Discussion Methods for tracking player engagement/interaction?

[AlexCognassist]

Hello,

I'm a Learning Designer at an education tech company. We usually use tools like Articulate 360 for designing our learning content but I've been looking at expanding into game-like, interactive content that's more compelling and ultimately more fun.

However, e-learning authoring tools (like Articulate 360) export content as SCORM or TinCan xAPI, which allows us to track data like session time, the user's interactions and many other things which are very useful for supporting our neurodiverse learners. I would like to know if that is possible with Game Maker Studio 2? Or if there have been similar use cases?

I'm not very technical so apologies if I'm not able to provide more advanced detail.

Thanks

 

[rui.r6o]

After a very brief Google search to familiarize myself with both SCORM and xAPI, they seem to both be technical standards. GameMaker does not have support for it natively, but you could go about it a couple of ways;
- Create a pure GML implementation that adheres to those standards, or
- Find libraries for those implementations and add them to GameMaker through the extension mechanism.
Either way should, in theory, allow you to then get the information you want exported, provided you collect it in the first place. However, if you're not very technical it might be difficult for you to create those implementations/integrations, so you might want to search in the collaboration forum for someone that you could potentially hire/partner with for it.

 

[AlexCognassist]

After a very brief Google search to familiarize myself with both SCORM and xAPI, they seem to both be technical standards. GameMaker does not have support for it natively, but you could go about it a couple of ways;
- Create a pure GML implementation that adheres to those standards, or
- Find libraries for those implementations and add them to GameMaker through the extension mechanism.
Either way should, in theory, allow you to then get the information you want exported, provided you collect it in the first place. However, if you're not very technical it might be difficult for you to create those implementations/integrations, so you might want to search in the collaboration forum for someone that you could potentially hire/partner with for it.

Thank you for your reply! That's really helpful.

I'm currently making a business case to get buy-in from the higher-ups so this should go some way in supporting that.

Let's say there weren't any extensions out there to support this and we had to create it ourselves, (as a very, very general estimate), would this be something that would take, say, two experienced people working 4ish hours a day, weeks, months or even years to create?

 

[rui.r6o]

Let's say there weren't any extensions out there to support this and we had to create it ourselves, (as a very, very general estimate), would this be something that would take, say, two experienced people working 4ish hours a day, weeks, months or even years to create?

Working professionaly as a software developer I can say this will vary wildly depending on the actual developers, whether they are experienced with the actual portions of GML required or not, the complexity of the standards (I didn't look into it in detail, so I don't know how complex they are), etc. The best I can suggest is to sell the creation of a PoC to the higher ups, to investigate external options that can be integrated or to try and create the bare minimum data export with those standards. Based on that you should be able to then have a concrete estimate of the total time required

 

[AlexCognassist]

Working professionaly as a software developer I can say this will vary wildly depending on the actual developers, whether they are experienced with the actual portions of GML required or not, the complexity of the standards (I didn't look into it in detail, so I don't know how complex they are), etc. The best I can suggest is to sell the creation of a PoC to the higher ups, to investigate external options that can be integrated or to try and create the bare minimum data export with those standards. Based on that you should be able to then have a concrete estimate of the total time required

Yes, I think you're right about creating a PoC. Thank you for your time and help, it's really appreciated