[Prototype] Master's Research Prototype

edited in General
Hi guys. Please interact with my master's prototype system. It is a proof-of-concept "game" (I use this term loosely because there is basically no game play) where the player can speak to the NPCs using natural language. My master's research is on synthesizing conversation to convey NPC personas in a gaming environment. This is fairly similar to Facade except I created tools that allow people who have no programming experience to create interactive characters and the game is simply a showcase of some of the features of my framework and tools. Please keep in mind that this is an extremely complicated task when you interact with the system. The test game can be found here. Please fill out the survey afterwards. The testing of the system and filling out of the survey should not take longer than half an hour.

Please let me know if you have any problems.
Thanked by 1hanli

Comments

  • Very interesting project. I enjoy such systems very much.

    A few simple things for you to do to make make the experience for your test subjects a little better:
    • Skip past the Terms Agreement right into the game. (Seeing a legal thing when expecting a game immediately blackened my mood. Any really important information can be given when needed, as you do with the text over the arrow when you are done chatting).

    • Implement a doskey type system (up arrow for previous line etc.). Nothing like having to retype a line just because of a typo (and was not sure how robust your system is against such errors).

    • Give the player some sense if the world; are there other characters? Where are they? Or just bring them in to all be on the same screen.

    • In your survey you have a minuscule box for giving additional feedback on the system. Make it bigger :)
    ----

    At times the character responses confused me very much (and it did not seem to correlate with what I was saying at all). Are the weird words from a foreign language? (If it is, consider cutting it until you have the system smoothed out and there is no risk of adding additional confusion that does not really relate to the problem you are trying to solve.)

    I will give it another go, though, wile reading through the survey I see that there must be much more that I missed :)

    Hope you make an update as well, would be interesting to see how you progress :)




  • Hey @hermantulleken thanks so much for your feedback. The legal stuff is required, by Wits, for me to make the survey official and thus be able to include the results in my dissertation. Bullshit as it may seem the ethics side of things delayed me hectically and gave me enough of a headache that I don't wanna talk about it again. The "doskey" system is a very good idea.
    The intro paragraph did mention a bit about the world and that the goal is to find out information from the characters - unfortunately I could not give too much away as part of the testing is the systems ability to convey information and to see how user's use it. Yes there was a bit of foreign language, if you interacted with Caecus (a random NPC is chosen for you to interact with) but the translations are in brackets and I felt it necessary to include to show the modelling of dialect that can be included using my authoring tools.

    In terms of updates, I don't have anything planned as yet because all I really want is to submit my dissertation and this game is simply to test the qualitative results. The game is not the output of my research - the models and authoring tools are... the game is simply a means to test.

    Thanks so much
  • Cool. (The legal stuff is unfortunate, but I understand). Why not let us play with the good stuff then? Give us the tools :)
  • The legal stuff sucks - but you will not believe the level of red tape Universities put you through just to ask people questions... one of my students has just had a 3 month wait on submission to be allowed to include 5 questions she asked a film maker about their work :/
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