Benjamin Franklin: The Great Mysteries of Ben

My 1st quarter benchmark was a new and fun experience to create. For my project, I decide to research Benjamin Franklin and how he is portrayed in the media, schools, textbooks, etc. vs. the person he really was or the person he could have been, hence, "The Great Mysteries of Ben." This project is an interactive videogame created by a program called Alice. 

In order to view my project, you must download Alice 2.2 for Mac. In order to do this, go here: 

http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=downloads/download_alice2.2
And click on: Alice 2.2 for Mac with Learning to Program with Alice textbook worlds (410MB)

Once you download Alice 2.2, open it in your downloads and click on the .dmg file located in your downloads or on the bottom of your browser for the first time download.

*Next, open your finder and you will see Alice as a device that is ejectable. Click on the Alice device and then open Alice from the window that pops up in the finder window. The file that contains my project is NOT accessible from this blog. Go here to download my file. I apologize, my efforts and hard work made this file extremely large. It may take a while to download (approx. 5min).


Once downloaded, in Alice, go to file and scroll down to open and select the file labeled: FranklinMystery.a2w

Finally, press play (upper lefthand corner) on the Alice program with my file opened. This will create a screen in which you will start out with text and a robot (you have third person point of view. 

*NOTE: DO NOT ALTER ANY OF THE PROGRAMMING BARS. IT WILL CHANGE THE GAMEPLAY.

Here is the rundown of the game: 

Franklin's Great Mysteries is an interactive world in which you can click on object to interact with them. Most objects in the world will act after being clicked and some are just for decoration. As for the controls, you can only look around and move using the cursor keys (it's very straightforward). So use the cursor keys to move around and you can move the camera's view up and down by using "W" to move the camera up and "S" to move the camera down. However, there is aren't any objects completely out of the original view you are given. In other words, if you can't see something because it is too high or too low, change the camera view. You can bring the camera back to it's original view by pressing the up or down - W or S key - in opposition of the key you pressed before.  

The objective of the game is to find out what you can about Franklin. Most objects will generate a script for you to read. Please take the time to read them (they are the purpose of the game). You can click on things to read the script again if you missed it the first time around. You can also press the "pause" button in the middle of a script if you want to spend more time reading (just press resume to continue). There is also a speed adjustor in the window of the game. If you accidentally click on something twice and don't want to read it again, you can turn the speed up to 10x in order to fast forward the messages. REMEMBER TO TURN THE SPEED BACK DOWN TO 1x BEFORE CONTINUING. That just about sums up how to work the world. A few things to consider about the game: 

You can walk through objects and walls without getting stuck, that's just the way Alice is. Please try not to fool around with the environment and treat it as if it were physical unless of course you are trying to get a better point of view. It took over 18 hours to create and polish it in one day and many hours over the course of  a week or so. 

Here is my bibliography. All images and information are taken from a variety of sources.




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