a before school activity and I was working off the basis that “anything is better than school.” However, even games within schools need to be more engaging entertaining than simply click here and play the game.

New:

With the feedback I received, I decided to implement a story into my game. Even though it will be incredibly basic I believe that it will increase the overall enjoyment felt by players whilst also being an additional challenge where I can flex my creative muscles and see if they still work.

The Story:

The story I have devised around pirates. This was chosen as pirates were something that I could conceivably do that would have the least amount of gender bias (i.e. It is easy to have female and male pirates). The children playing the game need to go from port to port to collect treasure. To make the captain happy (planned to be a random generation between male and female captain) the crew has been split up into teams where each team challenges one another to get the highest amount of gold at each port (this is where my scoring system comes in). There will be two modes for the children to play. One mode where the game automatically takes players from port to port and one where the teacher can decide at their own discretion where they want the children to go next.

Selection Screens:

Pirate Select - Male

Pirate Select - Female

As stated above the gender of the captain will be randomly generated at run time. Some days a male captain will run the crew and other days a female captain will run the crew.

Pirate Map:

Each port relates back to one of my game ideas and the names make it pretty obvious which port belongs to which game.

Working into the future:

Although the story adds a lot to the gameplay and the overall “gaminess” of the interactions I feel that my concept lacks the feedback loop that is important for children to receive to keep them entertained. Although, as adults, we can get enjoyment from seeing a small score counter go up the same does not apply to children. Therefore, it appears that my future work on this game will be centered around increasing the viability of the proposed story whilst also working on ways to implement the said core feedback loop in a way that it would be appropriately found on a pirates ship. Furthermore, any feedback implemented will have to be changed from captain to captain. Given that most feedback will most likely be audio 2 differing audio sets will need to be created. One for a female voice and one for a male.

[exergamingforstudents]

Formation and Validation of Hypotheses

4:00pm, 20 August 2018, GP P413

It is important when tackling an issue to generate a hypothesis around that issue then check if the said hypothesis is testable with stakeholders and ultimately whether the said hypothesis can be more refined and cut down as not to have too wide of a scope. This is a small segment completed by the team as part of an external exercise.

Breaking Down Hypothesis Formation:

Context: Exergaming for young children

Problem: Children don't get enough exercise and too much screen time

Question: How to create a fun and engaging gaming experience where exercise is a side effect

Resulting Hypothesis / Testability:

Hypothesis: Does a game make a child want to exercise more than traditional methods?

Is this testable? Yes

Generating Hypothesis Related Questions for Stakeholders / Professionals:

Q. Could health issues be a problem for some children given the exercises we decide to implement?

Q. What exercises do you find fun? (For Children)

Q. What most impedes a child’s engagement with exercise?

Q. What are the current modules for dealing with said impediments?

Q. What gaming experiences do you find fun? (For Children)

Q. Do you see any problems or limitations on a large group of children exercising together?

Refining the Hypothesis:

Hypothesis: Having the opportunity to exercise via an exergame, will a child be willing to participate in physical activity where they traditionally won't?

Generating a Hypothesis Validation Model:

Possible Project Avenues:

Although having a hypothesis doesn’t change the way I approach the development of my game it does present to me an opportunity for a more in-depth analysis of children at play that could be used to generate useful data that could allow for better games to be created, both video and not, that encourage children to begin playing outside again and hopefully increase their exercise gradually over time. 

[exergamingforstudents]

Testing Spawning And Object Physics

While having motion controls that work is important having nothing to do with them renders them useless. Because of this, I have to start prototyping how my game world will react and ultimately how my game will play. In this prototyping session, I set up a separate unity program so I could prototype random spawning and object physics.

Random Spawning:

The video below shows the start of my prototyping. As can be seen, I have set up 2 sets of 3 spawners. In my actual game, the spawners will be invisible. They are currently left visible, so I have a visual representation for prototyping. I set up code that randomly chooses the same spawner on each side, then select a random GameObject out of a list of GameObjects to spawn. I then just let them fall down using the gravity function available in the RigidBody function of unity.

Keeping Objects In Place:

Now that I had a system that allowed me to spawn objects in a random designated spot I just needed a way to contain their movement, so they didn’t fall off of the screen. To do this I froze the objects Z components in the Rigidbody function and created a box of box colliders to act like a basket to cradle to the objects in. By doing this I ensured that the objects only fell down to a specified height and that they couldn’t roll out of the bounds of the basket I had made.

Free Moving Objects:

As can be seen in the previous video, when the objects land on one another they do so in such a way that they become ‘perfectly balanced’, well, we don’t want this, it’s boring to watch things stay in place and also means that the screen fills up incredibly quickly. To fix this I implemented 2 separate methods. I added a physics rendering to every prefab that I spawned, and I also created a Sin function that ‘shook’ the spawners and what this allowed me to do was ensure that the objects never truly fell on top of each other and they would not take up the screen as fast and look more fluid in their nature.

Singular, Random Object Spawning:

Finally, the last thing I worked on was my spawning mechanic. My game works by spawning numbers between 1 and 10 so that it isn’t confusing for both myself, as a programmer, and the children as players I need to find a way to spawn only 1 number at any given time. As an example, I only want the number 5 on the screen once for each side at any one time. To do this I implemented a list variable. Every time an object is spawned its spawning number is logged and then checked before a new object is spawned. If the auto-generated number is present in the logged numbers a new number is generated until one is found that does not exist. Ultimately, at a later date when a question is answered, and the screen is cleared all I will need to do is clear the list and start again.

Going Forward:

Now that I have motion controls and random spawning working I just need to mold them together. This should then create a base for me to actually begin creating the game, with scores and time and randomly generated questions for the players to work with.

[exergamingforstudents]

Working With Research Papers and Other Technologies To Form Better Game Models

In order to get a more official understanding of exergaming for children, I need to read through some papers that aim to get the same result as I do, that being a game that I can implement in a school environment that teaches children while they exercise. This work is in collaboration with notes previously found by Thomas Priest.

Paper 1 - Hunting Relics: A Persuasive Exergame to Promote Collective Exercise in Young Children:

The paper aims to break down the design and evaluation of a previously created exergame, Hunting Relics

The paper explains and utilizes the COM-B model to explain the design and development of the aforementioned Hunting Relics game and focusses main on how to design exergames that function on interactive floors and as such, can be used to support young children with collective exercise modules

The COM-B model is used to promote healthier behaviours. It also analyses a participant’s behaviour within the exergame and looks at the effects when the game adapts to their psychological and physical abilities to interact.

The games main aim is to help two scouts find their fathers lost relic. They accomplish this by traveling between four different islands. On each island, the players must face different eye-foot coordination challenges, to avoid and overcome obstacles

The game is designed in such a way that it encourages and rewards continuous play. Every time the players commence a game session they will be lead towards a differing relic from the one they found previously, ultimately to relieve game monotony

Finally, the game strongly encourages co-operative play, which for the desired age group, ultimately increases the game's playability

Analysis and link to my proposals:

Hunting Relics will definitely be a considerable influence on my game in a myriad of diverse ways. First, I will definitely have to look into developing a greater connection with the COM-B model. This is ultimately because I don't have full control over who is playing my game and their separate strengths and weaknesses (This was also bought up by our project mentor Peta, an idea about creating an algorithm that can scale difficulty given how much the player is struggling in the game). Furthermore, it will also allow me to generate ideas on how I can most efficiently increase player excitement and enjoyment of the game to increase its longevity. Although my game doesn't have a system in which I can give the players constant rewards (like the relic system) I could possibly use randomly generated, rigged character models for the players to interact with, in such a way that the children don't know what character model is going to spawn when they enter the screen. The whole idea being that it is intriguing and changes the overall look and feel of the game for every play session(Hopefully).

Cibrian, M. L., Tentori, M., & Martínez-García, A. I. (2016). Hunting Relics: A Persuasive Exergame to Promote Collective Exercise in Young Children.  International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 9(1), 277-294. https://doi-org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/10.1080/10447318.2016.1136180 

Paper 2 -  Exergames for children with motor skills problems:

This paper focuses on the improvement of physical therapy for children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD)

DCD being a disorder which makes healthy children extremely uncoordinated, to the point where normal everyday tasks are painfully difficult

Currently, the physical therapy for children with this disorder is repetitive and children find repetition extremely boring

Froggy Bobby is an exergame designed for kids with DCD and is designed to answer whether or not this game can improve children’s coordination skills through repetitive play and practice.

Froggy Bobby, tracks kids arm movement with the use of sensors whilst getting them to move their arms in a coordinated fashion to, as a frog would, catch flies

Children are asked to catch flies based on colours and as the levels progress the game gets more and more difficult to increase the children’s repetition skills

Analysis and link to my proposals:

What this tells me about my game is that it may be too repetitive in some areas. While my game has the added benefit that it is set in school and, let's be real, nothing is more boring than school it still leaves a large opportunity for the game to be outed by more fun and interesting titles. If children find repetition so incredibly boring, how long could they possibly grab the right numbers and put them in the right spot? Their enjoyment may be greatly limited. I believe I can remedy this with a scaling difficulty. A physical and mental scaling difficulty. The physical being that numbers and objects move much faster, so the student needs to move quicker to actually participate in the game and the mental scaling being that questions eventually go beyond, easy, fast comprehension into something slightly more stressful when considering a time limit. Furthermore, and, more to the point of the article, how can I work with the disabilities of some students? Not every classroom is full of perfect Sam’s and Sally’s, in almost every classroom there will be a child who struggles in some physical way to play my game and omitting a child from play is purely unacceptable. The problem will be creating a system in the game that notices this and adapts the play style accordingly. Possibly a teacher-controlled trigger or something of the sort that allows them to tell the game that a student with x disability is playing and therefore this section of the game should function in x amount of ways different to the original version.

Caro, K. (2014). Exergames for children with motor skills problems. Sigaccess Newsletter, 108, 20-26. Doi: 10.1145/2591357.2591360

[exergamingforstudents]

Starting with Kinect and Prototyping Movement

One of the biggest challenges I face in this project is creating a viable prototype that I can present at the end of the work period. Today I was able to begin some very basic development with the Kinect and how to track movement.

Setting Up:

Began by getting the Kinect linked with my PC and ensuring all the drivers worked and that it mapped movement appropriately.

Also checked out the depth perception of the camera in 3D because I found it interesting.

Linking with Unity:

Getting the Kinect to work with Unity was simpler than expected. All I had to do was import a Windows specified package and implement it into some C# code. Doing this I was able to generate a very simple skeletal model.

This is the basic skeletal model I generated to get a better understanding of how the Kinect measures and registers movement.

Next, I worked on scoping down the number of parts being followed by the Kinect so that I was only my hands and my head.

I was able to get my hands and head-tracked well. I later found that depending on the amount of light present this either works better or worse. In normal light, I can bring my hands together without issue but in lower light (even with light provided from bulbs) the Kinect struggles to accurately follow the movement.

Finally, I did some work to see how easy it would be to sense that an object is being touched by my hands. Using colliders this task was also surprisingly easy.

A small bug that kept changing every time I booted the level was where colliders were actually seen to be colliding. In some cases, the collision worked perfectly, and I was able to almost have my hands perfect around the sphere without interacting with it, however, other times my hands could be a considerable length away and the sphere would still be interacted with. Still trying to debug whether this is my code or the Kinect.

Going forward:

I was able to develop a really solid base on my first day and because of this, I am really confident about my future work in the project. I plan to start auto-generation and scoring in my next session. I will work off the basic collision model for now as I am unsure of how to grab objects.

[exergamingforstudents]

Mentor Meeting and Breakdown of Ideas

3:30pm, 20 August 2018, GP PS1010

This week the group received feedback on their initial proposals from a diverse set of eyes. This proved to be helpful as it allowed us all to receive honest criticisms on our game ideas and also allowed us to receive insightful feedback on possible flaws our game may have that we unintentionally looked over during our short development stage.

Feedback Notes:

Note Breakdown:

Relating back to my initial proposal Peta was able to pick up on intricate details that I had overlooked or process that I accidentally omitted from my experience that ultimately would detract from the overall “gaminess” of my project.

More serious issues:

Space:

From Peta’s (and the universities) experience with Kinect, they found that getting too close to other people resulted in a lot of clashing and most importantly, painful headbutts

This presents an issue given the demographic and proposed setting for my game as I ultimately don’t want to have young children clanging their heads together early in the school morning

Possible Solution(s):

It was suggested that when the game starts that the players be issued a warning, similar to many Kinect and motion-controlled consoles (Wii)

It was also suggested that I write up a risk assessment plan and create an infrastructure on steps players should take to avoid collisions and what to do if a collision is to occur

Game related issues:

Gamifying the experience:

As it stands my game isn’t a true game-like experience. It lacks some sort of small and interesting story for the children to follow and the areas presented were generic and uninteresting

The experience needs to be GAMIFIED

The experience needs a journey

Possibly the children follow a pirate (or control a pirate) as he moves from Island to Island and them as teams must work to show who is more up to the challenge of being a pirate

Peta also suggested that the game have an interesting interactable map, so every game has a location and thus ultimately adds to the interest that the children may have in the product

Very simple map mock-up. The children select where they want to go. The boat goes there, and they complete the game associated with the area. They can also select their pirate name, to give the game a somewhat more personal feeling. Furthermore, each zone would house new characters would the children to become.

Working in with their timeframe and environment:

Peta also suggested, that if there was no choice that the games work in a certain order so that children would be readier for school when the games are completed (remembering this is made to be played before classes start at school)

The idea was that the students start with the Tug-Of-War game

This would allow them to burst out a large amount of energy quickly and hopefully calm them down for the next game

The next game would be the Simple Grammar game

This is due to its complexity in relation to the Numbers game

It would be nicer on their brains if the game started difficult then moved to easy before the day started

Finally, the Simple Addition game would start

This would hopefully be easier for the students to work with and get them ready for the day ahead

Object association and maths:

One last point Peta made was about the Simple Addition game. Her proposal is that there are two game modes. One with just numbers and one with amounts of things

As an example, one mode shows 2+2 =? and the other mode shows 2 apples + 2 apples =? apples

Another simple mock-up of the adding game but instead there are apples and not just numbers. This was suggested by Peta as an association of objects with numbers is something used by early years teaching. Such as counting on fingers etc.

[exergamingforstudents]

Further Research and Working With Different School Environments

When working with children it is imperative to understand how they learn and therefore, how to create the most effective gaming experience that they would have the best engagement with.

Information congregated with a Tumblr post made by Jordana Palmer and further explained by the Russel Island Teaching team.

For reference, Russel Island struggles with a large number of struggling students due to their home lives. Many students at the school do not have positive role models and show that in their actions at school. Therefore, I thought I would congregate some of the previous information gathered and work it in with the context of a struggling school environment.

Not all children work well with ‘negative’ feedback, must keep it positive

This goes double for students in certain schooling environments

Need to remember that some students come from lifestyles that are already negative

Some schools don’t necessarily have access to the appropriate technology

A large portion seem to have at least some appropriate technology

Many schools have at least a projector or TV

There are multiple issues with children’s understanding

Ridiculously short attention spans

Hearing impairment or deliberately ‘selective’ hearing

Poor coordination and balance issues

Slower mental student development

Extremely poor English and understanding of English

Children of the specified student age only respond positively to certain gaming aspects

The game must engage the student

The children must find it fun (like any game but more for children of that age)

Cannot use any negative language

Students respond poorly to it

Some students get enough negative language at home, they don’t need more

Always acknowledge the child’s achievements even when minor

The students may not get positive reinforcement at home, they will respond better if they are encouraged

Constant feedback for all actions to keep the students engaged 

Students react the most positively to a game that incorporates the following ideas

Imagine in play (like superheroes or cartoon characters) 

Children at this age are constantly imagining. Therefore, they find a game where they play themselves to be boring

Interactive media (incorporating dancing, acting or singing)

Chasing each other

Searching for a goal 

Being able to explore as a child is fun. Not easy to facilitate but fun for the students

Hiding a physical goal

Incorporate physical actions to get the goal, i.e. digging

Further game ideas that could be introduced into the school environment

Yoga - basic poses

This may not work for some students, as some students cannot hold a pose or sit still for the required amount of time

Memory games with numbers or puzzles

Guessing games - children retain facts incredibly well

This doesn’t apply to all students. A small number of students cannot retain information over short periods of time 

This is usually due to a small attention span

Skills that could possibly be developed further

Hand-eye coordination 

Hopping, skipping and jumping

Co-operation

Walking backward

Balance

Following instructions

One foot in front of the other (heel to toe)

Fine motor skills to help with writing

Cognitive skills

Language

Climbing

Core body strength

Although a large amount of the information is useful it seems to be worked in with a perfect or moderate school, however, does not work efficiently with the school structure that works with more ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘disengaged’ students.