OPTIMISING THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF LOCATION-BASED GAMES: THE LBE FRAMEWORK

The European project MAGELLAN designs and develops, among other systems and services, the Magellan Authoring Tool (MAT), which is a games authoring platform that has been specifically created to enable non-programmers to rapidly create and publish multiple forms of location-based experiences, involving several participants who compete or collaborate to achieve the activities and goals decided by the author. In the context of the project’s training activities, a series of training processes, content and events have been realised commensurate to training creative people to create their own location-based games. To inform future iterations of the Location Based Experience (LBE) Training Framework and to assess the efficacy of the training methodology adopted for training users in the Magellan platform, this paper presents a case study following the Training and Evaluation of an associated project workshop that featured the Alpha release of the platform. An analysis of the findings is presented from data collected at the workshop featuring both end-user feedback and user evaluation observations. An investigation into the delivery methods and training content, specifically created for the Magellan Alpha Workshop, are considered and explored further as the LBE Training Framework is refined to incorporate feedback concerning future user training requirements for creating Location-Based Experiences.