The document discusses ideas for improving an existing detective game platform focused on education. Suggestions include adding more story variations and branching plots while maintaining educational goals, adjusting guidance levels, expanding character personalities, enhancing clues, and improving usability, controls and pausing. It also recommends incorporating more emotions, sound, cutscenes and character graphics corresponding to dialogue. Additional ideas involve feedback mechanics for questions, allowing information links for incorrect answers, and tracking motivation metrics like scores, immersion and difficulty levels.

1. Jack Chang

2.  Detective game
 Platform game
 Visualization possibilities
 Evaluation strategies

4.  Continuity (flow, emotions)
 Story variations (with same educational purposed covered)
 Freedom to explore
 Play-tests

5.  More suspense, twists, emotions
 (ex: in mission 1, it turns out Hercules accidentally/deliberately contaminated the food; in
mission 2: more connection between Allison’s team and local doctor; mission 3: more on the
coach’s gambling intention.)
 Adjust the amount of “guidance”
 Less dialogue content, more branching in plots
 (allow variety of choices/endings while maintaining the same educational purposes.)
 Characters personalities
 (something already there but worth expanding)

6.  Change the use of e-phone
 (ex: have a HUD or panel instead of accessing everything through the phone)
 Allow more free roaming & clicking around
 NPCs response when player idles for a while
 Enhance the hint of “evidence”
 Usability
 (ex: w/out “reload the game”, allow dialogue previous/next control, allow pauses or
progress-saves, due to short attention span...etc.)

7.  Cut-scenes
 Sound & voice!
 (very important for creating an immersive story-based RPG, especially when the target
audience are children/youngster. Also helps learning the medical terms.)
 Character graphics: correspond to the dialogue more
 Introduce multiple characters in one scene

8. Secret Agents
The Quest Reality Show

10.  Feedback (reward/penalty) mechanics
 (ex: Correct answers lead to confetti‘s or applause; harder questions reward special points;
wrong answers results in goofy sounds...etc)
 Some questions with multiple choices
 (Not just Yes/No/Maybe)
 Why some answers are not provided/relevant to the
platform game?
 ---> Provide (links of) correct answers for a incorrect answer

11.  More NPC & PC interactions
 Enhance time-countdown
 Allow pauses or progress-saves
 (due to short attention span)
 Smoother/more sophisticated control
 (ex: double forward to dash, dock; Space bar in lieu of mouse click...etc)
 (In frig game) Tissue for sneezing is good. Can add more like
this.

12.  Sound & Voices!
 Background: moving; more content
 More graphics for the exit
 (in frig game) items are on top of each other: it made it
hard to discern objects

13.  Motivation
 Scores (can be saved/shared/compared among the player community)
 Immersion: NPC & PC interaction, more environments (different parts of human bodies or
real world), sound....etc
 Level Difficulties
 Adaptive difficulty
 Combination of kinds and amount of NPCs
 New NPC (ex: a boss level after every 3 regular levels)
 Complex AI
 Use of combination/variation of controls

15.  Score
 Age
 Regions/countries
 Stickiness (frequency or total time played)
 Community (using Twitter or Facebook API)

16. Population of European countries, 2010 (from Many Eyes)

17. IU Faculty/Staff Salary (a team project we did using Google API,
in “Information Visualization”, taught by Katy Borner)

19.  Breadth & depth of understanding
 Framework (scaffolding)
 How well the player can apply the knowledge to real
life

20.  Test/survey/assessment
 Presentation/sharing (in classrooms, daily life, or online)
 Activity
 A sequel game! (that the player will feel more comfortable playing if they have
understood/completed the previous games)

21. Thank you.