Simplifying Narrative Serious Games Development: An Exploratory Analysis

—Game engines and developer-friendly authoring tools have greatly simplified entertainment game development. However, this does not extend to serious games which, in particular, require involvement of non-developer stakeholders. We present the first evaluation of uAdventure, an easy-to-use game development environment for narrative point-and-click graphic adventure games. uAdventure is a re-implementation of the previously-validated eAdventure environment on top of the Unity game engine. The idea is to get most of the advantages of the Unity professional environment at a fraction of its complexity, and without requiring programming knowledge to use it. uAdventure include educational-oriented affordances, such as assessment and learning analytics; and has been formatively evaluated by heterogeneous users with different degrees of technical knowledge. The results of our evaluation show much simpler story creation for profiles that had no previous knowledge of the engine, and positive feedback from more technical profiles which would use the tool as a prototyping tool for complex projects