Today I should finish indexing my question set. Epimythos has over 380 multiple choice questions, and I have tried to avoid incredibly minute details like the name of the shepherd who bumps into Jason on the way to wherever. We’re avoiding that, and sticking to the heart of the myth.
However, with so many questions, sometimes the heart of the myth is being examined from different angles, and anti-repetition filtering has been my way of avoiding what may feel like repeat questions. That filtering scans my question set actively during the JSON conversion pipeline and creates question groups dynamically.
However, I began to consider tagging questions to ensure chronological clumping can be avoided. For instance, if we cover (A) Thetis dipping Achilles in the Styx, and (B) Thetis marrying Peleus, and (C) Achilles being invincible, all under ThetisAchillesMom it’s okay. Putting them in the same group would avoid repetition. Question (C) doesn’t really require Thetis to know the answer, but the discovery mode explanation would mention her, refreshing the player’s memory and making asking A or B far less challenging, and vice versa. However, what about the question of (D) Who killed Achilles? It may be distinct from A and B, but is too similar to (C).
I could tag them like this:
- A ThetisAchillesMom
- B ThetisAchillesMom
- C ThetisAchillesMom, AchillesHeel
- D AchillesHeel
But that’s actually a lot of work, and would require testing passes afterward. It would be faster to go directly to making multiple passes of testing while fine-tuning my anti-repetition scanning logic. It would probably produce much more comprehensive scanning word combo set, which could also be used by my Verbose mode. So when the next major update comes, expect the anti-repetition logic to be more aggressive and frankly, hopefully, give the impression that a human professor hand-selected the questions.
Also, this effort has given me more ideas for questions, helping to round out the set and fill in gaps such as with the Gigantomachy. I thought of making an interactive geneology tree too, which would be neat because there’s all kinds of possibilities there take advantage of the Unity engine and make it smooth and easy to use, not to mention a great reference.
All told, I’m still having a blast updating this game and adding features. Let me know what you think, and leave a comment below!
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