Documentation the nuts and bolts
Getting Started
Stay In The Know
Our mailing list is hosted on Google Groups. Be sure to join up to get commit notices, discuss changes and updates, and express any feedback. Our Issue Tracker is hosted by GitHub. For information on current bugs and features, have a look there.
LevelBadger Mailing List (Comp412-Gamification)
Issue Tracker (Hosted on GitHub)
Technologies
Installing Rails
If you have not already experienced the wonders of the Rails Framework, you can read about its advantages in one of the many guides used as a staple for many new rails developers.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
You can install rails quickly by following the steps
Windows - http://railsinstaller.org/
Unix/Linux (OS X) -
- Install Ruby 1.9.3 http://soff.es/how-to-install-ruby-193
- Install Ruby Gems ( latest version )
-
Install Rails with the following command:
- "sudo gem install rails"
Developer Instructions
Fork us on github
run the command: git clone https://github.com/ericburns/gamification-library
Getting Started
For those new to the rails framework, you can learn about the file directories to educate yourself on where the code is in this guide.
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby-on-rails-2.1/rails-directory-structure.htm
The essence of our gamificatiion process lies in the data models and relationships with one another.
- a GAME has_many LEVELS
- a GAME has_many USERS
- a USER has_many FRIENDSHIPS
the list goes on, but to get a complete picture, look through each of the models to see how each interacts with the others. By upholding the integrity of these models, we can iteratively improve the process of gamifying many activities.
Contributing
The best way to start contributing is by becoming more and more familiar with the code. We suggest to frequently visit the issue tracker and then start getting involved in feature discussions.
It would be unwise to simply hack at the code alone ( meaning, without discussion with the levelbadger community ) and send an unforeseen pull request.
Get involved in the discussions! everyone is welcome!
Version History
1.0.0 (Alpha)
Alpha – This is the first alpha of Level Badger that we demonstrated on November 20, 2012.
Features:
- Ability to create multiple games and users.
- Ability to set the game’s unit of measurement. By default, this is XP.
- Ability for a user to add 1 to their XP with the press of a button.
- Progress bars to track the XP of all users in a game and compare them to each other.
- Ability to create multiple levels in each game. Levels are sorted by the amount of experience required to reach the next level.
- Badges can be created and awarded whenever a user reaches a specific level.
- Ability for users to create friendships.
- Users can add many email addresses into their profile on Level Badger.
Known Issues:
- No password recovery.
- Badges are only awarded once.
Planned Features
Password Retrieval
Presently, a user is not able to recover their password if they lose it. This feature will be implemented as soon as possible.
User-Uploaded Badge Images
One of the upcoming features to Level Badger will be the ability for a game master to upload their own badge images to use in their games. This means that a game administrator will not have to manually place them in the public/assets/images/badges directory, and if many Level Badger games are being run on one server, this functionality would be best in the long term.
In order to prevent potential trolling of this function, there will be size limits on what a user can upload as a badge image, but those have not yet been determined.
Changes to the +1 XP Button
Depending on what unit of measurement you are using for your game, you might have times when you need to add more than just 1 whenever you need to increment your progress bar. Typically, you will want your users to be able to increment by only 1, but in the future, there will be a way for the player to add more than just 1 to their progress bar at a time. This could even be regulated by the game admin, who could set a maximum value for the XP button to be incremented at one time.
Awarding Badges More than Once
Presently, Level Badger can only give a badge out once unless the game admin manually modifies a user’s Badge information. However, in the future, Level Badger will be able to give out badges based on intervals, or give out only a set number of badges.
Automatically Create Levels Based on Scale
Based off of an idea part of our team had, this will be able to create your entire level set based on an experience scale. Let’s say you want to quickly create 100 levels, where, in order to reach the next level, you will need to earn 110% of the experience you needed to reach the previous level. In other words, if it requires 10 XP to reach level 2, it will take 21 to reach level 3, 32 to reach level 4, and so on.
Presently, this would need to be done manually, but in the future we hope to give game admins the power to create a system of levels as quickly as possible.
