That's quite interesting, Dr. Reddy.
I understand that this is an educational game with editing capabilities which could be powerful. How are you planning to deploy this tool to? Are you going to be targeting mostly teachers to start with? Can this game be used with other languages besides English?
Keep up the good work. I'll be following this thread closely
Wow, is my reply to this post late! The games were finished, tested and are still being used by teachers in at least a dozen countries :-) but looking back they are dated. I'd do things very differently now, of course, and a whole new version of Stencyl is now here; I used heavily modified v2.2 for my development. The target audience is/was language teachers and people supporting children with dyslexia (parents, support workers, etc). We used Drupal (a PHP powered Content Management System or CMS) driving an SQL database of mod scripts for each game template. Most of the games were language neutral, meaning that they could be used with/in any language; this required us to write our own bespoke text drawing and keyboard input functions, as the games had to deal with non standard character sets beyond the usual Latin ASCII. In all, we had to support at least three different character sets and five distinct languages; Bulgarian was my favourite, Cyrillic text like Russian. Quite a challenge!
As for me, I took an unexpected 'holiday' from game development after the course I was running was culled in education cuts within South Wales universities :-( and I was in a road traffic incident (they don't like 'car crash' or 'accident' in official circles), which left me rather the worse for wear, with little time for making games. After some time off I was back teaching, but mostly filling in when other lecturers were made redundant or redeployed; my university was 'merged' (read 'taken over' and 'asset stripped' to be honest) with a larger neighbour, where I previously worked for 12 years.
And now, thanks to myself being redeployed I am back teaching game development :-) and looking to convert my fellow lecturers to Stencyl
Part of that is to start making games again (yey!), as there is nothing as bad as a lecturer teaching game dev who isn't actually making games himself. A lot to catch up on, with version 3 of Stencyl and Haxe to learn, but I've always liked a challenge!
Just finished bug fixes for an editable education game, "Poets... Verses. Zombies!!!" that is web2.0 enabled to allow teachers to edit word lists used. ... There are 5 other Flash game editing tools (basically user modifiable games) for a variety of language learning activities - vocabulary, grammar, etc...
Great to hear that I'm not the only one who has been been thinking about making language learning games! My focus wouldn't be on English language but on Russian and other European languages. Many of my ideas would be extendable to function with any language, but it's best to start simple.
I see your games are part of a project for the European Commission and also funded by it. I've mainly thought about other ways of funding the development. If you have Skype or want to pm me here, I'd be happy to exchange thoughts with you.
Sorry to not respond to you Daedalon. See above for several complicated reasons; this is my first time back reading Stencyl forums. (Have you missed me?)
EU funding has its drawbacks. Two years after the project finished, we are still being audited for use of the finances; it's a common problem when one or two partners don't present financial data in an acceptable way, which leaves us as lead partner to sort our a shopping list of queries way after the funded project period. A real headache, especially when you factor in the costs don't ever really cover the time that it actually takes to do such a project.
I'd be up for revisiting these games, and even adding others now, as well as other languages, but funding is always important, to help balance out different commitments, such as teaching, etc. If you are still interested in this field, please do get in touch.
DoctorMike
