Functional requirements

4.5.1 The game

Type of game

The game we will develop is a single-player educational game where the player controls the life of a fictional avatar. The player needs to guide the avatar through life, giving the avatar education, work experience and earning money through working. In order to advance in the game the player will be presented with educational questions that needs to be answered correctly in order to advance in the game.

User interface

The user interface of the game should be a graphical window user interface with almost self explaining information boxes and menus. It is important that the users of the game do not get demotivated by an advanced user interface. It is also important that it is well documented in a help text in case the user is unsure of the different functionalities featured in the user

interface. The game's user interface should also support both Windows and Linux as these are the most common operating systems used by the game's target group.

User input

The player should be able to answer the games question through the use of the computer mouse. In addition the mouse and keyboard is used throughout the whole game to interact with the user interface.

Answer educational questions

The game will be able to give the player educational questions based upon how far into the game the player has advanced. As feedback is an important aspect of learning the player should also receive appropriate feedback based upon the answers given.

Scoring and goals

To give the player a competitive edge to the game-play it is important that we implement some way of giving the player feedback on how good he/she played the game. We will try to implement 4 different goals (namely happiness, money, work-experience and education) that

the player needs to reach in order to complete the game. At all times during the game-play the player will be able to view how far he/she has advanced to reach the given goals. We also need to give the player a score at the end of the game to give feedback on how well the player did. This will also encourage the players to compare scores, compete between each other and through this play the game more and learn more knowledge.

4.5.2 The assignment creator

The purpose

The purpose of the assignment creator is to keep the game evolving at all times. With this feature the persons that have access to the assignment creator can totally change the question content of the game and also be able to adapt the content of the game to teach different types of knowledge.

Availability

The assignment creator should not be available to the regular user of the game, but rather be an administrator feature. This will ensure that the students have to learn the question answers through reading literature rather than checking the questions solutions through the assignment creator.

User interface

An author of new questions should be able to add questions through a well known windows- like environment. The author should also be able to choose where in the game he/she would like to add the questions.

Administrating the questions

The assignment creator should let users with administrator rights add, view and change questions in the game. Further it should allow administrators to chose where in the game the different questions will be given, and change the locations of the questions. Another feature that will be added is the possibility to make an exam. An exam is when the player has to answer several questions following each other correctly in order to advance.

Add images

give points of interest to the images, so it is easy to make the different kinds of question types without manually having to enter image coordinates etc.

4.6 Summary

We have defined our educational content to be based upon the curriculum of INF1050. We gave an overview of the INF1050 curriculum as we researched it in late 2007, and how it changed at the start of 2008. INF1050 covers the theoretical basics of system development, and includes topics as: Data representation, Constraints Normalization and redundancy, Data models, Relational database, Development platforms and System development strategies. Based on this knowledge we explored different question types we could implement in our game and landed on: multiple choice, image identification, drawing and SQL.

Based on these choices we decided on the system specifications for our game development. These specifications are founded on the idea of merging the educational content with the motivational aspects from chapter two. The system design characteristics we defined are: user friendly, extendable, reusable and entertaining. Further we set up the functional requirements for the game and the assignment creator that administrate the questions that the player is given in the actual game-play.