I make virtual escape games, which consist of a linear series of RW pages where solving a puzzle on each page provides the user with a password which they then use to reveal the link to the next page. However, all the pages are independent of one another, as no variable information is carried over from one page to the next.
I would like to start providing players some sort of score throughout the game to bring in a competitive element. It could be adding together time they spend on each page or the number of hints used on each page, or a list of items collected on each page, etc. All of these ideas require some info to be stored from one page and provided back to the user on a later page. Can someone suggest the easiest possible way to add that functionality to my site? I use Foundation 6 and Stacks for everything, so a stack-based solution would be ideal.
I’m not a developer at all, so am looking for a way to store and retrieve data without learning mySQL. I have S4S’s Sentry, which seems like it can pass information on through the URL, but I’ve read and reread the info page, and find it a bit overwhelming. Any easy solutions out there?
Thanks,
Gregory
I have a feeling that @AndersonUX has Quizzer already and possibly uses it in some of these games. I may be wrong. In any case it doesn’t offer the kind of tracking that he is describing.
If you are using Sitelok for the games though @AndersonUX - which it looks like you are - then you could quite easily use the custom fields available in that to track some of the things that you are talking about. I know @vibralogix was looking at releasing a JavaScript plugin that would make this a bit easier. It would need a bit of coding on your part but am pretty sure that there is no out-of-the-box stacks solution for what you are talking about.
Mr. Marshall seems to be a bit psychic! I do indeed use Quizzer on some of my games, and was scratching my head to think how it might be used to track data throughout the series of web pages. I also do use Sitelok, which hadn’t occurred to me as a solution. I’ll look into it. Thanks!
My Agent stack can pass data between pages via URL parameters. So you could pass the score via the URL and then customize your layouts based on that. I don’t know how you are making your games therefore I am not sure if this would benefit you or not.
My Foundation 6 forms can also pass data between pages as well. I did a live stream on this a month or two ago.
Cool. You record all your livestreams, right? I’ll check that out first, since I already have Foundation. Honestly, I don’t know exactly how I’m going to use the data passing for my games either. First I figure out what technology I have access to, then design around it. Far less frustrating than the other way around.
I have written a Javascript Access plugin for Sitelok which can be used to store and retrieve user data to custom fields client-side (as opposed to server-side using PHP). It’s not released quite yet but a pre-release is available if needed.
