Making the Games
Even before coming to Purdue and having read a share of literature to support my desire, I was an instructor interested in giving assignments to my students that went beyond the boring, traditional, academic paper. With a BA and MA in literature and only the smallest bit of comp theory under my belt, my reasoning at the time was likely– because they enjoy them. Noble beginnings, but certainly capable of being backed by some theory. I have personally experimented with all manner of assignments in my 106 classes, and the technological privileges here at Purdue have certainly helped the process (but also given me a cushy little bubble that is not entirely reflective of teaching at all institutions . . . I’ve done the community college circuit and these kinds of assignments would simply not fly there for a variety of access reasons).
As a lifetime gamer, I’ve always had a thought in the back of my mind that video game production would be another excellent assignment to get students thinking and composing in new ways. It has never been my most rational or practical thought, but I had it anyways. Then last summer I started teaching myself Flash and the opportunity to have students make video games became a bit more possible . . . for about two minutes. I am not saying it would be impossible to teach students Flash, but it is certainly not the most accessible program in the world. I am afraid that the time required to teach even the basics of the program would be too large of an investment. Nevertheless, I entered into this semester’s main project with dreams of grandeur. If I was going to someday ask students to compose video games, then I needed to make one myself– see how high that mountain climb is, if you will. That is where I started and I think I am certainly in a different place now.
Since I live and breathe academia, my first thought was that the game had to have some sort of instructional purpose. So I thought about my Flash abilities, reckoned what I could pull off, and then pondered what kind of instruction would best fit the situation. Early on I decided on a grammar teaching game. I am not the hugest fan of grammar instruction (is anyone nowadays?) but I am practical enough to realize that grammar issues pop up all the time. So the game was going to at least a mildly entertaining way to impart some grammar wisdom and allow me to develop the Flash skills I was looking for in the process.
If you play the game, it becomes immediately apparent that I had no real invested interest in making a game about grammar. In fact, if you play the game, you’ll notice that the thing stops right at the first opportunity to integrate some good ol’ grammar learning. It’s not that I couldn’t figure out a way to integrate some grammar games, it’s just that I really couldn’t get into the idea. Rule of thumb: if you don’t feel like making it then people probably aren’t going to feel like playing it (lord, if only some of the big time video game designers would follow this advice).
So what did I learn from my foray into the grammar game? Well, the most fun thing about it was constructing the narrative and setting the scenes. I developed a school courtyard background in Photoshop, used little circles to represent the moving characters, and displayed their dialogue in a bar across the bottom of the screen. Flash wise this is all really quite simple—some basic motion tweens, some forward buttons, and simple stop code. But writing the dialogue was fun and makes me think that some kind of Flash RPG could be really fun to make. The basic story (as far as I planned it) involved proper grammar lovin’ aliens coming to Earth to destroy our wicked bastardized grammar ways (the less you try to make this idea make sense, the better off you’ll be). As the hero of the game, you were to be cast in the role of an average University student who’d have to save the day by proving to the aliens that you understand basic mechanics and usage. You know, typical everyday kinda stuff.
Perhaps even more telling about my lack of interest in a grammar game is the fact that the only truly interactive gaming part has nothing to do with grammar either. It’s basically an object dodging game where the player must dodge the flames shooting from the alien spacecraft. It’s an important scene though, for it represents my first foray into more complex actionscripting (Flash’s equivalent of Java). The coding required to make the random movement and collision detection work is partially my own tinkering and partially lifted from a tutorial site. With absolutely no background in this kind of coding, I find it hard to imagine anyone in the same boat could pull off something even this simple without some code pilfering.
Simplicity might be another reason this game didn’t go very far. Since I’d been using Flash all summer to make short presentational videos, I mainly fell back on Flash skills that I already possessed. While trying to accomplish something relatively new and confusing, this is probably an understandable tactic. But it’s not a tactic that will keep someone interested in a project as involving and time consuming as game production. It wasn’t until a reading came up in my New Media class that a number of things clicked. I finally had an idea I was so interested in that starting from scratch and learning a lot of new Flash skills seemed fully worth the time.
Continue