PRE2017 3 Groep9 - Future Concepts

Back to the PRE2017 3 Groep9

Future concepts for the game

Knowing we are limited to only seven weeks to work on our game and design we have to limit the size of the game. However we think it is useful to explain what our game would have been if we had a whole year to create it. This is mainly important because this future design will tell something about our decisions made for our current game and why we think something like our game would be useful to society. Note that it is recommended to have taken a look at PRE2017 3 Groep9 - Game Concept, since it explains the way our demo works and goes into further detail about the implementation, whereas this section will explain more about the top level structure of the game.

Space based repetition

Because our game is made with learning in mind we would if we had the time also add an option for integrating certain learning strategies into our game. A good example would be if we were to add space based repetition in there. This would then either be an option which you can turn on or of or it would be tied to the scores you can get (you would have to wait longer before you can get more score from the same word if you have them correct more often and lose score if you can’t remember older words). The reason for us wanting to add something like this in our game is to improve the long term learning capabilities of the game because space based learning helps with the long term memory by asking the same word in increasing intervals.

Structure of the levels

The game will consist of multiple sets, or levels so to speak. This section will explain how each level will be played. A level is basically a rotation, as in it rotates through a set of words until all words and their minigames in that set have been played. Now there are a few rules to these rotations. If the player correctly answers the word part of every word, the rotation ends after every word has passed once. However if the player answers wrongly, the same word will reappear after a few other words. If there are no other words left except for the wrongly answered word, the rotation will be extended by also repeating 2 or 3 words already passed, the words chosen for this will firstly be words that took more than 1 try to get correct in the current rotation, and then simply be random words from the same rotation.

Highscores

The scoring system in the game is a relative scoring system. This means the score will be represented as a percentage of how good you were at the game. This score will be given after the user finishes a “rotation”, as explained in the previous section. The score is influenced by both the performance in the minigames, and the performance in the word part. For every word question not correctly answered the maximum score percentage that the user can achieve is lowered, meaning a user cannot get a top score without knowing all the words. Apart from this scoring system, there will also be a secondary scoring system for the words only. This scoring system will also be a percentage based system.This score will be for progression through the game, and as possible feedback for teachers as explained further in the next sections.

Progress

The words to be learned by the game will be divided into different sets, or levels so to speak. These levels will start with easy words and become increasingly difficult. At the start of the game the user will only have access to the first level. In order to unlock the other levels, the user has to have managed to get a perfect score for the words in the previous level at least twice. Each level comes with a variation of minigames, which invites the replaying of older levels because some of those minigames might not be in the later levels. This way the user will keep revisiting the older levels, and thus keep repeating the older words.

Audio

A huge part of a language is pronunciation. Especially for languages like english, knowing how to write a word and how to pronounce it can have a huge difference. This is why our game should also contain audio for every word. The audio would be played automatically when the player encounters a word.

Use in educational institutes

This game is mostly focussed on self study, however it could also allow teachers to follow the progress of their students using the game. Teachers could get access to the secondary score of the students, in order to see the progress of the students