Typing/Action, Smorball

[aeiea]

Smorball - http://smorballgame.org
Project Page: https://github.com/tiltfactor/smorball
Code and Assets License: MIT

Players of the challenging Smorball game are asked to type the words they see as quickly and accurately as possible to help coach their team, the Eugene Melonballers, to victory to win the coveted Dalahäst Trophy in the fictional sport of Smorball. Each word typed correctly defeats an opposing smorbot and brings the Melonballers closer to the championships.

Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor, an interdisciplinary studio that designs and studies games for social impact, recently launched two new open-source typing games Smorball and Beanstalk (http://beanstalkgame.org), which help verify text in books and journals online in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). It’s a way that historic texts are being saved from digital oblivion. Based at the Missouri Botanical Garden, this is part of the “Purposeful Gaming and BHL Project,” which was established through an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant and includes partners from Harvard University, Cornell University and the New York Botanical Garden.

Smorball and Beanstalk are just two examples of how Tiltfactor is working with other institutions to help make digital humanities content searchable and more accessible to the public. Their other projects include Metadata Games, a national standard open crowdsourcing game platform used with over 44 collections represented at 10 institutions that has generated 150,000 tags.

Mary Flanagan is founding director of Tiltfactor and the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities. Her interdisciplinary work “invades commercial game design, pop culture, and academia with provocative ideas about authorship, politics, aesthetics, and play.”

[qubodup]

youtu.be/_0WGXnRJ22I

I tested Beanstalk first and didn't notice that the music came from the other game:
- The (accidental) music made me keep playing, I would not have played remotely as much if there was none. (very subjective topic)
- Beanstalk text samples are too small and should be scaled up.
- It got boring relatively quick because text samples repeated and there didn't seem to be an increase in hardness level.
- The way you draw the plant is fascinating! Does this algorithm have a common name?
- Not being able to skip intro logos is annoying and might make people leave instantly since there's no way to tell how long it will take.


youtu.be/qMXRcQGwdNk

Smorball
- sounds like smores
- nice game!
- way too much text (also very subjective topic) I have some reasoning though: you're not talking to the audience but to the palyers. You couldn't expect players to pay attention to long sentences which are designed to distract viewers from the fact that there is nothing going on on the playfield at that moment. Instead you should write in a style in which the coach would shout orders at the players: "write Æ as AE!", "Ignore umlauts! Ü is U!", "Don't forget dots and commas and so on!", "Don't forget spaces!".
- sounds could use some variation, subtle footstep sounds would be great too.
- I played on medium but it felt too hard at times. It's ok to confuse the player with hard tasks but they need to get more time (slower enemies). So you might want to scale the speed of enemies on a lane down if the current word is very hard (accents, ae, umlauts, long, punctuation, fractions). Perhaps 5-10% slower per each complication
- a round's ending is anticlimactic: you have the adrenaline of fighting the hardest part, then it's over. There should be a whistle sound at least and people could start cheering then already while the announcers babble.
- the people cheering animations are great! although their in-game movement might be hard on the performance. :/

In both games i'd love to have music (hint: in app-like games music needs to have its own disable button in addition to the sound disable button)
In both games it feels unfair to punish players if they write . instead of , because the , was at the end and the text box is cropped to the edge of the font, making the black symbol mix with the outer background color. This problem also affects the dot on top of `i` if it's on the edge of the image file canvas. Again, the text sample needs to be scaled bigger and in addition you might want to give it an outer border with the color of the inner background color (yellowish white).

Is this portable (can I compile on Linux) or only compile-able on Windows with visual studio?