Posted on April 18, 2014 at 10:00 PM
We started to develop a new game and continued to improve "Cat Vs Dog". For our new game "BlooMon", One of the main objectives this semester is to make a technology which is self-reliant. By self-reliant we mean that we want the users to initialize our database of locations and hence make do without the initial mapping stage. So it’s a concept similar to crowdsourcing, such that inputs from players would help determine the initial fingerprint of a location and more the number of updates, the more accurate the database becomes. So BlooMon which stands for Blue Monster is a game similar to a Tamagotchi game in which your objective is to feed a pet monster and watch it grow from a cuddly baby, into fluffy fully-grown one. You can find food in different rooms in a building and in every new room, you will get more food to feed your pet. So this gives a motivation to the user to forage for new rooms in order to make the pet bigger. The consequences of not feeding your pet is that it will become smaller and eventually you run a risk of letting it starve to death.
Read MorePosted on April 11, 2014 at 10:00 PM
This was a busy week! After we finished a playtest successfully, we discussed what to do next. We had several meetings whether it is time to develop a new game or improve "Cat Vs Dog". To prove the potential of our technology, we agreed that we should develop one more game using our indoor API platform. Since "Cat Vs Dog" was a short and fast game, there are several problems we didn't expect. First, the refreshment of WiFi signal takes some time. Because of this, the location data can not catch up the speed of players when they move too fast. We think long time & slow pace game can solve this issue. Second, So this time, we decided to develop a long time game.
Read MorePosted on April 6, 2014 at 12:00 PM
In this week, we have lots of playtests for our game “Cat Vs Dog”. To prepare for the playtest, we made lots of changes throughout this week. The cool Animation effects are added in and more UI elements have been put in the game. We had teenagers in our first day of playtests, and they have showed huge interest into our game. Some of the reactions by them are actually out of our expectation. They have this energy of running around inside one building to check in! Those teenagers sometimes even play with strategy. We were very happy to see them enjoy playing and they also offered us lots of useful feedback after playing. During the game, we also found several bugs. So after the playtest day, we started fixing bugs. On the next day, we had another group of playtests with different ages of people. And we realized this game might not be suitable for all ages. We also found out that the game is constrained by technology at some point. So our next step is to think about all the feedback and make a decision of moving forward.
Read MorePosted on March 29, 2014 at 12:00 PM
It’s Half Presentation Week! And we were the first half presenting team, which made us both exciting and nervous. : ) We tried our best to prepare the presentation within a very limited time. Our project is liked by many faculty and students, and we are very happy about this! During our presentation, we had a live demo of our technology so far. Inside one big room, the phone could actually track certain locations and we displayed it lively on the screen. Many people found it’s very amazing. We had lots of visitors and tours this week as well. We gave a short presentation to Pittsburgh Penguins a few days ago. They were very impressed with our project, gave us lots of useful feedback and even offered us chance to explore more possibility of our project in places like sport arena. Other than this, with help of faculty, we began to reach out to some museums and hopefully to test our technology in more and more location based entertainment places.
Read MorePosted on March 22, 2014 at 12:00 PM
This is GDC week! Three Team members of Horizon->Run! Went to Moscone Center for GDC! It’s very exciting to see different games and talk to people about our games and ideas. We had a plan to that we want to try to see if our technology would work in big conference hall like in GDC. In expo floor, we mapped different booths, which has been pretty accurate. This is very good news to us. It has given us a vision of what we can do in the future. On the other side, some games in GDC has been very inspiring for us and gives us lots of thoughts. On the other side, we are also preparing for halves and the other two members were still working on the project in Pittsburgh. And they have made a lot of improvements in the backend. We will be able to switch to our new database in a very soon time. Next week we will have half presentation on Monday and we will have a very tight schedule. But it’s good to see everything is working in our plan.
Read MorePosted on March 14, 2014 at 12:00 PM
We are trying to have our first game UI and game playtest on Friday. The whole team has been very motivated to work towards this goal. Judy has created very cute UI and themed with “Dog” and “Cat”. The Dog and Cat are basically two teams trying to compete with each other. The whole team really likes the game with this simple but interesting style. Our developer team is cooperating to make the design into the real game. This is not easy. During the testing, a lot of problems pop up. We are working on them and trying our best to solve them. The playtest on Friday went on well. We have received lots of useful feedback on the UI design. We are considering to re-design some buttons to make it clearer and easier to understand. Generally, people like our UI and want to play the game. The game playtest is limited because we haven’t finished the game completely yet. But through the playtest, it’s very good to see how people react to our gameplay.
Read MorePosted on Feb 28, 2014 at 12:00 PM
This week has been a “game design week” for us. We have been building our game design ideas based on the technology that we have developed. In previous weeks, we have already discussed lots of game ideas, and right now with a better knowledge of our technique and capability, we are trying to narrow down our game design to a solid one. It was, of course, very challenging, because an “indoor location based” is a very new area! With lots of not-knowing, we thought about doing playtests would be really helpful along our design. These playtests includes simple paper tests and tablet prototypes. The playtests have been really useful for us to test if our ideas are solid enough for developing. During the process, we have found the game duration should not be too long because it will get the players very tired. We have also found that we need to have “interest objects” inside the game to make players more motivated. Some board games have also provided us lots of inspirations. As a team, we have played Monopoly together. It is very interesting to think about how it could be a good refer to our game. On the other track, we have continues developing our WAI app. Our artist has created a new design for the WAI and we will implement it soon next week. A lot of people have shown expectation in our WAI app and we hope to make it better as a good “tour guide” in ETC. Actually, WAI has already proved itself to be a really welcoming. We had a tour from “Dreamworks” this week, and they really like our project and game idea. Next week we will start our game development process and also start preparation for half presentation.
Read MorePosted on Feb 21, 2014 at 12:00 PM
In this week, we have worked on schedule and thinking about the future of this project. We have a big vision for how the project could be going and it is very exciting to discuss all of it. One of our goals is to bring the experience out of our school building and our small tests in a nearby museum proved it could be a success. Our next step is to reach out to the museum and test the possibility of more usage for our technology. Also in this week, Anthony Daniel has visited our project room and has shown huge interest in our project. He also offered us very useful advices. Based on that, we’ve changed the font-size for adapting different sizes of screens. Some of Anthony’s suggestions have inspired us to make our WAI app to the next stage, and we started thinking about designs and maintenance for WAI app.
Read MorePosted on Feb 14, 2014 at 12:00 PM
This week, we have 1 / 4 walk-around from faculty. Our app “Where Am I” has been made successfully in time. In the walk-around, we have given each of the faculty group a tablet for playtest. So when faculty walked into one project room, by using our app, just tapping on one button “Where am I”, they will get a list of nearby rooms. Then, they can get the information about this project. In general, people all like our app. It’s easy to use and we have made it pretty accurate within a certain range. The app also shows it potential in becoming a “virtual tour guide” for ETC. However, at the same time, we do realize there are a lot of things we need to improve and think for deliver the project for the final. We have received very useful feedbacks as well. Some of them asked us about our focus: Whether it is more focused on the technology or the game using the technology? How does it work for different devices? How accurate is it right now? Do you plan to take it out of ETC with a different setting? Some of the questions are very professional in technology, like Wifi Changing factors or refreshing rates. Some suggestions are very interesting: Can we follow our Boss? With all these feedback, we have long discussion about how to bring our project to next level. We are very exciting about using our technology to create more interesting “magic” products.
Read MorePosted on Feb 7, 2014 at 12:00 PM
In this week, we have been working really hard to make our first app “WAI” which stands for “Where Am I”. We have met some technical problem during the middle of the week, but we have been trying hard to figure out the reason and doing our best to fix it. Despite the small problems we met, we were all really excited because our prototype has become smarter in differentiate the rooms. This has given us lots of confidence to move on to next page. We have a nice design for the app, and we also found a good layout for the app. Our front end develop team is following the design to make the app functioning better. Our next step, is to combine the front end and back end to make a whole experience. Our quarter walk-around is on the coming Monday, so we are also preparing for the presentation and ready to express our vision of the project for faculty. We are really excited about that because we are on the track of our plan.
Read MorePosted on Feb 1, 2014 at 12:00 PM
This week, we have divided our technical goal into four stages. Before quarter, we will be focusing on the first stage, which is to make the technology work in small room based structure area. To prove the technology working, we will also develop an app to show it. After fixing several bugs we found last week, Our version 0 app for wifi signal testing has passed our tests and will be sent to ETC students for the first testing on the coming Monday. We will be gathering data from this testing and using it for reference for further developing stage in version 1. We will start UI design for the app shortly. For better promotion, we will also continue designing and implement the website. On branding side, we have decided our logo and in the process of creating posters. There are several very nice designs and our artist, Judy is polishing them into a better shape. The design combines our thoughts about Wifi and Indoor map in a very abstract and beautiful way. Also, we have decorated our room to match our theme and it now looks very interesting. And the team has been very enthusiastic in this environment.
Read MorePosted on Jan 24, 2014 at 12:00 PM
On second week, we started working on different tasks for the project. On technology side, Hao has written a detailed project API and in the process of writing helper class. Vijay has been learning PHP and implementing this API. Jenny has updated the prototype for checking wifi strength signal. Now we can collect Wifi data from different phones and updating the database automatically. The collected data is mainly used for testing the Wifi refreshing rate for different phones. Now, we are debugging this prototype using the data being collected and later we will have a bigger test for this prototype. We’ve also decided our version control tool—we have set up our Github. On the art side, Judy has different designs for our logo and we have discussed different designs with our advisor, who gives us very helpful suggestions. For the current logo designs, the theme of it is abstract, but does reflect “indoor structure” and “directions in space”. For game ideas, we have a brainstorm session with Jesse, and together developed a lot of interesting ideas, including treasure hunting game, trap game or some physical Tag Games. We have been doing research about these kinds of games and have some cool ideas of game mechanism. We also made a detail schedule for this whole semester. For next week, we will have our logo, poster and half sheet. Implement the prototype with more functions and some UI design. We will also sort our brainstorm game ideas.
Read MorePosted on Jan 17, 2014 at 12:00 PM
Our first week starts with lots of meetings regarding different aspects of the projects. Our team has also set the main role for each of the team member, like producer, artist, technical director and backend, frontend developer. As a pitch project, every team member seems to be very motivated and enthusiastic for the project. At the same time, we are also working hard from the start trying to realize our vision. Mainly we have a detailed scope for the project: Making the indoor mapping game platform. Later, we will be building several demo games for this platform. For the demo games, we have several good brainstorming sessions. In summary, the game ideas can be concluded into the following several categories: 1. A simple color game that need cooperation; 2. A territory based game needs competition; 3. A story-based game. We met our advisor, Ruth, who inspired us a lot during the first advisor meeting. Our pitch champion—John also joined this meeting. They offered us creative suggestions for the project, and also pointed out that we should look forward to think about what we can use this beyond school, which include bringing it to Location-based-entertainment and bringing the game not limited in Android but “multi-platform”. They also gave us scheduling suggestions for working as a pitch project. Because of the heavy-technical elements of this project, we have also been reading lots of research paper every day. Hao has been given us several technical talk as well. For next week, our goal is to have a very simple prototype, which will measure WIFI, and we will try to test the program with different phones to get data for further testing.
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