This research topic can only be taken by Thesis route and Project route student. This research topic include the following project development. The project outcome needs to be examined by well-designed experiment for quanititative and qualitative data analysis (for Thesis route student) and pilot testing for usability and technology acceptance analysis (for both Thesis and Project students).
In the past, we have developed a chessboard like Web-based Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game and done some pilots on it. The game allows learners role playing in the chessboard like world (in which many continents, cities, towns, villages, and dungeons). The players can choose more than one profession and pick up general and profession relevant quests from the quest givers (i.e., NPCs). Currently the game has administration portal for adding new NPCs, items, quests, buildings, and landscapes as well as expanding the size of the world (and cities, etc.). NPCs in the game can not only prepare quests for players and give players necessary items, but can also sell players things they need. The game now needs PvP gaming function so players can interact with others much more. Furthermore, the function can also make players get excited and further make players gear up themselves by doing quests and self-training.
Tasks of this project also include:
The student needs to design and implement PvP gaming interface (as well as necessary editors for entering all necessary data), mechanism, and function with JSP and AJAX. In addition, the student also needs to do (1) the design of the action and reaction that players may have during the fight; (2) the design of flexible and extensible database schema for storing the skills (and its effects and cooldowns), the equipment, the rankings, the titles, the characteristics, and the stats that players have; (3) the effect and the calculation principle of different actions such as defending, backstab, rushing attacking, etc. may cause; (4) the learning, reaching and training (leveling) ways for different skills that players may have; (5) the relationships among skills and the prerequisites that different skills may have such as assassin/rouge and thief and the strength and the dexterity/agility requirement for the use of particular swords and bow; (6) the design of PvP area in the field of the game world and the arena in the cities; and (7) the mechanism of duel request in the non-PvP area in the game world and the challenge request and ranking gaming mechanism for players challenging each others in the arena.
Learning outcomes:
The student can learn how to design and implement real-time web-based PvE gaming function with HTML5 (HTML/CSS/JavaScript), AJAX, and JSP techniques. Also, the student can know how to design a pilot (or a complete experiment for thesis students) to gather the perception that players may have toward the game and to do usability analysis for the game (in addition, for thesis students, they can learn how to design research model, make hypotheses, verify the causal relationships amongst factors, do quantitative and qualitative data analysis). Skills of designing and evaluating a questionnaire's validity and reliability can be learnt either.
For taking this topic, the student is better to have the following skills or knowledge:
- Having experience in playing any kind of RPG and MMORPG, e.g., World of Warcraft, Diablo, Dungeon & Dragon, etc.
- Having experience in playing web-based multiplayer games.
- Familiar with HTML/XML, CSS, and Java Script‧
- Familiar with JSP and SQL commands
- Information collection, re-organization, summarization, and reports
- Using screen capture software and video editing software/tool to creating instructional video clips
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