Timeframe: 04/2015 – 09/2015
Position: Gameplay Engineer (contract)
Technologies: C++, GTK+, AS3, Adobe AIR
Status: Used for classroom research grant, and as proof of concept for additional rounds of grant funding.
The Story:
The first contract with GlassLab Games (later LRNG, then Collective Shift, then Southern New Hampshire University), I was contracted to do some work to create a companion app to Contraption Maker for research into communication between kids when working on tasks such as puzzles, and whether or not it could be detected when cooperation breaks down via conversation (spoiler: it totally could!).
The app allowed users to construct sentences using menus akin to Disney’s Toon Town MMO, both to constrain the language domain, and to keep the users from just typing anything they wanted during this initial assessment.
The app was initially created in C++ with GTK+, but it was decided that it was easier to deploy in classrooms as a fully packaged Adobe AIR build that required no external libraries. Wise choice, and I do miss AS3 and AIR.
