Team Size: 20
Timeframe: 6 months
Sprint Timeframe: 7 weeks (+2 weeks revisions)
Role: Interactive Editor (Lead)
Key Contributions: Challenge 1, Payoff Music Logic, Master Logic
Learning Prompt: Identifies word families
Date Sprint Completed: August 2022
In this Mission (the last of Noggin’s second season and, as of October 2023, the last Mission in the series), something is up with the music maker lab in Nogginville. It is spitting out very discordant tunes at the moment, and it is up to you to navigate a series of challenges encouraging understanding of word families to help fix it.
I worked this Mission during a 7-week timeframe wrapped around May 2022 as lead interactive editor, and then were was some available time in August 2022 to make a few revisions in the logic to make it cleaner as well.
As the lead editor, that means managing the master logic in addition to the given challenge assigned, as well as various upkeep tasks as well (i.e. holding the core project file on your computer, running exports, and uploading to Box and gitHub).
Much of the master logic is pre-prepared and re-used as a template from older missions, but you still have to change out the programmatic aesthetics in your keyframes, including badge selection process (see below), and the menu (see below), which nests in the same keyframe, but evolves over the course of the experience based on how my challenges the player has completed. As such, this means managing the respective tracking variables that see how many challenges have been completed, as well as the seek logic that tracks where in the source video the menu will seek to upon completion.
As is the case in most missions when you “own” one, I was also in charge of Challenge 1 (C1). On paper, this was straightforward touch-and-tap logic tracking the given correct answer (CA) vs. wrong answers (WA) per interaction. Additionally, the logic didn’t change at all over the course of the Challenge’s three levels (see farther below), so, basically, logic for one interaction could be carried over across all.
As you can see in this deep-dive on the interaction logic, the small gate holding the done button needed to open and close based on a multitude of factors (i.e. whether the WA audio was playing, whether the player tapped on the word family or the given image, whether or not an audio was about to be replayed) and some of these taps were meant to disable touch (i.e. the WAs), and some could be interrupted.
And this before adding in the various “player idle”/timeout logic and audio as well.
So basically, a very straightforward kind of interaction required a lot of nested complexities, even though Levels 2 and 3 (L2, L3, below) could reuse all of it per their interactions.
***As is the case with most Noggin missions, there are 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.***
Lastly, in addition to C1, it was my job to manage to programmatic music that plays during the payoff/outro of the experience.
In most projects, the music is either built into the source video or given as a programmatic audio file that simply loops in between two different timestamps.
But M214 allows the player to select from four different ending tunes to play during the outro, thereby utilizing tracking variables for this music selection, and this portion of the source video is meant to loop indefinitely until a certain point in the musical song, so the given routine of music looping was, in a way, inverted for this payoff.
Two of these musical options can be seen below. I enjoyed in this Mission just how accurate it felt, in how uncomfortably discordant the earlier tune is, to how pleasant and upbeat the ending tunes are. It really invokes a strong desire to complete the mission just to get to the more comfortable soundtrack.
Nogginville has indeed never sounded better. Mission accomplished!
Matthew Floyd 