Monday, February 20, 2012

Various Projects

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on the expansion of the series of writings on the Customization Engine Model, and the progression of the XNA Elemens, in addition to a few new projects I have started.

Educational Game App

The first project I have begun development of has been the construction of an educational game application for the Android platform. With this application, I intend to discover, record, and observe patterns within educational video games that prompt interest in users. The application will be intended for younger audiences and will feature a variety of different modes that are extremely similar to the Elemens games I have been developing as well.

The idea was wrought from reviewing a conversation held with Dr. Xie about the effects video games can have upon young children. By replacing video games that lack educational benefits with those that do instill knowledge into children, we can enhance their mental capacities from an earlier age. Opposed to having our video games teach children the best way to kill zombies, teaching them the best methods to perform arithmetic seems as if it could assist in enabling a "smarter" society. The challenge will be to develop a game that will be primarily educational that can compete with the un-educational video games that saturate the markets. While the app is still under heavy conceptualization, I do intend to have several game-play modes, with at least one being similar to the Elemens game I'm developing in XNA. I'm setting a time frame for approximately a month and half worth of development and then hopefully release by no later than mid-April. If successfully released to the Android app market, I plan to obtain results of the study via built in surveys that will report and record information in regards to the most commonly utilized features in the app. This study will help in determining what features make an educational most appealing to players in order to maximize effectiveness when developing educational games.

Customization Engine Model

The Customization Engine Model analysis of the Soul Calibur series is wrapping up. I am doing my best to not only make it informative with a sort of a pseudo-research paper set-up, I am also trying to make it visually appealing and as accurate based on resources as possible. In the mean time, I should release the overview of the Customization Engine Model : Introduction piece shortly. This will be a similar artistic pseudo-research paper that will introduce the criteria on which I am examining in player Customization-based video games. I would like for the documents I provide to be up to a high standard before posting them for review, and based on that I feel they may require a bit more time to become fully developed.

Elemens Update

I have still been working on modifying the Element Relation Chart that was introduced in the last update, and have been continuing to work on v. 1.1.0. I have been working on trying to solidify an art style to use in the game as well. Been looking into methods to port this into a Windows Phone as well.

You Are Smart!

In regards to the application I developed for the I-Cubed Convertigo Mobilizer App Development Challenge, I am said to say that You Are Smart! did not place among the top three apps. However, I ultimately decided I'm going to utilize this resource that I created to form another medium to conduct research with. It's purpose as of this time is unknown.