"DISTRAINT For Research" (D4R) 
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WHAT IS D4R?

D4R is a resource (The D4R game) for primarily user-centred video game research. The resource is openly available and customisable, and can be run in the browser by linking it via a direct URL. The D4R game is based on a demo version of DISTRAINT: Deluxe Edition (Jesse Makkonen 2017), whose official distribution utilises fan-made localisations into many languages. To make D4R, this commercially-available indie game was ported into HTML5 by the creator of the original game as part of a collaboration with scholars. Researchers can easily modify in-game dialogue and UI texts to use D4R in their projects. All files and instructions necessary to make a working build are available under this repository. 



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HOW CAN I SETUP D4R?
The D4R game consists of the following components that all need to be hosted on a server and placed in the same root directory: 
  1. Data folders (just the directories "resources" and "src"): audiovisual assets, dependencies, scripts, runtime, etc. 
  2. HTML file (e.g. "english_release.html"): this file runs the game from a URL pointing directly to it (e.g. https://[domain]/[root-directory]/english_release.html")
  3. TXT file (e.g. "english_release.txt"): this file holds the game texts that the HTML file reads from to display in-game. 

CAUTION: The filenames of the HTML and TXT files must be identical (like in the examples above), and all components must be in the same directory. That is because the HTML file looks up its own name and location to find a TXT file with the same properties. You may change the filename of the HTML/TXT pair to whatever you need, however. 



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HOW CAN D4R BE USED IN RESEARCH?

You can setup more than one standalone instance of D4R, e.g. if you wish to deploy D4R in experimental studies. To illustrate: say you want to conduct a reception study to compare how the English texts in D4R compare against its texts localised into Basque. You may duplicate the HTML/TXT pair within the same directory and link a URL to the duplicated HTML file to generate a new instance of the D4R game that reads from the duplicate TXT file. You can also change its filename to something like "euskara1.txt", but you must change the HTML filename to "euskara1.html" as well. Into the TXT, you deploy your Basque localisation. You can base your localisations off of the official localisation files of the original DISTRAINT: Deluxe Edition. With the two separate URL links, pointing each to one of the two HTML files in the directory (e.g. "[domain]/d4r/english_release.html" and "[domain]/d4r/euskara1.html"), you can paste them into your HTML5 Internet Browser of choice. You can administer one or both such URLs to your study participants for them to play the game in either version as a stimulus material. As a post-task, you retrieve measurements of their reactions. You can utilise the D4R game somehow else in your research. 

Please contact the authors of the resource in case you have any further questions. 



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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When using D4R, the paper by the authors published in the peer-reviewed journal should be cited as reference in any resulting publications and talks.

DISTRAINT ©Jesse Makkonen – all rights reserved. DISTRAINT: Deluxe Edition and other updates and instalments to the series are understood as part of DISTRAINT©. For more information, you can visit his website: https://jessemakkonen.com. Jesse Makkonen is the rightsholder and owner of the commercially independently-published video game DISTRAINT and all other commercial releases of instalments in this franchise. 

DISTRAINT For Research (D4R) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA Licence.  To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. All files necessary to run D4R can be downloaded from our repository.