Future Directions

Gameplay

The awards from the Encounter Sprites in Round Route currently rely too much on chance.  The original design called for mini-games to be triggered from the goods sprites that pop up around the map.  As Round Route continues to develop, mini-game will be included to create addition gameplay and give the player a greater sense of control over the resource gathering in game.

The player needs more feedback about his/her status during gameplay.  The images that appear as the Encounter Sprite is leaving the stage are not enough of an indicator about what has been added or subtracted from the player's inventory.  One tester suggested simply having what was changed in inventory display under the colony name in the GUI.  This will be among the first fixes investigated in future game builds.

The game would benefit from additional activities that give players an incentive to travel around the map.  Two methods for include some gameplay variation will be investigated in the short term: mini-games and hotspots. 

The original mechanics for the Encounter Sprites called for each sprite to trigge a mini-game to provide additional fun and learning content, and give the player more control over how many units of a particular good they were awarded.  These mini-games were cut early in development due to time constraints.

Hotspots were an early idea intendended to give player a reason to perform specific activities at certain times.  In one form, the player would get a clue about an area from a town's person and getting to that area would trigger some type of reward.  In another form, occasionally a bonus Encounter Sprites would spawn.  These bonus sprites would either give a bonus when collected or give a bonus to other good collected during a fixed time period.  Both of these bonus methods will be investigated for future versions of Round Route.

Content Review

One major addition to the overall project would be the completion of the Expert Review.  Due to time and availability constraints the scheduled Expert Review was not performed.   In this review local middle school teacher were going to be surveyed about how effect they felt Round Route would be at it educational goals.  The opinions gained from this type of review would be very helpful while assessing what additional content should be added to the game.

Brand Management

In order to safeguard the integrity of the project some form of copyright protection will be pursued.  The will still be freely available to be played through my website and/or any other place that will host it.  The Copyright is simply to ensure that the brand can be trusted by educators, and that if anyone makes money off the game the creator gets his fair share and appropriate credit.

The game will be placed on at least one independent site for web-based entertainment games.  This is intended to increase the value of the Round Route brand while allowing the game to be compared to other similar products by actual consumers.  The feedback gain from the market will be used when creating additional features for the game.