Learning Proposal for Playpower
Pasquale Barilla
regards to our approach to new members learning how to program the
NES. I wont be offended if you say "Pasquale, that is a stupid
idea!" :)
Playpower U (Working Title).
Looking at “Rails for Zombies” got me thinking - it would be amazing
if we applied a similar approach (that is a series of videos and a
learning path), but applied it to NES. Think an online learning system
that streamlines NES programming into 3-4 pathways (subjects) that a
student can master. Each pathway has lessons designed to get the
student proficient with it. The pathways may be something like:
1. Programming
2. Graphics
3. Sound
4. Game Design
Each pathway would have a series of lessons that are targeted at
helping the student master said pathway.
Eg:
Programming
Lesson 1: Introduction to Programming
Lesson 2: Introduction to ASM
Lesson 3: Intermediate ASM
Lesson 4: Advanced ASM
The programming pathway would only deal with programming. Everything
to do with graphics creation would use pre-made graphics. and sounds.
If the student would like to master graphic creation, then taking the
Graphics pathway would work.
Perhaps at the end of the Lesson, the student must answer questions
about the lesson correctly. After the student passes all the lessons,
they can do an assessment at the end of the pathway that will be
graded by someone (like a major work). At which point, the student is
deemed proficient with said pathway, and that work can be used to
better Playpower (For example, the graphics pathway might be to create
the graphics for a simple sidescroller).
The key to keeping people interested in this is rewards, status and
gated learning.
Rewards: A student who passes a lesson is rewarded with the next. A
student cannot simply “jump” to the last subject. This ensures that
the student masters each lesson (after answering the questions), and
makes them hungry to learn more.
Status: A student who is proficient in all 4 subjects might have a
higher “rank” that a student who is proficient in only one or none.
This is simply cosmetic.
Gated learning: It is no good starting a student on advanced stuff if
they do not know the basics of programming (loops, variables, etc).
But, by the same token, it is no good continuing to teach the basics
in every single tutorial. Start slow, teach the basics first, and move
up to advanced things. You can assume only what the previous lessons
have taught, so the first lessons are super simple (lets make the
assumption they know how to turn on their PC), and progressively get
harder and harder.
Additionally, making it resemble a video game helps too. Having “skill
ups” that might be questions or puzzles which can be used to unlock
ranks or something. Like grinding in an RPG. or perhaps the grinding
adds levels to the character, which in turn allows the character to
access new “quests”, which are lessons. A simple way would be to use a
webpage with an animated gif as the NPC, and several buildings that
the user could click on. Each building would be a different school.
The data about the student carries between pages. Each building is a
different subject, and each subject has several levels that you can
grind in.
So a student might have stats like:
Programming: Level 1 (out of 10)
Graphics: Level 4 (out of 10)
Design: Level 2 (out of 10)
Sound: Level 1 (out of 10)
A student gets “EXP” for every question they get right. They can drill
questions they have previoyusly answered, but they award less exp each
time.
A student can also download an entire level and review, print off,
etc, without having to go through the motions of the website.
Once a student masters a subject, they can download the entire
subject, including questions and answers as a PDF file, and print and
keep.
If the subjects are well written, we can release a (maybe free)
(e)book with all of them in it, for use in actual schools that want to
teach NES programming (like bob rosts, etc).
DoctorMike
dereklomas
Obviously, there is still a lot to do. What would be the best way of moving the game forward, from an open source perspective? Right now, we are developing in teams, with defined roles and deadlines. Do you have any ideas for getting contributions from the broader community? It's always challenging to communicate how *specifically* people can help. (and then to scaffold them to actually do so)
Assume people have the skills necessary (maybe since they took Pasquale's training :) -- so this is an organizational challenge. Any ideas?
Cheers,
Derek
M: 917.544.4171
Juanjo Marin
> Check out the latest version of the Malaria game at playpower.org. Don Miller presented this yesterday at GDC. (congrats, don!)
>
> Obviously, there is still a lot to do. What would be the best way of moving the game forward, from an open source perspective?
IMHO this is the way to go, a lot of people learn by reading programs of
others.
-- Juanjo
Juanjo Marin
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Pasquale Barilla
do is sit around and write up a spec document. this is like the
scaffold you mentioned above. it clearly has outlined in it exactly
what development needs to occur.
The spec document is then distributed to each of the leads of the
departments (and by assosiation, to each team member), and work begins
on their tasks (which are outlined in the document).
I think you are correct, it does sound like an organizational
challenge (after training, of course ;) ) This playpowertech group is
amazing because we can update everyone on the mailing list at once, so
the research team is covered nicely. But, for example, i have no idea
how to contribute to art for the game. i know its buried somewhere
between wiki.playpower.org and playpower.org, but its hard to see
immeditally.
if you wanted to reach out to have more people contribute, i suppose
the first thing i would do is have clear objectives that need to be
acomplished. If you need art, say exactly what you need art of (like a
plant or a character or a kitty cat) If you need levels designed, or
sound made, etc, then highlight exactly what is required. Having
smaller, eaiser to achieve goals is eaiser than having one: "finish
the game". Having the abilitly, as a contributer, to make something,
shoot it across and cross something off a list is deeply satisifying.
Once the game is complete, it would be eaiser to recycle the code and
use it to make other projects with (think rom-hacking, there are like
a thousand mario hacks, some with new levels and art and sound and
everything!)
i think having weekly or bi-weekly catch ups on irc or some kind of
chat program would help, too. is there a playpower irc channel? if
not, that should be something we think about.
Daniel Rehn
I'm inviting artists and designers (many who normally don't work with games) to create sprites/bgs using the toolkit that Don Miller (No Carrier) has put together.
I'll post details once we're launched.
Peace,
Daniel
#end ➥ sent from mobile ➥
▤▧▥▨
Ambuj
games/application for Playpower using cc65 as cross-compiler and had
spent significant amount of time figuring things out. I had made a
very early build of Number Munchers. If anyone is interested in
picking this up, I would be more than happy to help.
I am going to put most of the code I had worked on, online.
On Mar 2, 4:43 am, Daniel Rehn <daniel.r...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A quick reply from GDC—Playpower is launching an an open-source game asset library this Spring at devlibrary.org. Initially it will be graphics-only, but it'll accommodate music and code eventually.
>
> I'm inviting artists and designers (many who normally don't work with games) to create sprites/bgs using the toolkit that Don Miller (No Carrier) has put together.
>
> I'll post details once we're launched.
>
> Peace,
> Daniel
>
> #end ➥ sent from mobile ➥
>
> danielrehn.com
>
> ▤▧▥▨
>
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Juanjo Marin
> a bit off-topic, still, I had worked on C based approach to create
> games/application for Playpower using cc65 as cross-compiler and had
> spent significant amount of time figuring things out. I had made a
> very early build of Number Munchers. If anyone is interested in
> picking this up, I would be more than happy to help.
>
> I am going to put most of the code I had worked on, online.
>
A C language approach is very appreciated because is less intimidating
than pure assembler. What I read about cc65 isn't very promising [1], so
I wonder which it is the best C compiler [2] for programming a playpower
machine or if cc65 is just simply good enough.
Maybe it makes sense to host all the code for the playpower inicitive to
in the same place (for example a gitorious.com/playpower, similar to
what kde people have in gitorious.com/kde)
Cheers,
-- Juanjo Marin
[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/6502/
[2] http://www.6502.org/tools/lang/