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What is Technobabble?

is a CÖ÷²¥´óÐã show (9am every Sunday morning) that is a high octane blast of the future. Each episode explores the worlds of technology, gaming, apps and all things digital - featuring films from a popular team of expert YouTube-style ‘vloggers’, encouraging the audience to become digitally creative through watching their ‘vlogs’, all packed with take away facts, tips and how-to guides.

The focus of the series is about two things, firstly to show the CÖ÷²¥´óÐã audience how technology will impact on their lives in the future and secondly to encourage and empower them to become more digitally creative. Make It Technobabble is an interactive extension of the show’s ethos and hopes to appeal to the next generation of game designers giving them an amazing opportunity to create the games they want to play.

Context

All of us have different types of knowledge and certainly different life experiences. This allows us to see connections between pieces of knowledge that others might not easily see. Steve Jobs pointed out that "creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something".

The young audience for Technobabble are intuitively creative - they are, after all, the Loom Band generation - and frequently creative in a digital way as evidenced by almost ubiquitous engagement with Minecraft. How do we inspire this next generation of digital creatives to have aspirations for digital careers? How do we lower that barrier to entry?

If we look at other forms of media production - software has been produced that abstracts complexity and allow users to engage almost immediately with a very shallow learning curve. In music, for instance, the gateway drug to professional products such as Pro Tools or Cubase are entry level experiences like Garage Band – entry level but still capable of outputting music that can chart. The lack of process complexity allows much more focus on the final outcome.

The Make It Technobabble kit aims to transform a generation of young digital consumers into digital creators. It will target a mainstream diverse audience by being fun and easy to use on desktop, tablet or mobile. The kit will help users to take their first 'creative' steps, build their confidence and then inspire them to continue their learning journey.

With 'Make It Technobabble' we are looking to evolve programming to abstract the complexity and lower that barrier. The goal is to engage users with simple computational thinking while allowing them to concentrate on crafting amazing products.

For a more in-depth look at the context for Make It Technobabble please read my colleague Martin Wilson’s blog post

Background

In preparation for the Make It Digital 2015 season an extensive amount of research has taken place – covering market, audience, behavioural, educational and engagement.

Personally, I’ve spent the last 8 years at Ö÷²¥´óÐã Children’s and overseeing the making of them. We've learnt a lot in that timeÌý- particualrly around theÌýcasual nature of web activities which means that user engagement needs to happen quickly and similarly with pay-offs.

Informal learning is key in engaging the user. Learning that matters is learning that is used – and here with the Make It Technobabble kit we are allowing creation of digital products to be tiered learning. At every stage the user has the capability to make something of quality but further engagement reveals more sophistication and possibilities. There is a distribution of cognition that delivers a very inclusive experience.

When building Make It Technobabble we had some important rules that we felt should be constants:

• When parts of the system are starting to become complex they should be abstracted into components.

• The kit must be able to produce sophisticated results

• The interface needs to be implicit and feel fun

• Language should be simple and obvious

• Touch screen first approach

• Reduce typing as much as possible

Our build partners are Aardman Digital – of Wallace & Gromit / Shaun the Sheep fame. Aardman have brought great technical expertise, creativity and understanding of the CÖ÷²¥´óÐã audience - working brilliantly alongside the amazing talents of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã team.

How is it constructed?

The Make It Technobabble game maker kit is built using web standards – HTML5/Javascript. This was an easy decision to make. We wanted the experience to be accessed on as many devices as possible. There has been a distinct improvement in browser performance and capabilities over the last couple of years and this trend will continue. By building as a HTML5 webapp now means that as the kit matures it can take advantage of optimisations and new developments to come on the web.

Components on a game object

Make It Technobabble is a component based system. By separating capabilities into loosely-coupled components (physics, effects, collisions, controls, spawner, etc.) users can easily understand the core function of the component without having to comprehend the detail.

Including the components, the Make It Technobabble kit consists of four key elements:

• Engine - a boilerplate set up that enables cross browser compatibility, asset handling, rendering and accessibility.

• Interface - an interface is intrinsic and obvious to the user - and is very easy to use.

• Components - these will abstract all of the extraneous requirements of systems, giving a framewok for real digital creativity without the boring bits.

• Assets – a range of assets that give the user a wide range of game/story possibilities.

Rules

Underpinning the components in the game space is a simple event-based rules system. This allows for a large range of events to occur and be reacted to. The core pattern is this:

IF [EVENT] THEN [WITH THIS FREQUENCY] DO [ACTION]

Events range from the pressing of the action button to a collision between objects. Once triggered the ‘frequency’ allows for some element of fuzzy logic to be applied – chiefly the frequency will be ‘always’ but can be set to ‘often’, ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely’. This allows for randomness and variability within a game. The system allows for a wide range of actions move/replace/create/destroy an object or win/lose the game. The rules are entered using a super simple drag and drop system. Default rules are included meaning that enemies make a player lose a game and collecting the last item will cause the player to win. Full games can be made with very few, if any, extra rules.

Experimentation

A brilliant aspect of component based systems is the ability to add one to see what it does. The kit has been set up to allow for quick experimentation and therefore quick discovery of how things work or indeed don’t work. This continual tweak and test approach is vital in allowing users to fail fast and iterate towards a successful and compelling game. Iterating at close to the speed of thought.

Beta

Make It Technobabble has been released as a limited Beta trial. In the beta release users are restricted to building one game level without scrolling screens or sound. These constraints will allow for creative solutions to give players the sense of a bigger space. Already games have been made where scenery and game elements are spawned which scroll across the screen. We will be tracking behaviours within the system and a dialogue with the users through the CÖ÷²¥´óÐã comments system will allow us to discover a deeper understanding of where to take the kit.

For the Beta release of the kit there is an emphasis on logical decision making and abstraction. By engaging, even in a light way, users will begin to understand the consequences of logical decisions. By building up screen objects with component sets users will be able to use abstraction to duplicate and propagate to quickly deliver some very sophisticated results.

Once a game has been made users are invited to submit them into CÖ÷²¥´óÐã. We’ll be putting our favorites into the featured games section.

Many more exciting features will be added in the full release of the Make It Technobabble kit in early 2015 – inspired and steered by engaging with the beta users - helping to shape the kit into a tool that will be capable of producing amazing games that will resonate with their players. Made by the audience for the audience.

See what games your creativity can generate at the.ÌýÌý

Jon Howard, Executive Product Manager, Digital Creativity, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Future Media