On Tuesday we ran another kids' game making workshop, this time as part of the Scottish Storytelling Centre's excellent StoryLab programme. We were using Neverwinter Nights 2, as we did in the summer workshops, but this time with an Adventure Author plugin called the Conversation Writer. This is what Keiron has been working on for the past iteration. It has vastly improved the NWN2 interface for writing dialogue between characters by making the text take the form of a play script or interactive book rather than a mostly textual indented tree style. There is also a visual representation of the unfolding conversation structure in the form of a rather nifty pannable and zoomable graph. We were also keen to test out the new functionality for specifying actions from conversations. Normally at these workshops I run around like a headless chicken being a script monkey (oops mixed metaphor again!) for the kids. They say "Would it be possible for a guy to follow you around and be your friend?" and I think "Not again.." and spend the next ten minutes writing a incomprehensible (in the child's view) program which makes this happen. As one kid put it "It's all oHenchman, oMaster blah blah blah". They don't get the syntax (or my adherence to variable naming conventions, she says sniffily). "Mumbo jumbo", they call it.

Now thanks to Keiron's fiendishly clever plugin, the kid can just click on a line of dialogue, and select an action from a menu: "make character an ally" and Bob's your mother's brother. In fact, they can do it multiple times and get a whole gang of people to be their friends. There are a whole range of actions: the kids at the workshop used: create a shop, teleport, allies, give rewards and causing attacks. No-one has tried the option for teleporting objects, which is my personal favourite. Think of the cool ghost stories you could make with that...
One of the kids started using the variable manager which enables you to keep track of state in the game, but we need more work on that because by the time they get to this stae there are a whole load of computer science concepts they need to follow, and it takes more than a well designed interface to put them across. I think we will have to make a set of sequenced examples games to illustrate the concepts. That will be a fun way to spend an afternoon!
So, a big leap forward for Adventure Author! Various teachers are planning to use it in their classes for problem solving (Nov) and literacy (Feb) so it will get used by kids again soon. In the meantime, we are working on the journal editor facility which enables the children to easily set up quest story lines.
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