Weekly Newsletter 12

Carnival on Saturday, 12th April! That is the first thing we’ve been thinking about for the week. Our list of tasks was looking very daunting on Monday, though we knew we had to get the majority of them done. We needed to have the ability to let folks play our game at the CMU Silicon Valley campus.
The sharing of pieces is almost done, though moving the working system from computers to phones is never easy. For Saturday we’re using a shared pieces system that team mates automatically get pieces instead of bumping to share. Following that we’ll look to get it working on the phones.
We have also introduced scrolling to help the user draw the map. With this it will hopefully be easier to define the area of play. We may need to add a manual element to this, as in some not so detailed areas, maps are not as accurate as others.
We have added a team select page which gives the users an updated method to see how many players are in their team, as well which team they are on. The user also has a compass piece which shows them where the nearest two puzzle pieces are located. This will hopefully help them find relevant pieces quickly.
We’ve had to do some tweaking with the sizes of the 3D icons in the map. With many team mates, we hadn’t considered there would be so many items on the playing area! This turned out to be a bit of a mess!
It actually turned out that having six players in the game raised the bug count by a huge amount! Friday turned into a massive fix up for a lot of the features in our game. It kept us there until 10:30pm, and the team must be commended for some serious hard work and venom for it.
So off to the Carnival, and a report back next week!
The Runaround