Creative Archive Game Generator
The BBC had an internal competition around the Creative Archive Project. They wanted to see what people would do with the video clips that they made available. At the last minute I decided that I wanted to enter, so with a week remaining, I knocked up my idea at nights after work and a long long weekend. The idea is to allow the simple creation of text and video based adventure games, as I grew up on Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone books and Text based adventure games. A part of this was also inspired by an MHP project I worked on at BBC Imagineering where we created a video and text based game for the Natural History Unit. This time I wanted to create a toolkit that allowed a user to create the games themselves.
It was the first time using Windows Forms and I have to say that I found it extremely nice to work with (compared to MFC and Win32). The code was hacked together using Windows media player 10 sdk for playing the video. I used an xml format for describing the environment (the rooms, the text, the video, etc) and even got to be able to add different actions like pickup and drop (those were the days!). With a view to building a drag and drop GUI to generate the XML file.
Anyway, after building the prototype engine, I had a day left to create a demo game and I have to say it was not only fun to create the game and educational in trying to build a simple narrative and learn about the content, but the end experience was compelling (in a simple way).
I am sceptical of many so called educational games. I think that as schools try to harness games in education they would be far better off letting the students build games rather than making educational games themselves (which seems more fun for the teacher). Not only would they learn the art of games making, but would have to appreciate constructing non-linear narratives and get to grips with the subject matter at hand.
I seem to have lost my only copy of the software in my dead computer. Rats, when I fix it I will put the code up 
Oh yeah, I won the competition. 1 weeks work experience with Castaway 2 in New Zealand 
Not bad for a weeks work.
