Wolverhampton City Learning Centre (CLC)

MissionMaker, Immersive Education’s amazing game-creation tool has been exercising my imagination a good deal over recent weeks. Last week we hosted and led a NAGTY event to give G&T students an introduction to the software. The feedback from the students was fantastic. In a single-day session, they implemented some really creative ideas in their games. During the Autumn Term, we are running an extended project with the software with a group from Our Lady and St. Chad’s RC School. I’ve also started work on a game in MissionMaker for use during our primary Adventure Game theme day; here’s the current version of the Maths part of the adventure:

• Maths Game (Right-click and “Save As”) - can only be opened from within MissionMaker.

(Later in the year, Immersive are planning to release a free player application which will allow anyone to play MissionMaker games, whether or not they have the game creation tool. You can find some examples of games created by students on this MissionMaker blog from Shropshire Local Authority).

All this means that I’ve been acquainting myself in detail with the joys (and occasional frustrations) of working with the software. MissionMaker is still a beta (development) product at the moment, but the core functionality is implemented beautifully. I have no doubt that the full production release will tidy up and enhance those features that are still a little rough-around-the-edges.

For those of you in schools and centres who have access to the current beta release, here’s a little trick I found!

Adding multiple triggers for an event

During our initial training at the CLC with the team from Immersive we were shown how to add multiple actions to a rule by opening an existing rule from the “My Game” menu and holding down the shift key while clicking on the arrow for another Action to associate it with the same trigger. This can save a huge amount of time and energy.

In the current beta version of MissionMaker there is no direct way to have multiple triggers for an action i.e. rules which say “the player must complete TASK A and TASK B to activate ACTION C”. This sort of rule-making allows the game-creator to implement far more complex and challenging puzzles. There is a scoring mechanism in MissionMaker that can accommodate some of this functionality - i.e. TASK A adds 100 to the score, TASK B adds 100 to the score and ACTION C occurs when the player has 200 points. The problem with this is that the player is completely aware of the progress they are making towards the goal; they see their score rise as the tasks are completed. This is a particular problem for a puzzle which involves positioning objects in trigger volumes, as the player can walk through the trigger volumes (holding the object in front of them) until they see their score increase.

I wondered if there was a work-around that would allow multiple triggers to be implemented in a manner that is completely hidden from the player. Here is the solution I came up with:

Multiple triggers - an example

The example I am using here is a very simple one. We will set up a room with a door. This door is activated when both of two levers are set to the on position. If either lever is off, the door will not open.

Here’s the plan for the example:

The door we are going to open is the door at the North (top) of the large room. This door has two levers by it.

We then create simple rules to toggle the state of a lever when it is clicked.

The room to the west (left) of the large room is also behind a door, but this door will never be opened during the game, and its contents will therefore remain hidden from the player. We will call this room the “trigger room“. Inside the trigger room, we place a single trigger volume into which we drop two weights (we’ll call them trigger 1 and trigger 2). The weight of each is set to 10, and both are set as Inactive:

In a moment, we will associate each of these weights with a lever. Now, we make a rule to open the door (by the levers) when the weight in the trigger volume reaches 20:

If both weights in this trigger volume become active, the door will open! Finally we set a rule to set the trigger one weight to active when the first lever is switched to on:

and a rule to set it to inactive if the lever is switched off:

We now repeat this process to make two more rules which associate the second lever with the trigger 2 weight, so that it becomes active when the second lever is set to on, and inactive when the lever is set to off. When we test the game, the door does not open until both of the levers are switched on at the same time:

This was, of course, a very simple example, but by increasing the number of trigger weights used, more triggers can be added to the rule. This method also allows rules to be made which require that the player completes any two of three events; have three trigger weights of weight=10 each, but set the door to open when the accumulated weight in the trigger volume reaches 20. By combining together triggers of this type, it would be possible to have complex AND/OR operators in rules too . . .

Here is a complete list of the rules for the simple example above:

Web-links

• Immersive Education homepage
• The MissionMaker blog (from Immersive)
• MissionMaker games from Shropshire