Quest development

I spent a good portion of yesterday and a few hours today working on my quest chain as part of my Sunday Japanese class. My quest chain features a small boy in a market, a corpse and some odd enemies to fight. It is approximately 90% complete and shouldn't take more than 30 minutes to do the whole thing (assuming players have no trouble with the mobs along the way).


It has been a lot of fun figuring out exactly what can be done with the plugins, and to be honest, I'm blown away at the amount you can achieve rather than frustrated at what you can't.

Language learning connection

There are a plethora of ways that carrying out and creating quests improves one's second language competence. A few obvious ones:

1. Creating socially-appropriate dialogue for characters in the L2 (especially in Japanese with its politeness levels).
   
2. Creating narrative to drive the players behaviour in the correct direction.
   
3. Creative writing and vocabulary acquisition from the use of slightly more obscure words like "ghost," "magic," "holy water," etc.
   

One of the key elements of this foray into the development of quests is the password quest objective. This is great for asking players to repeat what they have learnt, try and use new words, check their knowledge of grammar rules and vocabulary meanings. 


Although I am not the chief player at Kotoba Miners in charge of lore, they have come up with a way to make players use Japanese seem both natural and essential. You'll just have to wait and see how we've done it.


Until next time.


ちーぷ