Footprints in educational games...?

I have been tasked with a weird assignment.

I was to make an educational PC game set in an outdoor environment such as the forest, where the players choose a character and solve puzzles to reveal unknown parts of the map. There are four different type of puzzle based on character selection: Mathematics for Mathematician, History for Historian, Physics for Physicist, and Arts for Artist.

One of the graphic requirements was to render footprints left behind when the character walks around the terrain, and these footprints would disappear after some time. I was to write the technical design document, and needed to look for similar game references.

Which games would have such feature that is already implemented?

How about some of the latest games with pretty graphics?

Final Fantasy XIII can be considered one of the really pretty looking games, and look! No footprints on the terrain! Or maybe the ground was hard and no visible footprints are left behind....

Ok, how about....

White Knight Chronicles was released at approximately the same time as Final Fantasy XIII, and although graphics wise the real time rendering quality cannot be compared with the previous game title, still, no footprints!

Even when the characters are walking in the desert, only some sand flying simulation whenever the characters lift their legs off the ground is carried out.

Come to think of it, I had never thought of or noticed that there were no footprints in the games I've played, until I really looked hard (for this assignment). Why is that so?

The only viable reason I could think of is... Footprints are too small to be noticed, and thus additional processing power spent for achieving this effect could be better spent elsewhere. Or, it could be that during level design, considerations for harder terrains (so that no footprint rendering is needed) have already been made, such as in Final Fantasy XIII. All the terrains in Final Fantasy XIII appear either hard, or have lush greenery such that no footprints would be left behind even when characters travel through the terrain.

If for all these games which strive to achieve realism through the eyes of the players have left such real world "realism" behind, then why should an education game, whose focus should be mainly on puzzles for players to learn from, have a requirement for a graphic effect that is not inline with the game focus?

The only conclusion I could get was... this is a lousy assignment whose actual requirements from another existing genre had been poorly fitted into an educational game. If we consider the games that really focus on graphic realism, the only feature remotely similar to the aforementioned requirement is just the simulation of tire tracks, such as in crysis:

Thinking back to my assignment, i can only summarize my feelings with o.O and =_=|||

Expectations are the root of all evil

Whatever I do, it's all wrong.
Just tell me, what can I do now?

Buzz2 Chaos - Spot The Difference

yays! the game i've worked on is finally going commercial! check out the youtube video:

Conformity

I just happened to be sitting in front of the TV last night after my bath to just stone and let my hair dry for a while... and that was when I was captivated by the movie "Little Red Flowers" on Okto's FilmArt.

The movie was about a boy called Fang Qiangqiang, who was a rebellious and naughty boy, who fails to adhere to the rules in the kindergarten he attends in China. His rebellious may not be by nature; he wanted to fit in with the rest of his classmates and have fun with them, but he does not follow the rules set by the adults and as a result, gets shunned away by the adults and other children in the end. Although I felt sorry for Qiangqiang throughout the movie, I also understood the headache the teachers in the kindergarten had as well.

I hate rules as well. This might be the reason why I feel for Qiangqiang, and think that the adults might have been too harsh on him. Yet, now that I'm so much older, I hate to admit but I stick to rules too. There are certain social rules that I "enforce" on others too, like if someone else is not "nice" I'll do the cold treatment just like the teachers in "Little Red Flowers". Could I be too harsh as well? Of course I could always argue that, hey the people I'm facing now may not be children like Qiangqiang, children still do not understand the workings of our world so we could excuse them. But this movie just made me realize that like how Qiangqiang interprets the world differently from the other children and teachers in school, so do I and the others I meet and face. Just because someone else is "different from the norm", does that mean that person should be shunned away as well...?

That's a really good question.

There's a reason why certain social norms are in place. And those who do not understand this will appear different from the norm. However, if others shun away from you, perhaps there really is a good reason behind it; yet it is just human to think of other people being at fault rather than we ourselves being at fault.

The battle within

When there is light, there will be shadows.
In darkness, there will be light.

For all these years, my light and dark sides have been battling each other with no clear signs of victory to either side... Or there could be no lasting victory for either side at all in the first place?

I am tired.
Can my light side take over from here?

Frustration

Seriously... How could you not know the correct name for someone whom u've worked with daily for more than a month?

Are my expectations just too high?
I really feel my irritation meter filling up fast and bursting soon... again.
RAWR~!

Explosion

I really need to work on my temper.
But I don't regret the things I've said earlier.
Because they have been buried deep in me all these time.