Game Design Analysis Project

Project Updates

Update 1 - 09/23/2020

For the first update, we gathered some information and will begin our project on the original BioShock game. After some conversion, we got a raw text file and edited slightly to include bullet points and other symbol recognition.

Update 2 - 10/05/2020

For our second update we began to form a schema around the BioShock game. It is going to be changing as we continue to work though because we plan to include 3 other pitch documents in this project.

We began to form a research question surrounding the other pitch documents we were thinking of adding to the project.

Added the following pitch documents: The Flame in the Flood as well as the original Diablo game. We saw these as great additions as FITF has diversity with lots of images and art while Diablo is a very old document that uses lots of paragraph style.

Update 3 - 10/14/2020

We began to reform the schema in order to be more compatible with multiple pitch documents that vary in structure.

We added another pitch document to our research, Wasteland 2.

Update 4 - 11/10/2020

We made significant progress on XML markup for the BioShock document.

We also made great progress on the schema, making some adjustments as we progressed through the BioShock document.

Added lots of content to the website. Continuing to think of different ideas for the final layout in order to keep things accessible and organized.

Update 5 - 12/09/2020

The website was edited and updated to aid in accessability and organization, and a Creative Commons license was added. All website code is available on our project's GitHub repo.

Update 6 - 12/17/2020

Added a huge change to the schema. We added a new section called Gameplay patterns in order to highlight different use of gameplay elements throughout the documents. We also did some minor tweaks to the structure in order to validate the new markups.

Update 7 - 12/17/2020

Finished up the xml markup for all four of our pitch documents. Began production of xslt with the use of highlighting key game play elements.

Update 8 - 12/17/2020

Development of SVG to show a visual comparison of our documents.

Update 9 - 12/17/2020

For our final update on the project we just wanted to give some feedback on what we accomplished with this project as well as some other results.

Positives

• Saw differences through the structure and game information between documents
• Separate tree of elements and attributes to markup the game play patterns in the pitch documents (gameplay, lore, setting, etc.)
• Biggest comparison is the differences between BioShock (most detailed) vs the Flame in the Flood (image heavy)

Negatives

• Each pitch document was unique in structure, so it was difficult to create a schema that encompassed everything we wanted
• Because of highlighting both structure and patterns, we had to use a lot of different tags
• Often there are tags inside of tags