PROGRAMMING

We added the bank scenario and dialogues/questions in the game. So now we have two scenarios: fruit vendor and bank. However, it has been challenging to integrate a rewards system.

ART

In terms of art, Andrew has been working on polishing the game environment (see below). This environment contains four social scenarios: bank, department store, fruit vendor, and street. Due to the time constraint, we will use this image both as the main game environment and as the backgrounds for the separate scenarios (zoomed in version).

Sarah is working on the sprites of the bank teller (a robot lady). Following the bank teller will be the images of shopping assistant.

Polished Game Environment in Black and White

PRODUCTION SCHEDULE

In the following week (by 4/18), we will add two more scenarios: bank and department store. We will finalize a polished UI design early next week (Monday). In terms of programming, we will integrate the rewards system, and track player data. Art-wise, we are trying to complete the game environment, and add character sprites.

PROGRAMMING

This past week we’ve made a lot of substantial progress in our main mechanics. We have all of the actual Chinese interaction segments are relatively finalized and draw data from the database. In addition to practice, multiple choice, and fill in the blank all working modularly, we now have a complete gameplay experience, being able to transfer from the title scene to the intro scene to the world scene and back to the question scene.

The next most important programming task is one more related to the goal of the project rather than player experience, which is saving individual user data. As the game is to be used as a tool to teach Chinese fluently, the instructors naturally need a way to track the player’s data as they progress throughout the game. As such, there’s a couple more tables in the database regarding player identifier information, and the player’s question responses. The challenge then becomes both tracking player throughout the game as well as saving their data uniquely to the database.

Multiple-choice question

Drag-and-drop challenge

 ART

In the past week, we came up with the sketch of the restaurant where the player practices with buddy bot and receives the quests from customers. We also experimented with UI design. In terms of the character spites, we completed different facial expressions of the buddy bot. All different expressions of buddy bot match with the expressions of NPCs (neutral, happy, confused, mad, awkward). But the expressions of buddy bot are more exaggerated than NPCs in game in order to indicate the (in)correctness of player’s language choice at the practice phase.

Over-world View Sketch

Inside Restaurant Sketch

Facial Expressions of the Buddy Bot and Fruit Vendor

PRODUCTION UPDATE

In the coming week, we will playtest the prototype with learners of Chinese. Programming-wise, we will work on saving player data, connecting different game phases, and adding the rewards system. In terms of art, we will have polished overworld view and restaurant view, bank teller character. We will also work on better UI design and look into sound effects as part of the feedback.

PROGRAMMING

Programming wise, work has been put in on making code more modular and populating scenes from the database as intended. For the moment, we’re currently a bit behind schedule as we’ve been intending to make more scenes such as moving in the overworld also integrated from the database. However, we’re keeping focus on the evaluation scenes so we can demo them on 4/3.

Within the Evaluation scene, we’ve been working on developer tools as well as the results screen.

We’ve added mouseover text so hovering over a piece of Chinese text gives you the PinYin (pronunciation) for the Chinese dialogue. This is helpful for both players and developers. For developers, since there is no guarantee that people on this team or future development teams know Chinese, having PinYin, and in the near future English, helps developers know what’s going on in-game. For Players, since the game intends to teach social scenarios as opposed to language, having a PinYin option would make the game more forgiving and not test for the wrong concepts.

ART

We came up with a sketch of the overworld environment. In this environment, the player can interact in four social scenarios: fruit vendor, department store, bank, and street (all at the left of the picture). The homebase (restaurant) is located on the right part of the picture. The player starts from the restaurant scenario (practicing with the buddybot) and rotates from practicing with buddybot in the restaurant to interacting with build-in characters in real-life social scenarios.

In terms of build-in characters, we have completed five different expressions of the fruit vendor (award, confused, happy, mad, neutral).

PRODUCTION SCHEDULE

    For production, we have adjusted our goal to completing 3 social scenarios (bank, department store, street) by the end of the semester. For the coming week (by 4/6), we are aiming to have a polished version of the fruit vendor scenario, including multiple-choice practice with buddy bot, multiple-choice challenge with the vendor, and drag-and-drop challenges.

The programming challenges include adding rewards system and tracking player data. Having finished the sketch of the environment, the next steps will be creating UI, refining the environment, and creating buddy bot.

Programming

We have scaffolded all of our different scenes; We have multiple choice scene which Brian has been iterating on and improving, a drag and drop construct your own sentence that Ryan improved on to catch partial correctness such as Sociopragmatic or grammatical errors, which will help give more constructive feedback to players and reduce frustration. Additionally, we have constructed an over-world scene, which the player can navigate using directional keys or WASD, as well as interact with people and strike up conversation.

We’ve also ran into a number of setbacks. One in particular was that upon presenting our checkpoint progress report, a guest industry specialist pointed out that our interactions differ from practice to challenge mode. Before the protagonist of our story set out into the real world, they have an opportunity to practice their Chinese with a buddy bot, providing a stakes free learning environment. The original plan was to have a fun interaction during practice mode like throwing that would help spice up the dull action of selecting multiple choice and help engage  people starting up this game, and remove it later in the game where situational context is more important. However, concerns were raised as to establishing misleading “rules” for the player and giving them false expectations.

As to where we’re going for here, addressing the concern raised above. However, the big focus moving forward will be constructing our database and game manager so that we can start populating our database and resource folders and really streamlining the process of creating scenarios and story before we start making them.

Art

As said last week, we’ve established a more focused and concrete aesthetic of solarpunk rather than cyberpunk. We’ve brought a stronger focus on the Chinese aspects of the environment. We finalized the visual layouts of the game, with the four key views being the Practice View, Challenge View, Conversation View, and Overworld View. Reactions and feedback given by the NPCs who are being questions will involve large talksprites sliding into view with the proper expression for a reaction, to emphasize the feedback being given to the player.

Going forward we will be creating polished art assets that can be used for the upcoming playtestable scenario.

Key Game Views:

MOVING FORWARD

This week we will focus on finalizing the prototype so we can move to full production in March. We need to come up with a new idea for the fun interaction during the practice phase. We need to set up “rules” so that the player will experience the same rules through different social scenarios (instead of throwing apples). We also need to build a playable sample of the game so we can start playtesting. By the end of March, we will complete four social scenarios (street, bank, department, fruit vendor) with both practice and challenges phases.

Meanwhile, Xiaofei will communicate with her dissertation committee members about the game plan to make sure that she can use the game for her research study. The goal is to minimize the variables on the interaction and learning experiences in the game and the web-based comparison environment.

Production schedule for March

PROGRAMMING

Multiple-choice Interaction (Bryan)

This week Bryan has been updating and ironing out the multiple-choice setup. The first iteration was a lot of testing different ideas and a lot of messy code. This week was spent to create something neater and more easily utilized for a larger project. So far we have a script that handles multiple multiple-choice questions, keeps track of which answers are correct/incorrect and why, provides unique and appropriate feedback for each answer (through dialogue, currently represented through basically the grossest little green text box imaginable), and has some semblance of the silly physical ramifications we wanted to incorporate into the practice sections.

We were planning to have the “challenge” portion of the game set up alongside this practice section as the next step, but after a group meeting it seems like we might want to spend a bit more time on how the practice scenario handles questions to make it more analogous to the real deal. We want to have the system set up to handle questions exactly the way we want it to before we start creating a second scenario, because any changes made after that will essentially have to be duplicated. It seems we’re setting the real scenario up somewhat differently, which means we have got some course-correcting to do before we set this up in both practice and challenge mode.

Drag-and-drop Interaction (Ryan)

Ryan has been working on how to implement drag and drop responses into our game. Part of our game consists of having Chinese learners create their own responses to questions as a way to be more interactive, so we have been working on a simple word bank and having an answerfield determine which “answer units” have been selected and in which order they are in, which we can use to construct the player’s intended chinese statement and compare it with the given answer.

Additionally, We have been working a bit on integrating SQL with Unity. Since we have a lot of dialogue, a way to effectively store and read lots of dialogue as well as edit and add to it without parsing through the code. As such, we have been looking into SQLite plugins for Unity and C#, and we’ll see if we can get it up and running before the next blog update!

CONCEPT ART (Andrew and Sarah)

We’ve experimented with style and layout and we’ve decided on a couple things: Less cyberpunk, more solarpunk, first person view during conversations instead of third person. Having decided on these points, we’re ready to move forward with designing actual game assets.

Production Schedule

By next Friday (3/2), we will build a full scenario (fruit vendor) consisting of the practice phase and the challenge phase. For art, we will have the background and characters with different facial expressions (upset, confused, awkward faces of the vendor, robot). For programming, we will have multiple-choice questions (positive and negative feedback) and Drag-and-drop (positive and negative feedback) questions.

We will begin playtesting the prototype next week and see what people think about the interactions (multiple-choice and drop-and-drop) as well as the art style. We will move forward with full production in March with the goal of building four social scenarios (Street + Bank + Department + Fruit Vendor) by the end of March.

WHO WE ARE

Hi everyone! We are Beefy Chicken Stewdios. We will be developing a RPG game for Chinese learning this semester. Our team members are:

• Andrew Chang – Artist, UI/UX Designer

I am Junior in the School of Art with a Game Design Minor. I am mostly an illustrator with a passion for making, playing and modding games.

• Ryan Eckert – Programmer, Interaction Designer

Hello, I’m a Sophmore in the Information Systems major, with a minor in Game Design. I’m mostly a programmer, but I’ve been more of a sound designer on previous projects. (Though since we have a person that can actually make music on the team I’m hoping that the sound for this game will be better than anything I can pull off). I’m excited to work on a “full scale” game that’s more than just a demo, and something that’s hopefully actually going to be played by people outside of demos and playtesting!

• Xiaofei Tang – Producer, Learning Content Developer

I am a PhD candidate in Second Language Acquisition in the Modern Languages department. I believe in the potential of using digital games for language learning. Games can provide a fun immersive environment to practice using language in context. I am very excited to develop a Chinese learning game for my dissertation study entitled “Digital game-based learning for Chinese formulaic expressions”. The study will examine the effectiveness and learner perception of game-based language learning.

• Bryan Tiggs – Artist, Interaction Designer, Programmer

I am Bryan, Game Designer with Beefy Chicken Stewdios, Master of Art and Unity, Manipulator of Sprite Sheets, Devourer of Bugs, Champion of the 2018 Global Game Jam! The elves know me as a senior Biology major, the dwarves know me as a Biomedical Engineering minor, and I am known in the northeast as a potential Game Design minor, and there may be other secret titles you do not know yet, titles so powerful I dare not utter them to mere mortals such as yourself…

• Sarah Wang – Artist, UI/UX Designer

I am a junior Information Systems major with a double in Statistics and a minor in Game Design. Despite my technical background, I have a love of art and illustration, and primarily act as an artist in my projects. I’m looking forward to learning more as both an artist and game designer through this semester-long project!

Game Concept

We are developing a RPG Fetch Quest Game for second language Chinese learners to practice using Chinese in different social scenarios in a fun engaging environment.

Plot Synopsis

You are a robot of an older model who has worked for a restaurant for as long as you have been functional. One day, your boss leaves you temporarily on a trip. “Take a vacation for once!” These words are completely foreign to you, so you open shop anyway. Due to your lack of personal skills, you don’t realize that when customers talk to you about their small requests or problems, they aren’t asking you to fix them. However, you try to help them anyway, and are sent through a series of jobs and tasks before finally returning to the restaurant.

By the end of your journey, you obtain much better social skills and the restaurant’s ratings skyrocket. You’ve even made some new friends along the way, who are now motivated to come to the restaurant and visit!

The main phases of the plot are:

1. The exposition — the leaving of the owner, the introduction of your character
2. Journey through the world
3. More journey
4. The return of your owner and a reflection on what you’ve learned

Game Aesthetic

The game will be set in the future, aesthetically lending itself to a combination of VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action and Gravity Rush. Sprites will be stylized and have dramatized poses/actions during conversation.

The layout of the game will be top-down for world traversal, and character sprite conversation overlay (akin to Fire Emblem).

Key conversations (conversations that prompt response options) between the player and NPCs will have a music shift and feel more like an event compared to just normal conversation from non-key NPCs.

Conversation — Chinese Learning

The robot will go through a series of day-to-day scenarios, in order to experience all aspects of society. Each scenario will have a series of Chinese questions that have appropriate answers based on the social connotations (i.e. some answers are too formal, have improper grammar, etc.). Correct answers will grant positive reactions from the sprites, along with continuation of conversation and plot. Incorrect answers will grant various negative reactions from the sprite, depending on what the player chose and why it was incorrect.

Scenarios

End Goal

Our goal is to make a game that engages learners of Chinese to practice Chinese expressions in an immersive environment. One challenge of making an educational game is that we want to motivate learners in a fun gameplay experience, but we also do not want to distract their attention from learning. Our end product will be used in Xiaofei’s dissertation study to test if the game promotes better learning outcomes and learner motivation compared to an online learning environment that delivers the same learning materials but without gaming elements.