Ruby Quest is one of the many fine eductional games that can be found in What On Earth‚Ñ¢, a daily news journal from Ingenius‚Ñ¢. For more information about What On Earth, surf to: http://www.ingenius.com.
Programming, design and authoring -
Gary Rosenzweig (rosenz@aol.com)
Artwork - William Follett
Sound Design - Jay Shaffer
Art Direction - Phil Waters
Ruby Quest and What On Earth
There are a dozen other interactive Challenges, as well as Ruby Quest, that can be plugged into one of What On Earth's six daily news stories for kids. These Challenges use a different set of data every day written specifically for that news story. All of the Challenges are made to enhance the learning experience of What On Earth.
For more information about What On Earth and Ingenius, visit www.ingenius.com.
Technical aspects of Ruby Quest
This demo of Ruby Quest is a Macromedia Director projector. The experienced Director/lingo author might wonder how Ruby Quest works. There are no special Xobjects - just lingo. Each of the pillars are puppetSprites and use one of two randomly choosen pillar graphics to prevent the appearance of a pattern in the pillars. In addition, the pillars are scaled down as they go back into the screen to create a 3D effect. The animated characters are also scaled as they jump back toward the ruby. The ruby itself is just a 1-bit cast member with its forecolor constantly changing. The actual size of the Director movie before it became a projector was less than 400K.
The correct path across the carvern is choosen by a lingo routine using one list of correct answers and one list of wrong answers. The music is usually a set of MIDI files - using Quicktime on the Mac and MCI MIDI files on the PC. For this demo, however, they have been converted to regular sound cast members. The fonts are Ingenius' own custom bitmapped fonts designed for cross-platform presentation.
The What On Earth product is completely cross-platform, although this demo was made for the Mac.
About Gary Rosenzweig
Gary has been programming in lingo for quite some time. He has written a book on lingo that is available over the internet (www2.csn.net/~rosenz/). He has also programmed in similar languages like those in Hypercard and Toolbook for more than seven years. He has an education that combines computer science with journalism and graphic design, and paid his dues by programming in Fortran and C on mainframes for years.
Gary lives in Denver, Colorado, where he works for Ingenius as the lead software developer on What On Earth. He also owns and operates INsystems, a multimedia consulting firm.
