Projects/mmedugamepack

MMEduGamePack Project

Motivation

Game development is always a tempting subject. Almost everyone have already played a video game since the Atari era. Over the years, software houses have become rich making video games and consoles. New technologies allowed more complex and interesting games. Today, millions of people enjoy playing games in their PCs, consoles, cellphones or in any web browser-enabled device (casual games). So, if millions of people enjoy playing games and there are so many technologies that make game development an easier task today, why not use games to teach something or to learn something?

Many people have worked with educational games in the last 10-20 years, but many contributions are still needed to make this "kind" of games become so interesting as the "industrial" games. We want to give our contribution is this direction, by developing games and tools that make use of multimodal user interfaces. With a multimodal user interface, people can play games using their gestures or speech, for example. These interfaces are easier to use and could turn educational games into much more interesting games, specially for children.

Description

The Multimodal Educational Game Pack (MMEduGamePack) is a package of educational mini-games like TuxTyping (http://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/tuxtype/index.php) and Childsplay (http://www.schoolsplay.org/), but using multimodal user interfaces.

The MMEduGamePack will be develop using, mainly, SDL (C++), PyGame (Python) and OpenCV (C++). We also want to develop some game designing tools, to simplify the game development process. For these designing tools we will use GTK+ (C) to create the GUI.

Features

1. Integrates SDL and OpenCV.
2. Provides a multimodal SDL library for basic multimodal input routines.
3. Creates a parser to generate SDL or PyGame source code (C++ or Python).
4. Builds a package of Multimodal Educational Mini Games (initially, 4 games).

Technology Choice

1. SDL (and its related libraries, like: SDL_image, SDL_ttf...) as game environment.
2. OpenCV for multimodal user inputs.
3. FMOD for enhanced sound effects.
4. GTK+ for the frontend of the designing tools.

Useful Links

Useful links for more information about the libraries we will use in this project or documented here for reference purposes only.

• http://www.libsdl.org/
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/
• http://www.gtk.org/
• http://www.fmod.org/
• http://sol.gfxile.net/gp/
• http://www.linuxheadquarters.com/howto/programming/gtk_examples/index.shtml

More info

We will put the project deliverables for download at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mmedugamepack/

Some extra information can be found on our website (in construction) at: http://mmedugamepack.sourceforge.net/

Contact info

My name is Agostinho Barone. Please feel free to add your valuable comments, criticism and ideas in the discussion page and contact me at - agostinhobaroners@hotmail.com.