This presentation describes how uAdventure's adventure game narrative model has been augmented by mini-games that support other types of game mechanics. Now uA allows through Unity programming to include new mini-games that implement other game mechanics. However, once the mini-games have been created, it is still easy to include and launch them from the uAdventure visual editor and the mini-games can also include analytics so as not to lose the white box model of uAdventure games.

1. Extending narrative serious
games using ad-hoc minigames
ICWL 2021 | 13-14 November 2021 | Macau, Macao, China
Pérez-Colado, Victor Manuel; Pérez-Colado, Ivan José; Martinez-Ortiz, Ivan;
Freire, Manuel; Fernandez-Manjon, Baltasar
balta@fdi.ucm.es @baltafm
Facultad de Informática
Universidad Complutense de Madrid

2. Serious Games and games genres
Serious games (SG) : games where the main purpose is not pure entertainment
● Teaching, creating awareness, changing behaviours, etc.
● Serious Game Effectiveness depends on game design and mechanics
● Some SG mechanics better suited for specific learning objectives
○ E.g.: Action games improve rapid decision making while narrative games promote logical thinking
Game genre(s) include a framework of default mechanics
● Each game genre include different mechanics that can be used to promote
different skills
● Designing and developing new game mechanics is costly as it requires extensive
programming
Choosing the right game genre is key for obtaining a successful game
● effectiveness and applicability
● development requirements and costs

3. Narrative Games
Point and click games focus in the story and use logic puzzles through
conversations and interaction with objects to progress in the game
● Rich enough to provide immersion and roleplay
● Good balance between simplicity and flexibility
○ Reduce total costs and increases maintainability
Narrative mechanics: conversations, choices, exploration, logic-puzzles
● Good for introducing knowledge and practicing it
● Narrative mechanics can be used to simulate other more-complex
mechanics
○ a solution for non-experts but burdensome for experts and affects the final game quality
Proposal: use narrative genre as game backbone and allow extensions with
programmed mini-games for specific mechanics

4. uAdventure: simplifying the creation of serious games
uAdventure (uA) High-level narrative SGs authoring tool for
non-programmers
● Narrative model for adventure point-and-click games
● Support for adventure game mechanics
○ graphical editor for scenarios, navigation and object interactions
○ editor for dialogs
● Allows for the creation of geolocalized adventure games
● Built on top of Unity game engine
○ Generic game engine with multi platform support
● Games as white boxes : default support for xAPI learning analytics
● Game model that can be extended
○ uA allows to include new game mechanics by programming
uAdventure simplifies creation and prototyping of narrative SGs while
allowing advanced users to include new game mechanics
uAdventure is available as open code at https://github.com/e-ucm/

6. uAdventure mini-game extensible architecture
uAdventure mini-games
● Stored in Unity scenes with all its
capabilities (simple for Unity devs)
● Can use uA Adventure Features
(simplify implementation with
mechanics such as tutorials using
dialog boxes)
● Access to uA Core Features (e.g. alter
the game state for messaging)
● Can use the LA tracker to send out user
traces
○ Maintain the “white box” model
uAdventure provides a high-level interface for extension with new mini-games

7. uAdventure mini-game integration and lifecycle
Launching side (uA Visual Programming):
● Config and results are written and read using uA
variables and flags
● Mini-game scene is launched using uA scene
change mechanism
✓ Can be used by non-programmer uA game
creator
Mini-game side (Native Unity Scripting):
● Mini-game adapts reading the config
● Sends back traces, and stores the result
✓ Require a game developer with Unity
programming experience
Once created by programming new mini-games are launched seamlessly
from uA without requiring Unity knowledge

8. Mini-game development
Since mini-games only connect with uAdventure through the Adventure and
Core interfaces our proposal is useful for:
● Developers of games, that can customize their narrative games using
mini-games outside of the initial narrative uA scope
● Non-experts, that can use uA normally and delegate to developers
specific mechanics that fit better for their learning objectives
● Reducing costs, since mini-games can be reused in other games by only
understanding their input and output configuration
● Developers of Unity that could use uA just as supporting narrative
framework

9. Development,pilots and courses
uA extension mini-game model piloted with students from the the Serious
Games module at the UCM Videogames Engineering Degree:
● Users experienced in game development
● Not much experience in SGs or narrative games
● Students learn uA and then create a game during the practical lessons
First pilot:
● Prior to full mini-game concept
● Unity extension for uA
● Give uA more flexibility
● Game: Vuela
Second pilot:
● Mini-game focused
● Specific skills
● Learning Analytics support
● Game: Paranormal Mansion

10. Vuela: A game for teaching airport protocols and safety
Students creating games in uA showed interest in using Unity features inside
uAdventure including new types of interactions (i.e. mechanics)
● uA has the basic support for extension but not “formalized model”
Three different contents:
● Mini-game for learning the appropriate
products for cabin/airplane hold.
● Security roleplay for ID and passport
validity understanding using uA
(adapted narrative simulation)
● Standard uA for quizzes

11. Paranormal Mansion: computational thinking escape room
Students wanted to use mini-games to teach
skills out of uA scope
● Want to maintain default learning analytics
in the new mini-games
Computational thinking:
● Mini games improve skills:
○ Pattern recognition, abstraction, algorithms, etc.
● 5 different mini-games
● All minigames include LA to track player
interaction inside the minigames
uA narrative support the game plot and the introduction of computational thinking concepts
● formalized model to integrate minigames into uAdventure including analytics

12. Learning Analytics support in the mini-games
Mini-game configuration is managed by uA
uA offers an xAPI tracker to report user interactions in the mini-games
● High-level tracker provides a simple interface that creates xAPI traces
○ the developer just call the tracker to sends the traces
● Mini-games are “white boxes”
Computational thinking case:
● Each game traces steps, interactions and results
● Player traces allows to analyze how mini-games
behave
● Specific case: analysis showed that the number of
steps for each difficulty is not progressive

13. Conclusions
The mini-games extension applied to the narrative model increases
the learning capabilities of the uA narrative model by implementing
other genres mechanics
This extensible model implemented in uAdventure allow for different
actors to cooperate: educators can create the story and game
programmers create the new mini-games when required
Tested with game programmers that were able to create
mini-games to teach spatial and computational thinking skills
Game programmers were able to include learning analytics into their
mini-games using the generic uA xAPI tracker
● xAPI is becoming a new IEEE standard (P92741.1)

14. Future work: PUMVA Mini-game repository
Since mini-games are focused in
specific skills:
● Mini-games could be re-used
● We propose creating a repository
for exchanging mini-games
● Game programmers create
generic mini-games for specific
skills
● Teachers use and personalize
mini-games using their uA
descriptor configuration

15. Thanks!
Contact: balta@fdi.ucm.es @baltafm
This work has been partially funded by Regional Government of Madrid (eMadrid S2018/TCS4307, co-funded by the
European Structural Funds FSE and FEDER), by the Ministry of Education (TIN2017-89238-R, PID2020-119620RB-I00),
by MIT-La Caixa (MISTI program, LCF/PR/MIT19/5184001) and by Telefonica-Complutense Chair on Digital Education
and Serious Games.
Our publications: https://www.e-ucm.es/publications/all/
Our open code: https://github.com/e-ucm/