Improvements to the standard torque game engine for Australian indigenous storytelling: developing the digital songlines game engine

This paper reports on the development of the Torque Game Engine (TGE) as a digital storytelling platform for Indigenous Australian storytelling. It outlines the project cycle, improvements to the base TGE, and the key features of the Digital Songlines engine (DSE) version of the TGE. It concludes with an overview of recent implementations of the DSE. The Digital Songlines project is funded by the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID). It has been developing protocols, methodologies and toolkits to facilitate the collection, education and sharing of Australian indigenous cultural heritage knowledge. The project explores the areas of effective recording, content management and virtual reality delivery capabilities that are culturally sensitive and involve the indigenous custodians, leaders and communities from around Australia. It investigates how players, in a serious gaming sense, can experience Indigenous virtual heritage in a high fidelity fashion with culturally appropriate interface tools. This paper reports on the development of the specific technology which makes the game engine most suitable for the goals of this project.