Dani the Dino Adventures was a game designed as the final project for ETEC 565 by myself, Sara Cameron and Stephanie Carr. The intent behind the narrative based format game was to introduce Indigenous knowledge and teachings of values guided by the Seven Grandfather Teachings in Twine for a younger audience. Using an iterative design process, we brainstormed ideas to generate a mental prototype and used the game design template to layout the events, script and mechanics of the game. We input our ideas into Twine to program our mini adventure game. Over many late nights, our team adopted the game design strategy of ‘interrupt/modify/stop’ that produced many changes to our original idea in order to generate an outcome that far exceeded our expectations!
In terms of Twine, the hypertextual structure was attractive for our non-programming background and coincided with our storytelling strengths as primary teachers. As Bolter (2001) explains about hypertext in relation to Twine, the individual passages contributed to the entire plot of the story and eventually became a ‘network of interconnected writings’. The structure of the text was designed such that there was both hierarchical and associative thinking that existed through links to individual storylines. Dani the Dino takes different paths to meet animals and learns about the seven teachings; they then return back to the puzzle wheel until they gather all the puzzle pieces (Bolter, 2001). One of the greatest challenges in the creation of the project was finding a method to input the voiceover of the main character. The voice was recorded by Stephanie and coded into Twine to correspond to the words on the page so that readers at all levels would be able to access the game through both audio and visuals.
References:
Chapter 3 of Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hi Jocelyn! Thank you for sharing your final project for ETEC 565. This is absolutely incredible. I can see the thought and care put into creating the theme and the friends. And the voiceover and all the visuals are so good!
I especially appreciate the part where the user goes back to the puzzle wheel after meeting each friend. I think it gives the sense of accomplishing a mission.
You mentioned your team used the ‘interrupt/modify/stop’ strategy to improve your project. I’d love to hear what changes have come about through this strategy and what you learned along the way!