Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

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.

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!

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.

A rather short entry after a rather long period of silence. But at least it is something.

<e-Game> is an educational tool. It was built with education in mind and a great part of its syntax has an educational flavour. However, <e-Game> is a tool that facilitates the development of any adventure game within the boundaries of its syntax.

Our new paper entitled “Production and Maintenance of Content-Intensive Videogames: A Document-Oriented Approach” explores the applications of <e-Game> as a tool for fast and cheap development of adventure games from a Software Engineering perspective. The elimination of technological barriers provided by <e-Game> allows it to be employed in different fields of serious gaming, such as advertising, dissemination of ideas, political campaigns, etc.

And its markup syntax provides a development model in which the author writes the script of the adventure (you can call it a storyboard if you want) and the script is then marked-up with the <e-Game> syntax. This very same script is then handed to the artists that will provide the art assests.

I will be presenting this development process during the ITNG 2006 Conference, which will be held in Las Vegas in April. After returning from the conference I will write the corresponding report and elaborate more in the possibilities offered by <e-Game> as a general development tool. Las Vegas, there I go… I think this is going to be fun.