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.

My research group is involved in the newly created Network of Excellence in Serious Games, funded by the EU to promote Serious games and Game-based Learning by gathering different research teams across Europe. It was about time…

As our field matures, it is becoming increasingly fragmented. Any time I go to a conference, most researchers agree in that “there’s a lot to be done”. So many open research questions. Lacking a proper direction (it is not even obvious what we should be measuring), a lot of researchers end up working in parallel on the same topics. I noticed this for example seeing how closely related were e-Adventure and the 80Days project (adaptive learning with adventure games). Hopefully, with the creation of this network we will increase communication, manage to focus on a vision of the future of serious games, and provide a forum to discuss the progress of game-based learning as a mature research field.

On Sunday my colleague Iván and me will travel to Genoa for a 3-day kick-off meeting. I’m looking forward to meeting the rest of participants and see the potential of the network.

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.

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 …

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.

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!

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).

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.

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.