After you’ve established what the learning objective(s) of your VR experience will be, it’s time to start thinking of creative ways to achieve it. You’ll want to spend time thinking about your idea, jotting down notes, and evaluating your concept against the characteristics of successful VR experiences. When you believe you have a thoughtful concept, […]
Why design, and research, custom built educational video games?
Quality educational video games take a lot of thought and time to design and produce. Game designers need time to follow a proper process and feel good about what they create. Their careers depend on producing quality work. However, researchers want data, and they want to publish now! Their careers depend on publishing and publishing […]
Successful Collaboration in Educational Game Design
One of the biggest challenges I face as an educational game designer is convincing, our often non-gamer, collaborators to respect the game design process. Working in a service unit at a University, on a non-academic career path, I look for advice from the few academic professionals who advocate for games in education. One of those […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Nine – A Second Screen
This project has been a great one for me because it has given me the opportunity to get familiar with multiple new technologies that I have never used before including the Microsoft Kinect 2.0 for Windows and the Microsoft Speech API. But, apparently, I didn’t want to stop there. Awhile ago, after playing with Nintendo’s Wii […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Six – Variety, Seeing and Viability
Up until now, I have been using a single character to test and make demos with. I did, however, duplicate that character and give him two different names for testing purposes. This was done to save time initially. I wanted to start laying down a foundation of functionality before charging head strong into creating additional art […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Three
My character’s head is sufficiently working inside Unity. All the animation keyframes I set up in Studio Max have been translated into Unity’s animation system and I have both an Animation Controller and code setup to control and blend the animations dynamically. The next thing I chose to do was give this character a body. To create […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Two
Now that I have a full textured, rigged and animated head model in 3D Studio Max, I want to export it and bring it into Unity to start exploring ways of controlling it inside the game engine. To do so I select everything, mesh and bones, and export the selection as an FBX file. The FBX […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part One
In late March, six faculty members gave a short 5 minute presentation on an innovative idea that could enhance teaching and learning in higher education. The presentations were watched and then voted on by a large audience with the expectation that my department would help the winning idea become a reality . The winning idea was to create a […]
Baby Steps and Giant Leaps: Motivating Players with Achievements
While playing your games, players will most likely want to feel like they doing well. To keep them playing, players will need to feel they are getting better or at least recognize the potential to get better. This post describes two types of achievements that can inspire people to play your games and keep them […]
Why I made a game engine
FLAG was originally developed with two main goals in mind. The first goal was to create a system that contain reusable objects, process and code for creating educational games. Prior to FLAG’s conception, each game that ETS and the EGC was producing was essentially a one off. When a new game project came along, we […]