Mission 209: The Baker’s Big Blunder

Team Size: 22

Timeframe: 5 months

Sprint Timeframe: 6 weeks

Role: Interactive Editor (Lead)

Key Contributions: Challenge 1, Master Logic

Learning Prompt: Story Comprehension + Sequencing Events

Date Sprint Completed: November 2021

In this Mission, you are tasked with “fixing” the book of “The Tale of the Merry Baker” by sequencing the events of the story in order. The story, which tracks the eponymous baker’s quest to bake the perfect cake, is divided into two main challenges for you to play through.

Working during 6-week timeframe during October and November of 2021 (extended due to the holidays), this was another project that I “owned” as lead interactive editor, 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 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). The drag-drop logic across the interactions of the challenge is fairly straightforward, which tracks a given correct answer (CA) vs. wrong answers (WA) and the interaction is completed if the CA is dragged to the goal spot. What ended up being tricky was custom music logic that needed to be crafted.

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. In C1, however, the music is all programmatic and needs to be “reset” at the beginning of each interaction, as well as manually turned off on each page turn of the book, requiring a series of keyframes to trigger such events.

In addition, Mission 209 re-used the adaptive leveling logic introduced in Mission 207 (see my page of Mission 207 for a deeper explanation on adaptive leveling), requiring the necessary keyframe tracking in the source video of the respective challenge. This is why my above playthrough sees my “level” raise from Level 2 (L2) to Level 3 (L3) midway through the experience, whereas my subsequent playthrough (below) to showcase some of the C1 logic takes place as L3.

In terms of logic across the different levels, it carried over fairly straightforwardly. Level 1 (L1) of C1 sees two picture options given for each interaction. L2 sees two picture options for each interaction, except for interaction 2 (i2) which is increased to three. In L3, there are three picture options for each interaction.