SAVE ENERGY game Green My Place has hit the point of beta and the game is close to fully-featured. Read what is going on with the game development team.
In the 6 months since February and the last newsletter, the SAVE ENERGY game has finally hit that point that all developers look forward to – beta! This means that we can release a product that is close to fully-featured. Since Green My Place is a modular long-term game, not everything that we intend to create will be released at first. However the fundamentals need to be sound and that is the bulk of the work.
Since February then, we have been focused on finalizing our design, iterating on the good choices and cutting away the bad ones with input from users. In detail, for the four key work areas of design, graphics, frontend and backend, this has meant the following improvements.
Design-wise we focused on the scoring mechanics, as a key area of motivation for the players. Points are now divided between individual players – Greener Points – and the teams – Team Points. Everything a player does will earn her Greener Points and improve her rank – but to contribute to her team, a player needs to help win a Team Award. These are Awards that only a whole Team together can win – by getting several Greener Medals (obtained in the mini-games), or contributing significantly via some other activity like quizzes, local events or using the Learn More page to browse the knowledge repository and real-time energy information systems. Also contributing to Team Points is the energy saving percentage of each pilot.
The graphics involved our artist Zhang polishing the meta-game user interface, and trying to integrate most functional operations into one visual ‘stage’. The visual style was tailored according to the perceived needs of our user group, which need to believe in the seriousness of our purpose without being turned off by a dull interface. For the mini-games, graphical polishing included rethinking the user interface of several games, using proper visual language and unified basic functional user interface and customized skins for different pilot building. These improvements help to lower the cognitive burden, smooth the game flow and increase motivation.
The frontend work has been focused around getting a smoothly operating web portal, where players can find a lot of information and activities easily and without confusion – yet still have a deep experience of discovery and learning. The systems design of the frontend has also been a major issue, juggling data from the server to display user accounts, team stats and mini-game resources. Finally, part of the frontend which is completely new since summer is the game music. This really puts the final polish on the mini-games to let players have that engaging experience that professional commercial games deliver.
In the last 6 months the entire backend was essentially re-coded from scratch. Key technology and design decisions were made in the period from the SAVE ENERGY Leiden meeting until January, and once those issues had been put aside, the smoothness of the development has been really impressive. Recent notable updates to the backend include all sorts of functionality developments and upgrades to allow seamless management of both the code-base and the community. Not to mention the connection with the ISA server feeding us energy data from the pilots. The backend is now truly a robust and reliable model.
Finally, a very nice postscript for the team is that in July we won a first prize in a non-commercial category at the inaugural European Best Learning Game competition. You can read about that on our blog, at http://serious-games.community.ict4saveenergy.eu.
