Timeline - Ancient Rome (CreateJS)

[Anders Athletic Design]

Hi all,

After some struggle I have finished my first Html5 game.

http://www.athleticarcade.com/educational/timeline/rome/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have made Flash games before and as I used the CreateJS libraries I still used Flash a lot for design and animation. 

This game is the first in a series of game as I plan to cover the world history. I will use the same base for the all games and hope to churn out games the coming  months....

It's obviously meant to be both educational and entertaining. I'm not sure how well it works. It plays pleasantly but it may not be the most spectacular game. I have a lot of other educational concepts that I am dying to try once I have all the timeline games ready 

[htmlhigh5]

I wasn't sure at first but once you get used to it the game is pretty nice! My biggest concern was that the questions were not always very precisely asked. For example, "The pantheon was completed at the height of the Pax Romana" doesn't read like a question. Instead maybe "During the height of the Pax Romana, which year was construction of the Pantheon completed?" (just a suggestion of course) One other issue I had was that I didn't know how to drag the scrollbar after reaching the Guru ranking. I tried to click and drag but accidentally clicked and lost the game.  I still finished with a cool 4249 and I did learn more about the dates of important events. Thanks for sharing!

[Tobiasz]

This type of games would make my highschool games go over the roof. Teachers should have a tool to create this type of games for their students. Good Job.

+I agree to the little unprecise questions mention above.

[Anders Athletic Design]

11 hours ago, htmlhigh5 said:

I wasn't sure at first but once you get used to it the game is pretty nice! My biggest concern was that the questions were not always very precisely asked. For example, "The pantheon was completed at the height of the Pax Romana" doesn't read like a question. Instead maybe "During the height of the Pax Romana, which year was construction of the Pantheon completed?" (just a suggestion of course) One other issue I had was that I didn't know how to drag the scrollbar after reaching the Guru ranking. I tried to click and drag but accidentally clicked and lost the game.  I still finished with a cool 4249 and I did learn more about the dates of important events. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you for valuable feedback. We don’t want to repeat ”which year” in every question to save space. Our convention is to present an event in precent tense. Sometimes it doesn’t work well. I have changed the question in question  to: “At the height of Pax Romana, the PANTHEON with its 43 m diameter dome is completed”. Not perfect, but better.

 

Yes, perhaps manual panning/zooming of the timeline should never be required. It’s main purpose is to enable study of the timeline between questions and levels. When you know how to do it, it is actually very comfortable but it may cause confusion as a very short pan/zoom will count as a click (I will try to shorten it). There are instructions on how to control the timeline but they are easy to miss. At least the manual panning is only required on the very last level – so well done for reaching it and the impressive score!  

9 hours ago, Tobiasz said:

This type of games would make my highschool games go over the roof. Teachers should have a tool to create this type of games for their students. Good Job.

+I agree to the little unprecise questions mention above.

Thanks, yes it has crossed my mind to let it evolve to a tool.

 

There are a lot of other problems, which I am aware of. It is especially tricky to make it work for both total beginners and students of history. For casual players a world history overview will probably work much better. I also plan to add some effects to spice up the look and feel of the game. But as it is meant to be quite serious, I can't go overboard. I will now add new "chapters" but even the Rome chapter will probably see a lot of changes as I go along.