eAdventure - Learn How to Make Your Own Game

There are a lot of great ways to bring unique learning experiences into the classroom. You can bring educational videos and documentaries into the classroom, or even playing games. In fact, games are a tremendous way to make students excited about learning. In addition to playing games, there are fantastic lessons that you can integrate into the process of creating games as well.

WEBSITE: http://e-adventure.e-ucm.es/

An innovative free software called eAdventure helps you to step through the actual process of creating working video games. This is a great way to bring many lessons into the classroom, such as planning and telling a fictional story, decision-making, organization, and much more. The skills that are required to create video game are actually valuable in many different academic areas.

Not only will using eAdventure to make your own game with students teach them those important skills, but it will also make them excited about coming to the classroom, and inspired to contribute to the video game project.

Make Your Own Game with eAdventure
The eAdventure software comes with two applications. The first is the editor that you'll use to go through all of the steps needed to design and make your own game. The second is the game engine that you or anyone else can use to play the game that you've created. 

  

eAdventure Software

When you open the game editor software, you'll find that everything you need is place conveniently along the left navigation bar of the main window. This navigation bar is where you'll do everything, from creating the scenes, creating the game objects, creating the characters, and much more.   

 

eAdventure Main Screen

As you work through each step required to make your own game, you'll find that you need media like background images, animations, video and more. You do need to create that media yourself, but eAdventure provides a folder structure where you can organize all of that content to reuse whenever you need.   

 

Folders to Organize Media

Some people have used actual photographs of rooms or outdoors as the background for games, but other people actually go further and literally draw a cartoon image of the background, characters, and objects in the game. How far you go is really up to you or your students.

Games are stored in proprietary "ead" files, which can only be read by the eAdventure editor or engine software. When you load a game you're working on, or one someone else has created, you simply need to navigate to and open the single EAD file that contains the project. 

  

eAdventure EAD Projects

The process of creating a game in the designer software involves working out the different scenes that make up your game. The designer lets you create the scenes with the backgrounds, characters and objects.

 

Creating Scenes

Once you've created your scenes, you can link them in the order that they appear in the game. This is a useful graphical way to keep track of places in your game and how you want the story to flow.

 

eAdventure Organizing Scenes

The designer software also includes an "Items" area where you create and organize all of the items in your game. You'll need to define what characters can do with the objects when they are interacting with them inside of the story.

 

Creating Items

 
Of course, you'll also need to create your main character - the central player of the game who will do all of the walking, talking and interacting with the environment.

 

Creating the Main Player

Of course, since this your own game, you need to also create every other character in the game that your main player will interact with. Much like creating items, this is where you will define everything about each character and how the player will be able to interact with them.

 

Creating Other Characters

 
Part of that interaction of course, includes conversations. You will use the "Conversations" area to lay out all of the dialogue that the main player will have with all of the characters in your game.   

 

Creating Conversations 

It's important to keep in mind that when you make your own game, you are making everything from scratch. This means that the time and thought that you put into things like the items you create or the conversations you define will make the game itself much more enjoyable.

This aspect of the eAdventure software will teach students about the value of creating an interesting plot, and putting thought into creating good dialogue between characters in the story.

Playing Your Game

Once you're done all of the hard work and have all of the elements of your name game in place, you can open the file with the eAdventure game engine and play the game! Start interacting with objects and characters, and make sure that the flow of the game really works the way that you intended.

Another great feature of the software is that students can generate a report about the game experience. This is sort of a log of what the person did in the game. This is a great way for a teacher that has created an educational game to follow how well students have done in each game play session.

Generate a Report

Don't have the many hours that it'll require to create your own game? Have no fear, at the eAdventure website, you'll actually find a library of games that other people have already created and offer to the public for free. These are divided into subject areas like training courses, research projects, and games that were created by organizations outside of eAdventure.

Find More Games

eAdventure is a great, free game design application that can be used in a variety of creative ways by an innovative teacher. Teach your students about game design or story plots, or simply create an educational game yourself that you can use right in your classroom.

The only drawback about eAdventure is that it might have a bit of a learning curve when you first start using it. You'll need to dedicate enough time to learning the software and how each piece of it works. It isn't too difficult to learn, but it can take time. Once you've mastered it, you can make your own game for a wide variety of great educational uses.