Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

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 …

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects, software engineering

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.

<e-Adventure> projects

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.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects, travelling

2008 has been a very interesting year for me. In 2007 I got my PhD degree and 2008 was an unkown. Would my life be empty after the PhD? Would I get a shot at a position in my University? Would I be able to continue working on <e-Adventure>? Would new research projects open before me? Or maybe I would simply become complacent and let a futile year go by?

Well, these are some of the highlights from the year:

• We accelerated a lot in the development of the <e-Adventure> platform, thanks at first to the involvement of Javier Torrente, and then with the support of the FLEXO project
• We have imparted three courses about the use of <e-Adventure> for teachers, educational technologists and professional content developers.
• We did some field tests with <e-Adventure> games, creating a game for medicine students and testing it with 65 students (still working on the results…)
• I signed a four year teaching contract with my department and started teaching full-time at my university
• We started a new line of research on using mobile game consoles (Nintendo DS in particular) to develop educational games
• We completed the first development of the <e-Adventure3D> platform, as described in this post
• We started working on a mobile version of the <e-Adventure> platform
• I participated in 14 research publications (including journals, conferences and workshops), with two conference papers receiving the Best Paper Award (ICWL 2008 and GDTW 2008)
• I attended four conferences (ICALT 2008, STEG 2008, DIGITEL 2008 and ACE 2008)

Not too complacent, huh? The bad part is that now I’m not sure if I will manage to pull another year like this one… I’ll tell you next year!

General conferences, projects, teaching

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).

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects

We have just finished working on a new release of the <e-Adventure> platform, already available for download on the <e-Adventure> website.

This new version is, in fact, a major release. We have completely redesigned the implementation of the project management process, thus solving all (or most) of the problems related to file saving and the ocasional .EAD file getting corrupted.

We have also included improved editor pages for assessment and adaptation profiles, timed events, timed assessment rules, active areas… It is the result of more than 3 months of work and probably the biggest update to the platform yet.

We would like to encourage all our users to upgrade to the new version (it is backwards compatible) and let us hear your feedback. The next release will focus on usability improvements so, feedback is more important than ever.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects

Last summer we were thinking about <e-Adventure> and how its simplicity might be an issue for some student profiles demanding games that were more up to date with their gaming expectations. We wondered whether a fully featured 3D adventure game editor and engine would be as simple to use as the original <e-Adventure> editor.

The conclusion was that it would probably be too hard. An editor capable of helping instructors to develop 3D adventure games would be too complex, and of course not as simple to use as the original editor. However, it was worth a try and so we started developing an experimental 3D version of <e-Adventure>

The work has been mostly carried out by three brilliant developers (Ángel del Blanco, Guillermo Cañizal and Javier Torrente) that decided to prove that it was doable. Their work has surpassed all the intial expectations and their results after one year of work are great. This is how the editor looks like:

The <e-Adventure3D> game platform is now officially a sister project of <e-Adventure>, where we will be exploring educational 3D gaming, bringing the games ten years closer to the current state of the art in entertainment gaming. Note that <e-Adventure3D> does not supercede the original platform. Both projects will continue to grow in parallel, for they serve different purposes and audiences, and represent alternative lines of research.

We belive that, even though it is still under development, we can now proudly announce the <e-Adventure3D> website, where we will be posting updated news about the 3D version of the platform and publish the beta release as soon as it is ready for the great public. Please visit the website and add it to your bookmarks.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects

The <e-Adventure> project was developed as a prototype for my thesis work. It was born as a development process model for educational adventure games, but eventually the tools developed as support for the process model have grown into fully functional products.

We have recently released both the <e-Adventure> editor and the <e-Adventure> engine for everyone to use. Leaving aside the development process model for large teams originally devised, these tools can be used by anyone interested in creating adventure games to create their own adventures without any programming knowledge. In this sense, this tool is trying to compete against initiatives such as the Wintermute Engine or the Adventure Game Studio.

Even if <e-Adventure> is not as mature as those tools, it offers some cool aspects worth checking out. To begin with, the games are stored as human-readable XML documents. This improves the maintainability and allows anyone, even without the editor, to tweak minor aspects of the gam. Additionally, it includes pedagogical features such as an internal assessment and game adaptation to suit learning styles. These mechanisms can actually be controlled from a Learning Management System, enabling online educational processes in which the games are deployed from the server as part of a course, enrichening the learning experience. For example, the games can include interactive exams and the grade can be automatically stored in the server.

I would like to invite my readers to test drive our current release (v0.2) and let us know your first impressions (write us at e-adventure#e-ucm.es) . We are still behind our competitors, but plan on catching up really soon.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I am again enjoying a research fellowship at the MGH / HMS Lab of Computer Science in Boston. Even though I am involved in a number of projects here, the main objective of the stay is to integrate the <e-Adventure> engine with the .LRN online learning environment that recently announced support for the IMS LD specification.

What does integration mean here? The idea is that <e-Adventure> games can be embedded in an IMSLD Unit of Learning and launched in the student’s computer from the .LRN platform. <e-Adventure> includes built-in mechanisms for assessment and adaptive learning, and these systems are connected to the Unit of Learning.

What does connected mean here? It means that the events that happen during the execution of the UoL before launching the game will affect the behavior of the game (tapping into the adaptation mechanism) and that whatever happens inside the game is logged by the assessment mechanism and reported to the .LRN environment in order to affect the execution of the UoL after the game.

The objective is thus to replicate and enhance the work I did at the Open University of the Netherlands a few months ago, although this time we will be paying special attention to making a general purpose solution. This means that the integration will be designed in such a way that the <e-Adventure> side should work with any IMSLD compliant system and that the .LRN side should work with any game that follows the public APIs that I’m developing here.

Moreover, in order to demonstrate all this, we will be developing at least two games during my stay. One should be an adventure game implemented with <e-Adventure> and the other a small game developed from scratch that uses the APIs to communicate with .LRN. Both games will be included in a couple of Units of Learning that will also contain “traditional” content. Unfortunately, we still haven’t found an appropriate topic for the games/UoLs. Fortunately, you are reading this and maybe you have suggestion.

Additionally, I’m taking advantage of the fact that I’m staying in Boston and going to a lot of talks, conferences and events, where I’m meeting a lot of very interesting people. I’m glad to say that <e-Adventure> seems to be gathering a nice amount of interest, which has finally driven me to update the project’s website. New samples, revised texts and… Yes! We have finally published a fully-functional version of the engine for download!

Mind you, it is not a release, just a stable snapshot of the codebase, compiled as a jar file and offered for download. It is an uncompleted and unsupported download. The official beta release of the <e-Adventure> engine is scheduled for July 2007.

Enjoy!

<e-Adventure> e-learning, educational games, projects, travelling

After several considerations, talking with some colleagues and the knowledge that in some circles the term e-game was associated with online casinos and such, we have decided to rebrand the <e-game> project.

From now on the project has been rebranded as <e-Adventure> and we have celebrated it by finally fulfilling the long term promise of updating its website. You can find it here. Feel free to visit it and celebrate with us. Also, why don’t you spend a couple of minutes telling us what you think of the new name. Is it better? More descriptive? Is it a mistake to change the name after all this time?

Anyhow, a big thank you for Bruno Torijano for the design of the new website. He is one fo the most recent acquisitions of the <e-UCM> research group and is proving to be a rough diamond.

<e-Adventure> projects