Game 2 – Stroop Test

We have been assigned a new task to create a game that is based on the Stroop Test.

In Psychology, a Stroop Test is ‘a test used to measure a person's sustained attention – eg. for word reading and colour naming–with/without interference’ (TheFreeDictionary, 2016).

We are always limited to a week time so we had to act fast.

First we did some brain storming to generate ideas of different games that can be used as interesting Stroop tests:

• Maze – one would follow a colour to find the exit. Although the player must follow the colour not the text representing the colour. The player would also have limited vision so the colours are discovered while moving.

• Runner – A character would be running across a never-ending path with obstacles. An indicator will tell you what colour you should take while text with colour pass along the obstacles.

We decided to go for the runner and to make the theme space related. During discussion first we opted to do asteroids as obstacle and a space ship as character. The game would consist of a spaceship running through path full of asteroids while words with colour text and different colour from text would spawn near obstacles.

On the player HUD, will then be displayed the active colour (what colour should be taken). If the colour of the text matches the active colour, you score 1 point, else a point is removed. At the time, we tough that it was a good idea for a strop test so we started to make a sample.

Because I know how to program and use unity, we decided that Gilbert would do the modelling and I will do the programming and animation to develop a sample of the game.

To know more about the models, please visit Gilbert's web site: http://gilbert-mangion.wixsite.com/mysite/blog/tag/Psychology-of-Play

I first started by blocking out the basic mechanics of the game. I represented the space ship by a sphere, put some green block to make the path visible, added ground also as reference where the ‘0’ for the altitude is, and created a script for the blocks to ‘randomly’ (when I will be saying random from now on I mean computer generated algorithm, there is no such thing as random) generate in size and location.

While testing the game, I realised that it would be more convenient if I made the block move towards the character rather than the character moving in space. When the character was moving, I had to have an infinite path whilst when I moved the blocks toward the character I could spawn the blocks far away out of the camera view and destroy it after it is no longer visible.

During the development, I had several bugs which I had to deal with but some were rather funny.

The next step was to introduce the Stroop test and as before a sphere was added representing the 3D model text. After several coding, testing and debugging and Gilbert managed to finish several spaceships we had something that looked like this:

We soon realised that the asteroids scaled in different sizes where not going to do the job, therefore we opted to design a simple space mine that would open when the spaceship approaches it. Also, to make the game more interesting we agreed to make difficulty levels and for each difficulty you would have different spaceships. Gilbert immediately started working on new types of ships, while a modelled a basic space mine in Maya.

Then a menu was created where you could select the difficulty and start the game. The finished sample looked like this:

After testing we soon realized that the game was not of a challenge because you could spot the colour way before you could read it. We showed the game to our lecturer and gave us the same feedback, plus he stated another problem that the player is still doing a single process because once you read the colour your only objective is to scan for that colour and pick it up. Whilst the aim of a Stroop test id to do multiple processing.

During this game development, several mistakes where done: We were too excited about creating our first 3D game that we got blinded and focused more on the design and visuals rather than on the game play and Stroop test. When we tested the game in the early stages we thought that it would get better when the visuals would be correct.

On the other hand, testing the game made us realise that the Stroop test was not working as we thought.

Referencing

TheFreeDictionary, 2016. Stroop test. [Online] Available at: http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Stroop+test [Accessed October 26 2016].