21/3 The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

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The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

Description:

An educational mobile game targeted for kindergarten kids to study and play at the same time. This game aims to help children understand complicated concept through playing and to help parents to teach their children by using interactive and cute characters to engage the children.

The game will be based on the story “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse”.

(Story can be found here)

The Player will be playing as the Country Mouse. Throughout the journey, player will be taught subject like English/Math and moral values. The Country Mouse will guide the player by reading to the player, instruct and teach the player.

Game play:

As the Country Mouse, player need to help it to finish its journey by making the correct choice. These choices are related to the story line and the correct answers are the correct grammar/vocabulary/numbers.

This mobile game will come with a toolkit with random blocks or cards inside. Using AR technology and the materials from the toolkit, the characters in the story will be reflected on the objects in the toolkit to trigger certain animation to tell the story. Throughout the game, player will meet characters formed by alphabets to help children remember spelling or to understand mathematics concept.

Aim for using AR:

To build motor skill by incorporating physical toy, a toolkit with random cards/objects to activate the NPC into the ‘real world’.

With physical blocks/cards, children can build random structure (motor skill) based on their own imagination and interpretation of the space. Children can shift around these objects to see how the character interact with it, like they are playing with a virtual friend.

2. Find at least 3 projects that you can use as reference for your own project. These are works done by other artists or designers that will help illustrate the direction and inspiration of your project proposal. Describe clearly what aspect, technique etc. of each sample work is useful for the development of your own project proposal.

Dora the explorer 

A talking protagonist that reads the story, explain, instruct, encourage and praise the player. Player can interact, sing along, dance, and answer questions. Dora also teaches Spanish, counting, team work, persistence and many other things.

Another interesting point about Dora the explorer is that it is able to engage restless young minds and hold them spellbound with these strategies:

1. Present a Compelling Mission – Each episode begins with a challenge that Dora and her friends are compelled to overcome.  They discover they must get from where they are to a distant location while avoiding a series of obstacles along the way.

2. Gain Clarity of Direction – To find their way, she calls on help from ‘the map’ in her backpack. The map comes alive to provide very clear directions with relevant landmarks. The map repeats each step three times, asking the viewing audience to join in and recite them a final time.

3. Appeal to Diversity – Dora realizes that not everyone watching speaks English, so she pauses periodically to repeat a phrase in Spanish. Wanting to build teamwork, she asks her English speakers to learn it and repeat it back to her.

4. Stay Positive – Even when faced with unexpected adversity, Dora and her sidekick both keep smiling and keep pressing on.  There’s no lack of work ethic in this crowd.

5. Celebrate the Victory – As they reach the established goal, each episode concludes with Dora and all her companions singing and dancing to the song, “We did it! We did it!”  This would brings children to their feet to join the celebration. With all interactivity, children feel as though they are an integral part of the team that has emerged victorious.

Table Ice Hockey

A Playstation Store’s top rated AR games is pretty self-explanatory. Table Ice Hockey uses the Playstation Vita to literally put an entire hockey rink on any surface the player wants it to be, where player can view the action from any angle.

Drakerz-Confrontation

An AR version of trading card games like Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Pokemon. Peoleo Entertainment broke the mold with the next generation of trading card games. Their new game Drakerz-Confrontation, uses AR to bring trading cards to life as 3D animated monsters called Drakos. Using a computer webcam, the 3D monsters pop off the cards to throw down in an epic battle. The camera reads the images on the cards, which look like any other deck of trading cards, and then it makes some animated magic happen on the computer screen.

The fantasy card game lets you play with physical trading cards that you put on the table in front of a PC with a webcam.

PulzAR

PulzAR is a different take on puzzle games. Available in the Playstation Store for PS Vita, this game uses the Vita’s camera and built in AR capabilities to create dynamic puzzles. The puzzles are aimed at guiding a laser around a series of obstacles until it can be redirected into space to destroy an inbound asteroid

  1. AR card – Place a AR card on a flat surface to create a PulzAR missile testing facility on screen.

2. Panning/camera angle – Able to see the danger.

 

3. Using one of the gantt charts or project development tools that I posted on OSS, create a production schedule for your project starting from April 2017 to May 2018. Include as much detail as you can think of such as including important dates and deadlines, team members or collaborators, tasks, what you need to research, technologies you’ll use for development, sound, visual materials, editing, interaction design etc. Though this schedule may be adjusted, it’s important to start creating a timeline for your FYPs. This will help guide you through your calendar and give you a way to identify and plan your progress.

(View timeline here)

 

Proj_Educational Game

Standard

To develop an Educational mobile game so that children can have fun studying.

Aim of the game:

  • Help children understand complicated concept through playing/having fun
  • Using interactive and cute character to engage children
  • To ease parents’ trouble to teach their kids

Concept:

Player will follow a fairy tale’s protagonist to finish its journey. Throughout the journey, player will be taught subject like English/Math and moral values. The Protagonist will guide the player by reading to the player, instruct and teach the player.

Game play:

Player will help protagonist to finish its journey by making the correct choice. These choices are related to the story line and the correct answers are the correct grammar/vocabulary/numbers.

Similar game play to Dora the explorer:

The series centers around Dora, a 7 year old American girl, with a love of embarking on quests related to an activity that she wants to partake of or a place that she wants to go to, accompanied by her talking purple backpack and anthropomorphic monkey companion. Each episode is based around a series of cyclical events that occur along the way during Dora’s travels, along with obstacles that she and Boots are forced to overcome or puzzles that they have to solve (with “assistance” from the viewing audience) relating to riddles, the Spanish language, or counting.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_the_Explorer)

Game approach 1:

An interactive protagonist

  • Player will be able to change the appearance and the clothes of the protagonist, so the kids will be attached to the character.
  • Player can interact with the protagonist by touching it to trigger certain animation and answer to the protagonist’s question and gets a reply.

The aim of this interactive protagonist is to give feedback to the player and keep the children engaged. Even if the player is not interested in continuing the task, they can just interact with the protagonist.

Similar concept to Talking Tom :

The goal of the game is to take care a little cute kitten named Tom. At the beginning, the user is invited for growing these kitten up interacting with him by different ways: feeding him, taking him to the bathroom. Tom can repeat words spoken for up to 25 seconds at a distance of 10 meters from himself using the synthesized voice, “leaning against” his ear to phone`s screen.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Talking_Tom)

 

 

Game approach 2:

An augmented Reality NPC + toolkit (random cards/objects to activate the NPC into the ‘real world’)

 

Throughout the protagonist’s journey, protagonist will meet characters like the alphabets below.

Using AR technology and the materials from the toolkit, these alphabets will be reflected on objects in the toolkit to tell the story.  These Alphabets/numbers characters will join together to form certain words/numbers to help children remember spelling or to understand mathematics concept.

Aim for using AR:

Children can interact with the characters by shifting the toolkit’s materials around, like they are playing with a friend.