Towards Guidelines for Educational Adventure Games Creation (EAGC)

Many recent studies have shown that educational games are effective tools for learning. Despite the recent popularity of game-based learning and some first general guidelines for the creation of such educational games, there is a lack of useful practical guidelines for specific game types that address all relevant aspects of design, implementation and testing. This might be explained with the possible lack of experience of instructional designers with computer games and game designers with education, but it influences the focus and the approach chosen for the game design and implementation process. The goal of our work is to develop guidelines for the creation of educational adventure games that help not to forget any aspect. In order to do so, we refer to both existing guidelines for the design of entertainment games and existing frameworks for the design of educational games. We suggest a structure of five main game development phases (conceptual design and game design, implementation, testing and validation) and also take project management into account, to not only guide through the creation of the game itself but also to support the organization of the game development process. Our next steps are to put the EAGC guidelines into practice and to show their applicability in a concrete example project, an educational adventure game on electricity, which is currently under development.