Graduation Assignment of Jeroen van de Merwe

Graduation Assignment
Project: Graduate: Coach: End-date:	Real-life Adventuregame Jeroen van de Merwe Maarten Lamers 4 augustus 2003

As a gradution assignment, I wanted to do something that was thé Mediatechnology assignment. For me, personally, that involves:

creating a new interface
other than standard interaction
high-tech stuff
some elements that are new territory for the graduation student
and the project has to be innovative; something I believe the education is trying to accomplish.

During a brainstormsession, with Maarten, a few ideas came up:

I think it would be fun to develop a game.
I'd like to do something with ambiance-intelligence (some interaction with your surroundings).
I'd like to use more than one technology in my project.

Besides these things, (retro-)games like Lesuire Suite Larry and Rick Dangerous came up during the session. Those games gave the idea what is going to be the base-line for my graduation assingment; a real-life adventuregame.

The Idea

I'm going to develop a real-life adventuregame, where the gamer fysically has to follow a storyline. For this purpose the gamer has a kind of terminal that leads him/her trough the game. The terminal runs the storyline, handles the communication with the 'fysical' world and shows which objects the gamer has collected throughout the game.

With the help of GPS-positioning the game locates the position of the gamer and starts an action. The gamer has to respond to that action with an appropriate reaction, which is rewarded with the next piece of the puzzle. During the game, the gamer has to go to various locations and has to do more of those actions. With all of those pieces, the gamer has to complete and solve the whole puzzle which leads to the end of the game.

The Story

The story of my game is going to be something like the one in the motion-picture "The Bourne Identity". In this story the main character finds himself on a ship in the middle of the ocean. He doesn't remember anything about before and goes looking for his identity. Throughout the story he finds out that he is a secret-agent-like-killer-person and finds himself in a difficult position.

The main character, a.k.a. the gamer, in my game has to do something similar. He/she has to find out who he/she is. By solving the various puzzles and questions the gamer can (hopefully) resolve the question of who he/she really is.

Note: When the game-engine actually is going to work, this only is a possible gamestory. After that the gamedeveloper can think-up various scenarios and plots for a new game.

The Hardware

The gamer is equipped with a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), which runs the gaming-software. Therefore the PDA has to be capable of:

linking with a GPS;
playing sound for spoken text or to simulate phone-conversations,
and has to have a development platform to develop the game engine with.

the GPS

Next ...

I have split-up the things to be done in:

Find a suitable PDA
Develop a game-engine and gamedescription which the games are going to be based on
Find out more about the GPS format, how does the GPS-output look like?
Link-up the GPS with a PDA (follow the link to find out how I did that ...)
Get to know the PDA development software
Develop a game with the gamedescription
Program the game-engine for the PDA
Get the developped game working on the engine, and have some fun!

I hope these steps are going to result in an exiting and great project!

Exposure

As Mediatechnology exists now for two years, the first graduates are released into the big world. Because those delivered the first real graduate projects, Mediatechnology wants some exposure to these projects and the education itself. So ahead of that, I arranged an interview with "De Bevelander" - a local weekly newspaper (you've gotta start somewhere). Here it is:

(click on it to view a more readable version)

Documentation

You can learn everything about the project in the scientific article I wrote about it.

You can read the online version, or you can download the word-document.

Then you can view the presentation I gave about this project on august the 28th.

Software (27 August 2003)

You can download the RALF game engine from the site, together with a demo-game that takes place in Scheveningen (The Hague, Netherlands). To run this software correctly, you need a PDA with a GPS-device attached to COM-port 1. The Engine can run on PDA's with I486 and ARM processors.

Ralf Game Engine v1.3rc2 (1,334kB)

Demo Game "fooStagiair" (164kB)

If you don't have a GPS-device, but still want to test this software you can download RALF together with FakeGPS and the Demo game "Mobster Vinnie". The fakeGPS application runs on your desktop computer faking the locations that are in the Mobstergame.

fakeGPS (1,381kB)

Demo Game "mobsterVinnie" (1,088kB)

So, connect the PDA's cradle onto COM-port 1 on you dekstop computer and start the application. Make sure that the computer cannot Sync with the PDA (shutdown the sync software). Then load the game into the engine directory on the PDA, start RALF, select the game and go ...