destiny team mailing list archive

[Ian Crotty <archangel114@xxxxxxxxx>]

My apologies for not replying sooner, I've been out this evening at a show
with my brother.  That could be a possibility Zach to make it a scripted
event.  As far as the embedded tabbed widget for the notebook we'll have to
make sure that the images are set to be scaled properly.  The tab takes away
pixels at the top and I'll have to go back and redo all of the images to
compensate for this pixel lost.  Its not that big of a deal but it will be
tedious.

One possibility I thought of is maybe having the notebook silently award
points, or exp based on how many entries you have in it.  Don't let the
students know this otherwise they'll just write a bunch of junk.

My main concern right now is the size of the GUI.  We're really limited with
how much we can change the size of the app and add more picture boxes and
what not and still maintain the 1024 x 768 ratio.  I don't want to shrink
the images much as it starts to detract from the experience, IMO.  Visual
games like this, from back in my day at least, always had a very basic
interface with the picture being dominant.

I figured the kids wouldn't care about the intros but I like them anyway.
 Hopefully one kid will read them and get a laugh.

Originally I had the interview button in the tools section with an image
holder but it felt clunky so I changed it.  It could easily be changed.
 Also with that, Elko and I were talking and rather than the kids just
clicking through and making a guess with a 33% (percent not modulus) chance
of getting it right, I can rewrite some of the story and introduce more
dummy characters and have a total of 6 suspects to choose from.

Most kids are lazy so I can see them not wanting to type.  I think it might
be beneficial (in a small sense) for them to have to type some things out.
 Maybe have a block saying if you haven't written down x number of clues
they can't solve it.  These are just my thoughts.

Rebuttal?

Ian Crotty
UTS Hardware Technician
Ball State University


On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Zach Elko <zachelko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Thanks for the update, Doug.
>
> When I did a long play-through last night I noticed some of the same issues
> with the Notebook, namely the minimize issue. My initial solution to this is
> to go back to the tabbed view and embed the Notebook widget in that tab.
> This makes it accessible at all times without getting "lost" to the player.
>
> As for them using the Notebook, that's sort of what I was afraid of... I
> didn't expect most of them to even bother using it. Unless we come up with a
> good way to deter them from guessing instead of trying to solve the
> scenarios, there's not much we can do in the way of forcing them to use the
> Notebook.
>
> As for the Interview, what about having that be a scripted event that
> happens automatically after they uncover a certain number of hints? It could
> be sort of an award for them trying to solve the puzzle. Also, if Ian can
> tweak the Interviews to have especially important information, it could kill
> 2 birds with one stone in nudging them to try and find clues instead of just
> clicking around randomly.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
>
> Zach J. Elko
> Ball State University Unified Technology Support
> Certified Hardware & Software Technician
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Doug Shook <dsshook@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Went and did some testing for Sleuths at Burris yesterday.  Got some
>> awesome feedback and it seems like this one might be the highest rated game
>> yet.  Some notes:
>>
>> Kids seemed to enjoy the theme of the game right away.
>>
>> The most requested feature was to make the picture of the tools clickable.
>>
>> Almost no one read the introduction paragraphs (sorry Ian...)
>>
>> Kids expressed interest in having a map.  I don't think that's feasible
>> with how much time we have left, but I was thinking that it may be
>> beneficial to switch the "Previous" and "Next" buttons to instead be a set
>> of 3 buttons with the area names on them.  This wouldn't be too difficult to
>> accomplish and would at least give them some detail about where they
>> actually were within the game.
>>
>> The interview button was routinely missed.  After pointing it out to the
>> kids a few of them suggested that it would be better to have a picture of
>> the person in the scene and be able to click on them to talk.  This would
>> essentially be like making "interview" a tool, and I think its a great idea
>> as long as we can find suitable graphics.
>>
>> About half the kids used the notebook, half of them ignored it completely.
>>
>> Also to note, about half of those who used the notebook attempted to
>> minimize it instead of closing it, which led to some confusion since they
>> couldn't see the notebook, but the game wouldn't let them click the notebook
>> button.  Also, if they have a copy of the notebook open when they click to
>> solve the game it actually opens a second copy of the notebook which doesn't
>> have the notes they wrote down.
>>
>> The notebook was also a point of contention among the kids.  They wanted
>> to find clues but they didn't want to type.  Some of them used copy paste if
>> they knew the keyboard shortcuts. I was originally on the side of making
>> them type in all the clues themselves but now I'm kind of on the fence about
>> it.  I feel like they should have to do something with the clues, but it was
>> also kind of a bummer that no one really wanted to type if they didn't have
>> to.
>>
>> The reaction to the game was, in general, very positive, and there were no
>> major negatives.  They especially enjoyed that it had nothing to do with
>> math.
>>
>>
>>
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