AnnMaria here. The last week I have been working on a “Level 0”. This is because some teachers have told us their students have difficulty playing the game initially because they aren’t sure which keys to use to do what. The space bar jumps, the ctrl (control) key shoots arrows, the arrow keys move you up, down, right and left.
One of the objectives these teachers told us they have for their students in learning mathematics is persistence. They say that the students just give up and ask for help too easily and they asked could we incorporate in the game more on how to use it.
So, using impact.js of which I am a big fan, I made a very, very simple mini-game at the beginning where the player needs to walk around some rocks, jump over a tree and shoot a buffalo with an arrow. If they pass that challenge they get asked a math question about how to find the way back from the lake (this is a math game, after all). If they get that, they continue on playing.
I also did a number of little fixes here and there, added growls to the wolf movie, rewrote some of the dialogue to be less redundant. I fixed the quizzes to be less touchy if you accidentally hit return instead of tab – I did that weeks ago, though.
All of this will be in our next release version, 2.0b3
We are hiring a new intern and his or her first task will be to play the game all of the way through on several browsers – Safari, Firefox, IE9 and Chrome. So, when Mom said no one would pay you to play video games, she was wrong! After Mr/Ms To-be-named checks the games for errors one last time, we will release the latest version, we anticipate before mid-June. At this time, we will also set up a pre-release page for people who want to buy the game now, download the beta version and get the game when it is released in the fall.