Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

I have previously posted about our research regarding the applications of e-Adventure in the mobile space. We started with a port to J2ME, seeing this platform as an easy way to run e-Adventure games on a phone. It worked, although it wasn’t flexible enough.

In the last five years phones have advanced incredibly. The explosion of iPhones and Android phones have elevated what can now be considered a “standard smartphone” and that’s why we switched to Android two years ago. We are now seeing good results, and our Android-related tools are evolving quickly thanks to the work of our talented developers.

We have led the development in two different directions. One line is porting the e-Adventure engine to the Android platform, so that it would be possible to play e-Adventure games on an Android phone. Right now we have an e-Adventure app that can connect to the network, download adapted e-Adventure games from a repository and launch them on the phone. This Android-based engine can also use features that go beyond the desktop version: we can define effects that are not triggered by a user action, but by locating the phone’s position using the GPS. We can also scan QR codes and trigger effects in the game depending on the code. Unfortunately, games that use those features cannot be edited with the current e-Adventure editor.

We have a video showing the current prototype.

In parallel, we have been working on a mobile game editor. The key idea here is to allow both teachers and students to draft or tweak existing games on the go. Imagine going on a field trip and planning an assignment of making a photo-based game of the visited environment: You can create the game on the spot, using the phone’s camera to take the pictures for the scenes that form the game. Of course this mobile editor is limited, and doesn’t allow the same complexity and fine control as the desktop editor. But it is possible to create game drafts on the go and then open them on the desktop for further refinement.

There’s a video for that too.

After developing and testing those two prototypes as branches of the e-Adventure platform, we have already started working on integrating them in our release process. As I mentioned a few posts ago, e-Adventure development is now split in two lanes: maintenance of e-Adventure 1.2 and the parallel development of a brand new e-Adventure 2.0 written from scratch. In the last technical meetings we have been designing a game engine that supports parallel development for the desktop and the mobile version. And once we are done with the engine, we will start working on the editor, incorporating a new look and feel, new game authoring metaphors and exportation support for a variety of formats.

We are not sure when we will be publishing the first betas of e-Adventure 2.0 including the mobile features, but we are sure it will be great.

In my last post I mentioned how, after we released <e-Adventure> v1.0, we split our development in two branches.

The first branch was focused on short-term improvements and on adding new simple functionality to our existing model. This line included GUI improvements, general optimizations and new features such as “Drag and drop”, a revamped conversation system or new exportation profiles. As I said in that post, the result of that line of work is the publication of <e-Adventure> v1.2. We have already published a release candidate, which we expect to make final within the next few weeks.

This version marks the end of this line of work. Version 1.2 will continue to be improved and supported, with minor tweaks and solutions to emerging bugs. However, this also our feature-freeze point, and no new things are expected to make it into that branch.

On the other hand, this allows us to concentrate our efforts in what we internally call <e-Adventure> 2.0, which is our current research & innovation platform/sandbox. Among many things, these are the main lines of work within <e-Adventure> 2.0:

• WEEV: Weev is the ongoing thesis project being developed by Eugenio Marchiori, proposing a new metaphor for game creation and visual languages to “weave” stories without thinking about flags and variables. The story of the game and the state changes can be defined with a high level of abstraction using the visual language, and these settings are automatically converted into an <e-Adventure> game with all the flags and conditions correctly configured.
• Android integration: We already have the engine working in Android phones (see our preview) and the next step is to provide an automatic exportation profile to the editor. <e-Adventure> 2.0 will support reading QR-codes or using GPS data to trigger effects when the games are exported to an Android phone, and the editor will allow the configuration of these aspects (we need to do them manually right now). [Read more]
• Accesibility: We have already invested a lot of effort in integrating accessibility features into our games. The next step is to make the editor as accessible as possible, and we are working in this line with Technosite.
• Plug-in architecture for the editor and the engine. The key point here is to allow independent development of new features, affecting the engine, the editor or both.
• New integration architecture, with new ideas and protocols for the integration with Learning Management Systems
• New completely revamped GUI: We are working in the development of our own look & feel, giving a unified appearance to all our projects and (hopefully) solving our ongoing cross-platform GUI issues.

Each of these lines of work would deserve its own post describing it. I will try focus on some of them in the next few weeks.

For the last year, <e-Adventure> development has been split in two main branches. On the one hand, we kept working on the current <e-Adventure> platform, solving bugs, adding a few new features and tweaking some things that we learned could be improved. On the other hand, we started a new development branch, which we internally call <e-Adventure> 2.0.

I will elaborate on what’s brewing for 2.0 in a future post, but today I would like to announce the first line has finally seen the light as <e-Adventure> 1.2. We have published a Release Candidate online and, as usual, we would like to hear some feedback about it. Among the major changes, I think that the “Drag & Drop” feature is the most novel, and covers an often requested improvement. We are excited about the potential uses for this new interaction.

Also, after our experiences with users at the Lab of Computer Science, we have added a new layer of flexibility to the conversations, and it is now possible to configure aspects such as waiting for a user click before changing text lines or having the option to display/hide the last line before a branch (so that we can ask questions and let the question remain onscreen while the student thinks about the answer).

Less prominent would be our new icon set, the performance improvements (both for the editor and the engine) and a reduced installation (which also translates in smaller applets when exporting for the web). Oh! And we also have community-contributed translations to Portuguese and German!

All in all, it is a great improvement, and we would like everyone to try it out. You will not be disappointed. Once we have gathered some feedback, we will release version 1.2 “proper”.

e-Adventure was born with the objective of reducing the barriers for game-based learning adoption. As such, it was a platform that attempted to make it simpler for small development teams, or even individual instructors, to create their own educational adventure games without any programming knowledge.

Five years later, I believe we have been successful, and I’m proud of how e-Adventure is maturing as an open platform, at a rate of 300 monthly downloads, and with new features and usability features added on every release.

In the past three years we have been organizing courses at different Spanish education institutions, such as universities or high schools, with one clear objective: To teach teachers how to teach with e-Adventure.

So far the reception has been great. Teachers like the courses, enjoy using the platform and always give us back positive and valuable feedback.

The organization is simple: For two entire days (or three days with half-day sessions) we walk the participants through the constructions of a complete game using the e-Adventure platform. We usually start with a short motivation and context lecture, and then one of my colleagues (usually Javier or Ángel) go step by step through the construction of the game, while I walk among the participants bringing anyone who lags behind up to speed. This method works great, as it allows us to impose a reasonably high pace without being concerned (or interrupted) by people getting lost in the process. The pace of the class is enough to keep advanced students engaged, while the support by the second instructors is a relief for those who sometimes loose pace.

The course is very complete, and the by the end of the second session, the students have mostly completed the Fire Protocol Game (available at the e-Adventure website). The last day we give the students an empty version of the 1492 game, with all the scenes, characters and conversations, but without any connections or behaviors. That last day is usually fun and engaging. There is no new content (just a review of previously used features) and the students appreciate the rapid progress in the creation of the game (it feels like those books in which children can paste stickers to create their own stories).

Right now Javier and myself are in Puerto Real, having just completed the first day of the course. The participants seem interested and motivated, and rather capable from a technical perspective. I think this is going to be a great course…

We are finishing some stuff related to our new and shiny v1.0 of the <e-Adventure> platform including a brand new website with community forums, sample games, video tutorials and much more. However, we are so proud of it that we couldn’t resist publishing it so that we could hear your opinions, even if the big release with the new website is still scheduled for a few weeks from now.

We have thus uploaded v1.0-RC1 (that is, Release Candidate 1) to the sourceforge repository. This version is fully functional and quite stable, and we would like everyone’s help testing it. Any bugs found in the next few weeks will be fixed for our “proper” 1.0 release, which will happen when we have the website ready and we figure out a couple of known issues.

We really hope you like it. It has taken a lot of effort to arrive to this point, a fact that is amusingly reflected by OHLOH’s metrics. Nearly $1.0M value. I wonder where all that money went …

It’s been ages since I last posted something. Time constraints this year are being worse than ever and I hardly find the time to write (interesting) things. Just to remind everyone (including me) that I still maintain this blog, I wanted to give a brief overview of the current state of the <e-Adventure> family of platforms.

Yes, I said family.

I am assuming that readers of this blog are already familiar with the <e-Adventure> platform. Almost one year ago, I introduced in this blog the <e-Adventure3D> platform, a 3D version of the same approach to educational gaming. During the last year, we have also been working on a mobile version designed to work in mobile phones, with the idea that it would be possible to create a 2D adventure game using the <e-Adventure> editor and then “export” it suiting different mobile devices.

We have been busy in the last few months promoting this family of platforms all around the world. First, I presented a very early prototype of the mobile platform (<m-Adventure>) at the DIGITEL 2008 conference in Banff, Canada (and I wrote about it).

Then, I went to Japan to present for the first time our <e-Adventure3D> platform in an academic event, the ACM Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE 2008). The presentation was very successful, mostly because the platform is really cool. I really hope we can push this development further. This is the full citation (remember that you can always find all our publications at the <e-UCM> website):

Javier Torrente, Guillermo Cañizal, Ángel del Blanco, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2008): < e-Adventure3D>: An Open Source Authoring Environment for 3D Adventure Games in Education. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2008). December 2008, Yokohama, Japan.

Only a few weeks ago, Pablo Lavín went to Jordan to present a newer, much improved version of <m-Adventure>, where he spoke about our flexible architecture designed to support multiple exportation profiles at the IMCL 2009 conference. This is the citation:

Pablo Lavín-Mera, Javier Torrente, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2009): Mobile Game Development for Multiple Devices in Education. In proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Mobile and Computer-Aided Learning (IMCL 2009), Amman, Jordan.

At the core of all these products, is the notion of using a Learning Management System as a central point in game-based learning activities. Javier Torrente recently traveled to Liverpool to present our work in how to coordinate heterogeneous game platforms (including <e-Adventure>) using a Learning Management System as a persistence layer. The presentation was very succesful and received the Best Paper Award from the Programme Committee at the GDTW 2008 conference. This is the full citation:

Javier Torrente, Pablo Lavín-Mera, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2008).  Coordinating Heterogeneous Game-based Learning Approaches in Online Learning Environments. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Game Design and Technology Workshop and Conference (GDTW2008), pages 27-36. Liverpool, UK.

As you may see, in spite of the long silences in this blog, our research line is more active than ever. We are being pleasantly successful with our products and really anxious to see how far we can go. And soon you will all get a glimpse of our recent progress. Stay tuned for the inminent release of <e-Adventure> 1.0, which right now looks awesome.

I forgot to mention that last month we released a new version of the <e-Adventure> platform. This is, honestly, our biggest release yet. In a previous post I spoke about the mid-term plans for the platform, with releases 0.8, 0.9 and 1.0 (or 0.10?) in the near future.

Well, 0.9 is available and it is mostly feature-complete. The next iteration focuses mostly on usability (many UI changes) and tweaks. So, it is more important than ever to receive constructive feedback and suggestions, so that we can push them into our 1.0 milestone.

Please go ahead, download it, make your game and then let us know what you think. Thank you.

About two years, while I stayed in Maastricht working at the OUNL ago we started collaborating with Drs. Marc Spaniol and Ralf Klamma from RWTH Aachen. They were doing projects related to interactive storytelling and we were half-way through the first implementation of <e-Adventure>. Since then, our main line of collaboration was the integration of our tools to explore new methodologies to create learning games, as described in this post from the STEG08 Workshop.

One of the most appealing “artifacts” of this initiative was an educational created by our German partners to help Afghan locals understand the procedures involved in archeological work at the Bamiyan Valley Cultural Heritage site. Niels Drobek was one of the main developers for that educational game, which stands as one of the earliests applications of the <e-Adventure> platform in a real setting.

He has put together a video about the game, and it was great to see what they accomplished with such an early version of the platform (it even has the unicorn cursor!). Thank you Niels for your great work.

Every research project comes to a stage in which the research is finished, and you have a working prototype that proves your ideas. This stage is one of the most critical points in the life-cycle. Once you reach there, the project is not that interesting from a research perspective, which means it is more difficult to find funding to keep working on it so that it becomes a production-ready tool.

<e-Adventure>, as a prototype for my PhD. work, entered that stage a few months ago. However, thanks to the FLEXO project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, the future of the platform is brighter than ever. The project is about the development of adaptive learning platforms, and one of the work packages deals with adaptive gaming. <e-Adventure> will be the core of that work package.

We have thus hired three new programmers to work on the platform, which means an important increase of our work capacity. For the duration of the FLEXO project, we will try to push the platform as far as possible, including a complete redesign of the adaptation module (of course), lots of new features and a lot of usability improvements.

Stay tuned for the next few releases driving towards our 1.0 milestone (0.8 before Christmas, 0.9 in February and 1.0 in Spring).

The article we wrote in cooperation between the <e-UCM> research group and the Educational Technology Expertise Center from the Open University of the Netherlands has finally been published in the latest volume of Simulation & Gaming.

The article describes the integration of the <e-Adventure> platform with IMS Learning Design environments, implemented over the CopperCore platform.

This is the complete reference:

Daniel Burgos, Pablo Moreno-Ger, José Luis Sierra, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Marcus Specht, Rob Koper: Building Adaptive Game-Based Learning Resources: The Marriage of IMS Learning Design and . Simulation & Gaming 39, pp. 414-431. 2008

As usual, the final draft is available for download at the <e-UCM> website.