After finishing paper testing in week five and discussing specific revisions to the question text and plot in week six, I began preparing a more standardized narrative text. Specifically, this included all text from day one, including narration, character dialogue, and word choices for players in the questions. This troubled me for a long time because it needed to simultaneously meet the following conditions: 1. It needed to be within a reasonable range of answers and reflect the different thinking of people with ASD. 2. Each player’s thinking and answering style is different, so having a single, standard answer to get points for this question is unrealistic, or rather, too difficult. 3. It needed to consider the technical aspects, such as my teammates’ programming skills, because providing a possible solution for every possible permutation and combination is too challenging.
Since we have a second game test this Thursday, my main focus this week was on the writing style and flow of the entire story. I took Vanissa’s advice from week 7. She said that sharing my text in the group for discussion was fine, but not formal enough. I also felt that this made it too difficult for Nam to extract key information, such as whose part it was, where the answer key was, and where the words players needed to choose were. So I organized this into a Word document and used different colors and highlights to indicate which part each section belonged to and where it should be placed. Nam said it was indeed much clearer.
Next, I addressed the scoring system. In week 6, Misty gave me advice. She mentioned a game she had played or heard about where the spelling wasn’t based on the entire sentence, but on individual words. This resonated with me, so I kept some key words in the fill-in-the-blank section. For example, if the complete answer was “I remember how to play with the planet cards,” the keywords would be “remember,” “planet pattern,” and “card.” Choosing any of these three cards would earn a bonus, one point per word, making the total score for this question three. This method is a good thing for programming because it eliminates the need to calculate probabilities and right or wrong answers; it only requires calculating scores.