Hello everyone, welcome to our week 9 blog. This week we have our halves presentation on Monday, and get feedbacks from faculties and students. We also finished several prototypes with different tools.
On Monday, we had our halves presentation. We introduced our project, goals, what we did each week, and why we re-define our developing process. We showed all our 15 prototypes in GIF format, talked about lessons we learnt from building these prototypes. We also concluded what found from play test on week 8, and based on these observations, what we are going to do in the next coming weeks.
Here is the video from our halves presentation.
The prompt we focus on this week is tools. One of the prototype is Drawing with Cozmo. Although we already started this prototype last two weeks, we finished drawing all 26 characters in this week. With this feature, Cozmo can drawing any characters combinations so that they can communicate with players in this way. For example, we can ask Cozmo to draw players’ names. Here is the list of all characters we currently have.
From the photos we can see that some characters are not good enough due to Cozmo’s moving limitations. The way we do this is: first we attached a marker to Cozmo; second we ask Cozmo to drive its wheels to move.
At first, we tried to use go_to_position() method to enable Cozmo’s movement. But after trying several times with this method, we found that each time we call this method, it won’t follow the same path. In this case, we use drive_wheels instead to implement this function.
Another prototype we built is called Horseshoe. It is board game with rules. Basically in this game two Cozmos will form a team, while the player control the other two cubes. At first, two cubes and two Cozmos are placed on each corner of the board, and one of the Cozmos will make one move to start the game. Both Cozmos and player can only move following the yellow line. Cozmos and player will make a move alternatively. The goal of this game is to block the opponent so that they won’t be able to make further move. Here is a video to show how this game works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye6ssoGT94Q
The first part of this video explains the rules of the game, and the second half shows the prototype we build.
Besides these prototypes, we also trying to integrate other technologies to explore possibilities with Cozmo. For example, we are trying to enable the communication between Unity and Cozmo as well as Unreal and Cozmo. Once we get this work, we can start to build more complex games for players to play with Cozmo. Currently we are thinking to make games such as Flappy Bird or Give It Up.
Another experience we are exploring now is a story-based drinking game with Cozmo. Since none of us have a writing background, we asked people who has writing background to help us build a story with Cozmo. We will figure out how these ideas work in next week. Thanks for checking this week’s updates. Drop by next week for our more updates!