Team Size: 17
Timeframe: 4 months
Sprint Timeframe: 5 weeks
Role: Interactive Editor
Key Contributions: Challenge 2, Adaptive Leveling Logic
Learning Prompt: Listening Comprehension
Date Sprint Completed: August 2021
In this Mission, Chickaletta has gone missing in the Tower of Tasty Treats, but she left behind a “guiding gizmo” of clues as to how to find her. Your task is to listen carefully to the gizmo and then piece together these clues in order to track her down.
This experience was the first Noggin Mission to implement “adaptive leveling” logic. In previous Missions, there would be three separate “levels,” in which a player’s assigned “level” of difficulty is determined based on a player’s performance in experiences across the Noggin app.
However, in Mission 207, new logic was constructed so that your level could change based on your performance within the Mission. For each interaction, if you get the correct answer (CA) first without any mistakes, your skill level is raised, and if it crosses a certain threshold overtime, your level increases. Vice versa, if you get two or more wrong answers (WA) in a given interaction, your skill level is reduced, and once it crosses a certain threshold, your level decreases.
The master adaptive leveling logic was constructed for the experience in pre-production. But for each interactive editor on the project, you had to set up keyframes across your given challenge to check the leveling, and then seek to different points in the source video based on said leveling, doing so very carefully so as to maintain verisimilitude.
This is all reflected in my playthroughs here. In the above playthrough, I begin on Level 2 and get CAs without any mistakes in the first half of the Mission, and then by Challenge 2, I get raised to Level 3. In below playthrough, here is an example of what happens if I get a few wrong answers here and there (i.e. I stay on Level 2).
In addition to this new implementation, I was also in charge of Challenge 2, as you get closer and closer to Chickaletta once you’re within the Tower. There were two parts to every interaction, so there were more interactions to work on in total (18 across the three levels), but overall the logic itself was fairly straightforward, consisting of some touch input CA checks and some drag-drop interactions for different objects. The interactions for Levels 2 and 3 (L2, L3), as seen in my playthroughs, can be viewed below.
The differences across L2 and L3 is mainly the complexity of the object descriptions. For the lowest level, L1, the objects themselves are more or less the same as L2, except that the player is given visual hints during the listening portion of the experience to make the difficulty easier.
Chickaletta rescued, mission success!
Matthew Floyd 