Hello!
Well here we go with the assessment, first of all, the links;
Porject proposal :
Mid Point Review:
Written Paper
So those are the links! I've got some drawings I do ocassionaly in lunch breaks during work on the blog, just ignore them for the purposes of this assessment, although some of them have connections to the project itself. I believe I also did some short storyboards way back around october/november There is also lots of written things connected to reality, perception and society, which are connected to our project. They can be found in the blog, just watch for the (MA) tags!
I tried updating this blog as much as I could, but as much as I understand the merits of keeping record of everything I do, I work quite fast and without much organization, which doesn't work well with this type of system. I do try to adapt and learn though, and I believe this year I evolved a lot, both artistically and the way I take responsibilities. I tried to keep this blog alive as much as I can, if you focus on the (MA) tagged posts, you can find anything I updated for the course.
Basically what remains to do with the project is to map what we need on the Hoppala layout. LINK HERE FOR HOPPALA After that, I will do a small documentation of someone actually running about using our program on a smartphone to make a video for the final project. What we are trying to do here is to get people from somewhere to somewhere else. The power of actually mobilising people can open ways for advertisement and many other things, and doing this using a simple application like a smartphone-farmville can actually spread amongst users like a virus.
I want to document what makes people tick. Is it rewards? Appreciation from others? Recognition? Can a small thing like a title for your game character make you go to places in a city and clicking one button? How can we reward people and get them addicted? These are some of the many questions I want to look into. My research paper also looked into this, using Massively multiplayer online games as an example.
What I learned so far during this collaborative project is that working with people is hard. Very hard. Organization, timelines and ideas fly around in a mess, and you do need someone to actually take charge and make decisions at some point. It has been quite fun though, I believe we actually created so many ideas that we can support maybe 3-4 more projects now, if we were given the time and the money. It also has some nice sides as well, someone to share your troubles and hardship is nice to have around, and like I said, bouncing ideas off someone whenever you need is a fantastic opportunity.
The project did change a lot. We started off as a narrative smartphone based application. It had its own problems though. The narrative base gives us a nice background to use, but it also creates a lot of problems programming wise and we realized it could also hinder the game itself, if the people who play the game got stuck within the narrative. Easy interface and fast game play is a bonus for us, we need as many players as we can get.
So we changed into a small one-button game that can be played on the map itself. We will still test-drive the game in Edinburgh, it's a small city where you can walk from one edge to another in 20-30 minutes max. And it will also have a small narrative, but it will be just one page, optional to read, to get people in the mood if they wish. The game itself will be just the map of the city in a grid, where players of two teams just click something like 'sign in' or 'make a mark' button on the grid they are. The more marks a team gets, the more they own that zone. Individuals who click more at different spots get more points, which will lead to small titles and other rewards. The trick here is that we will randomly assign different zones which give bonus points when you sign in from there at a given time space. This, we hope, will get the players to go to these zones. This is the main idea of the project, controlling people with small achievements.
Ease of use and simplicity is our main goal now. We need to get this program running as fast as we can. Anything else can come later, be it artwork, design or background for the game. I believe if we can get a simple model running, we will find our problems and start fixing them.
There are several other application types that we can look into but we had to decide quick now as there is only two months left in our schedule. One really nice application that may suit our needs is; Hawlett-Packards Mscape but we will stick with Hoppala, as we started working on it.
During our discussions in the class I've gotten quite positive feedback which made me reflect on the project in a more critical way. While you're working with someone who is close to your ideas and thinking system, it is quite easy to get lost within the dialogue and stop seeing what you're doing objectively. The meetings and the crits we had in class, and the presentations really helped me to hear myself from a 3rd person perspective, and find the problems in the project that I'm doing. After each session I met with my collegue and we sat down and went through what was spoken. Interestingly enough, he has similar cases of meetings with his peers and the feedback we take became quite important for us.
I tried adding what I could to others as well. I hope I aided them. I would try to remember everything I said but what ideas I had while we were talking were lost within the conversations. I could only remember asking Jes about her Low/high quality image differences, and the movies on the internet and how users downloaded these low quality images next to the high-def blueray rips.
Darren seems like he knows his business with programming. I believe he just needs some push towards the design aspect. He seems reluctant to do anything creative. This is understandable although I believe if he leaves his comfort zone, he can accomplish fantastic things considering the technological advantage he has under his belt.
That's about it, I hope I didn't miss anything out. Like I said, feel free to check the blog around, there might be some interesting stuff connected to the project. Thanks for reading!
-Sinan
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