Week 2 (1/20-1/24)

Previous Week

Last week, Team Monkey Business met with the client for the initial discussion of the project and to talk about the direction they wanted to take the Questyinz application.

The client indicated two major goals for the component that Monkey Business would develop:

• New and meaningful social features that strengthen peer culture
• New inputs to demonstrate learning especially through real world interactions

The team then held design meetings and brainstorming sessions to decide the best approach to implanting these aspects and delivering entertainment to the users. Once we had decided a direction, we set about investigating the best options for implementation and developing some concept art. We created a pitch presentation with our findings which was to be shown to the client on the following Monday.

 Week Overview

This week the team presented our ideas and findings to the client and made the adjustments they requested in order to have direction to begin implementation

Progress

During the client meeting we settled on Actionscript 3 and Flash as our main development technology. Flash will give the lowest barrier to entry for the client’s desired user base. In the client meeting, the ACLA liked the idea of the area map with different sections for different educational games for the users. They approved the overall direction as well as social features we proposed : player teams, user friends, and score leaderboards . For the remainder of the week, the programmers focused on familiarizing themselves with the technology, while the artists continued to work on art for branding, and began on assets that would be needed based on the project’s direction. Additionally, the programmers designed the needed adjustments to the database and coded for interfacing between PHP and Flash to access database information.

 Prospect:

The team plans to implement user login in the following week, as well as association with user groups.We will meet with the client on Monday and discuss our proposed designs for the games in the first area of the user experience.