Playing 20ish Questions

Here are the list of questions (mine and others) for the interview with Matt Weise Thursday evening. Please feel free to continue to add suggestions or edits.

Design
Matt, you wrote the initial design doc. for the game, how much of it was limited by what the engine could do?
Was the design doc written any differently for a modded engine, compared do writing it for an in-house game?
What limits / restraints did you encounter by modding?
How was character & artistic design impacted through a COTS?
The information and content learned is more import than the gameplay, but how did you structure the game in order to create incentives to progress?

Development
How large was the development team?
How experienced were the team members in development, design or modding?
What were the specific learning objectives designed into the game?
How often did gameplay get sacrificed fro the sake of the learning objectives?
What makes was a COTS engine mod different from licensing another commercial engine?
What challenges did you encounter scripting the NPC?
What limitations of the genre (rpg) did you encounter?
What compromises did you and the team make make?
Did you feel that this compromised their goals beyond what was reasonably acceptable?
Would another genre (or another platform) work better for the content?

Educational Context
How much research was done for the game's story?
What historic licenses were taken?
Unlike commercial game design, where the assessment comes in retail sales, how did you assess the success of the game?
Was the assessment planned and integrated from the beginning or was it tacked on?
Did you assess students' motivation to play the game?
What was known about the target group?
Did those students with previous experience with either the genre or platform, have an easier time 'mastering' the content than those who needed to 'learn' the platform?
How much previous experience playing games at all have any influence on the
students learning the content?

Experience / Recommendations
What would you recommended as potential engines or games to mod?
Which games are the most scalable?
Which have the best support community for modding?
For someone just getting started, what games are the most user-friendly?
Which ones can a newbie work to mod?
What level of experience do you recommend someone enter with?
Which games would be the most affordable?

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What else would you want to know about developing educational (library) games?

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