Hello,
I have designed a piece of Interactive Fiction (IF) for my General Maritme English class. It is loosely based around the NCIS TV series. It is a "whodunnit", which the learners must solve, thus solving the reading comprehension exercise. The issue is : it takes about a hundred hours of work to create a story which the learners solve in under three hours. (the tool I used was ADRIFT 4.0).
Does anyone know of an easy-to-use tool to create IF... possibly faster?
Thank you for your answers.
http://classroom-aid.com/2013/01/11/digital-game-based-language-learning-with-interactive-fiction-part-1/
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/interactive-fiction-in-the-classroom-matthew-farber
I have never used it but I could recommend that you check the work of Shannon Sauro. She works and researches on the use of Fanfiction and language learning.
https://mah.academia.edu/ShannonSauro
I haven't used ADRIFT before, but Twine, Inklewriter or Inky (the latter two both by Inkle Studios) are relatively easy to use. Why don't you let your learners write or rewrite game content yourself if return on your investment (time) is your main issue?
I am less pessimistic than Alcino. Even if it takes 100 hours of work to produce 3 hours of activities per student, this is not a one-off event. It will be multiplied by the number of students engaged in the IF over the life of the material. Let's say that the material lasts for 5 years and that 50 students per year use it, then that amounts to 750 hrs of student engagement for 100 hrs of preparation time. That's not a bad return on investment. If more students use it and/or the IF lasts longer then it seems even more viable.
Hello Alcino,
I am also working on creating interactive fiction for teaching (English for Academic Purposes). I'm using an authoring system called TADS 3, and I'd say the amount of time I've taken to create a game of similar scale to your own is well in excess of one hundred hours. Given the resources that go into creating a commercial game (i.e. a budget similar or in excess of that for a movie), this isn't surprising. However, the system I'm using is extremely powerful - for example, it was possible to add a tile-based mapping system.
Whilst I was looking at different authoring systems, I also experimented with Twine. Whilst this was far less flexible, and the games it creates are choice-based fiction (i.e. there is no parser - the player chooses what action to perform from a list of options rather than typing), it was certainly much quicker - it should be possible to learn the system and create a game in a matter of days.
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