Voices of Spoon River
Voices of Spoon River began as a class project: a text adventure based on Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, built to teach poetry. For my Master’s thesis I rebuilt it in 3D as a total conversion built on ioquake3, the community-maintained fork of id Software’s open-source release of the Quake 3 engine.
The 3D version put the player inside the setting rather than describing it in text, and was built around a single puzzle drawn from one of the book’s epitaphs.
I wrote about the experience of remixing someone else’s engine for teaching in The challenges, frustrations and triumphs of remixing an open source engine for educational games (TechTrends, 2008), listed with my other publications.