Can the app be embedded in a page?

[NiallTracey]

Can a Monogatari game be embedded as part of a web page, rather than take up a full page to itself?

If you want to know why I'm asking, read on. If not, you can stop reading now. ;-)

I'm studying a masters in Serious Games and work for the LearnGaelic.scot website.

I'm currently considering building my dissertation project around Monogatari -- my draft title is Repurposing an open source game engine for the delivery of online language learning content or something similar.

Basically, the idea is to write a front end wrapper that allows teachers to produce dialogues and stories, as well as interactive quizzes, then generates the Monogatari script (with some embedded custom javascript to handle communication with a host virtual learning environment).

Why?

Well, tools for the teaching industry tend to suffer either from being part of closed platforms (normally tied to specific webservices) or from lack of updates and a slow degradation of compatibility (Hot Potatoes, long the most popular free tool, generates some activities that won't work on iOS and others that render wrong in Firefox).

By wrapping the Monogatari engine, most of the compatibility issues are delegated to the game engine, so there's a much lower maintenance requirement -- any compatibility changes in Monogatari can automatically be incorporated into my output; only changes to the script format will necessitate updating the codebase.

So... all that said, the reason I'm asking about embedding in a page is that my first use case (dialogues) are intended to replace things like this with something more dynamic and engaging, and for our uses (and many other educators') it would be very handy to present the output of Monogatari in this way.

[Hyuchia]

@NiallTracey Hi there! I find what you are trying to make very interesting!, as a matter of fact, it is indeed possible to use Monogatari embedded on a website, with either an iframe or by simply resizing it's screens through CSS.

Making the dialogs look like in the sample you provided might prove to be a bit difficult mainly due to issues with positioning the elements, since Monogatari is responsive, there's no real way to be certain where exactly each character is positioned on screen.

This project might take a lot of advantage if you start checking out the upcoming v2.0 release that's being developed here since that one is probably able to adapt better to the embedding and custom functionalities. There's still missing a lot of documentation but I'd be glad to help out!

[NiallTracey]

Thanks -- I'll have a look at the new version. Are the differences mostly inside the code itself, or are there any radical changes to the script format.

I'm not wanting to replicate the current dialogs -- I'm trying to find a better way to do them, because the old style is really a bit of a hack, in my opinion. I want to do things with all the avatar emotions, click-to-advance etc of a visual novel engine.

I'm hoping it will also function as a "gateway drug" to get teachers producing visual-novel style language exercises -- there have been activities called "word mazes" in the past that work much the same way, but they can be quite clumsy, so doing them inside a visual novel engine should make life easier for everyone, teachers and learners alike.