Module: AG0982A - Creative Research

This blog documents my 3rd year research project at Abertay University. The focus of my research is on video game progression, tutorial design, and how to teach the player. My vision statement could be stated as such:

A game often needs to gradually introduce its mechanics and skills to the player. This needs to be done at such a pace that the player is neither anxious nor bored, and needs to be clear without sacrificing challenge. How can this balance be achieved? To investigate this, I've created a simple puzzle game, and released it to a sample of players. I can use data from their feedback to improve my game.

This issue came to my interest when I noticed that many games do a superb job of gradually teaching a player how to master a complicated system (such as Portal), while many other - often more complicated - games are lacking in comfortable and effective tutorship (such as Crusader Kings II), forcing players to resort to online wiki reading, and YouTube guides.

Saturday 16 April 2016

Final Tweaks with OAP Implementation

Over the course of my usage, my classmate Oliver Smith has been making a few tweaks to the Oliver's Analytics Package, which I'm using to gather data on how players play my game.

Some of the changes have been driven by my feedback. For example, where my game has 5 levels, and each one needed a game object to handle data-gathering, each with its own settings that needed to be changed constantly, I informed Oliver that finding a way to have all of these objects work with just one set of settings and one game object would be an enormous improvement. He managed to get this functionality working with an XML script to store my upload settings. As a result, OAP can now be controlled from just one game object (in my first level):


This might mean that I can now attach the TrackingScript.cs component, which marks the puzzle pieces that I actually want to track (i.e. my gem pieces), onto the prefab, but I still don't trust Unity's prefab handling, so I'll stick to having TrackingScript.cs attached to each instance separately, since it's only about 8 objects.

Oliver's Analytics Package also assigns a random name to each player as an identifier. This is used to differentiate data on the database, and to identify play sessions when replaying. However, this causes a problem. Players will play the game - giving me a set of movement data - and then fill out a form - giving me some feedback. It's important that I can link both of these sets of data between play sessions. For example, if I know that one player said that they kept getting stuck on Level 4, I need to be able to find their corresponding play session to take a look at where they were getting stuck. This session, of course, has a randomly generated name.

I can link a session's ID to a survey, however, by using pre-filled surveys. Using Unity's Application.OpenURL() function, I can open my survey's url, which has a specific section that pre-fills the "Player ID" field in the survey. If I pass the randomly generated PlayerID to this value, I can find a player's survey answers to link to their movement data.

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