Course Reflection

Throughout this course our team (Team Theseus) has managed to inspired and motivated each other to complete fantastic work and develop our own personal skills in areas involving web design & development. During the 13 weeks of this course I was able to expand my knowledge of web design and implementation and being able to have freedom to experiment and refine my ideas as well as receive and can give feedback within my group and the rest of the class giving more valuable insight into the creative process for real world application.

From the beginning of the course I have been interested to see where it would lead me. It has let me understand some more of the possibilities that you can accomplish with API's and JSON which can help lead to more interactive websites. These and other tools seem like a precious tool to be able to understand and be able to be implemented into future websites that I may create.

My overall enjoyment of this course has been high but as I am finding with studio courses is that the stress and workload along the way can be quite high also. Time management as always is extremely important to help complete assigned task and be able to assist others when they require/request it.

My visual diary can be viewed here.

Trade Show

This was the last day for tutor feedback in class. We were asked to display our apps for review and comment by the tutors and the rest of the class. We had setup our app "Labyrinth" to run independently through the server on a computer for people to come by, play and ask us questions regarding our product.

This was the last chance we had to see what improvement we could make to Labyrinth before it was on the Friday. At the time we still had issues trying to get the Trove API to work probably but aside from that everything else seemed to be working well with no glitches.

This came across to our group as a success and to take a quick time out on our own work to view the rest of the classes accomplishments.

Digital Prototyping & User Test

In the contact this week, each group was asked to present their current work to the rest of the class for digital prototyping and testing. Much the same as the previous paper prototyping, this was to see how they had changed their applications from the paper prototyping stage and get some more feedback now that a rough digital version of their apps had been created.

A number of groups had made great progress since the last round of prototyping and have started on some fantastic apps. 

The feedback we received was overall positive with a few criticisms. We were having issues making the Trove API work probably and a few room issues within the game which made the prototyping hard at stages. These problems we saw on the technical side of the project and were delegated as required. Some suggestions were also made regarding the visual design of the website and game that some colours did not work well together, text choices and layout. As I had been working on all of these aspects, I took it upon to review and will be making some appropriate changes.

Colour Scheme Part 1

YELLOW - 255-194-14

GREEN - 64-102-24

BROWN - 120-72-15

YELLOW TINT - 255-214-96

GREEN SHADE - 34-52-27

Colour Scheme Revisited

Revisited the colour scheme after having some issues with  colours not working well together and becoming unusable. With keeping with the original idea and concept behind the colour choices, this is a more usable and clean colour palette for the website.

USE	R	G	B	Hex	Test
BACKGROUND	34	52	27	#22341B	AaBbCc123
BODY TEXT	245	219	193	#F5DBC1	AaBbCc123
HEADINGS	252	194	14	#FCC20E	AaBbCc123
SUB-HEADINGS	255	208	96	#FFD060	AaBbCc123
LINKS	198	217	116	#C6D974	AaBbCc123

Character Movement Test

Paper Prototyping

For the morning of the paper prototyping, we had created a walk through of your application where users had to navigated through the maze and understand how we helped the user find the end of the maze.

Users where asked to see if they could identify certain aspects of our team's design and features. The team took note of how long it took users to spot or figure out what we were asking of them and if they had any issues identifying or notes to add.

Users managed to understand our layout and navigation through the application from splash page, game play and exiting. Some aspects needed to be explained as we went as testers asked us about particular elements such as our Trove implementation and how we planned on linking it to the application itself.

Feedback we received was mixed in terms of whether it was aimed at the design or functionally of our application. Some simple things such as a Help or Tutorial page were over looked in the early stages of the development from our team which lead to a few testers asking for help.

Most users asked about our difficulty settings and required further information on what the differences were in options.

As a whole we collected a lot of great feedback and insight to our application which we hope will help us develop a well designed and thought out game.

Walls & Textures

A maze needs walls. There going to be the building blocks for the maze we are constructing. 32x48 size textured blocks to display the the environment.

With this in mind we have decided upon a standardised term of "block". One block represents 32x24 pixels. This will help us design the maze and characters within it.

Sprite Design

My attention has been focused on the textures and characters of the game of late. This has been great fun and doing something I really enjoy.

Above is the character concept by team mate Yifei on the left. On the right is my 30x46 size version of her design to illustrate the walking animation.

Blog Posts?

Sadly. I have dropped the ball a little with the blog posts but back on track now. I have still been note-taking with my journal during Lectures, Contact, Workshops, Meetings and personal time.

Contact: Week 4

First Contact in which we have worked on our idea has a whole. Lots to discuss and think about.

"for tomorrow, if everyone could have a think about the main points for the concept document and well can discuss them tomorrow. these are - scope, background inspiration & research, design concept"

Some quick notes about the activities handled within the contact itself.

• Thinking Hats were used to help work on ideas and make them more specific and focused our end goal and project.

• The team charter plan was read and signed by all members so we can all work with same guidelines and know what is expected from us as a team and as individuals.

For reference and inspiration for the web application we are going to be building, the following was discussed the help get an idea of what we could looked.

• Encarta '95 Mind Maze

Image from http://www.giantbomb.com/mindmaze/3030-25465/

• Viewing Perspective

Image from http://www.juliadennebaum.com/news/2013/4/1/mcp-2013-mario-world-map.html

Image from http://liza.io/2012/02/27/top-down-perspective-vs-isometric-projection2-5d/

• Fog of War Concept

Image from http://www.giantbomb.com/fog-of-war/3015-14/

Pathfinding

Skype

We have started to use Skype as a way of having group meetings. It is proving to be an effective way of organising ourselves and everyone being heard.

During these sessions the use of Google Drive Docs have been important to help catalog discussions, thoughts and decisions within the group.

This method of meeting is also proving to be convenient in that finding a time in which we are all available during the week can be difficult with work commits and resent illness. We suggest and discuss an appropriate time for us all to get together so we can have a talk about where we are in the project.

Our Team

For the project, we have organised ourselves into groups of 4 people to work together to deliver a web application that can demonstrate our skills with coding and access information from Trove. 

Following from the previous posts activities we were asked to choose an area that would interest us, whether it is was educational, puzzles, games or utilities. From there we formed groups based on what we thought would be a good project to work on. 

Our team came together as we all thought working on a maze would be a great project idea. Our group consists of Yifei Chen, Harrison Lucas, Blake Bodycote and myself. 

Next was our first decision as a team, what our name was going to be. The tutors asked for us to use a name selected from Greek Mythology, whether it was a god, monster or hero. As we were doing a maze I thought it was appropriate to base our name of a myth involving one.

Image from http://uploads5.wikiart.org/images/edward-burne-jones/theseus.jpg

From Ancient-Greece.org

"The sacrifices of the Athenians ended only when Theseus, son of Aegean ruler of Attica, traveled to Crete as part of the youths to be sacrificed, but once in the labyrinth he killed the Minotaur and managed to find his way out of the labyrinth with the aid of Ariadne, the daughter of Minos."

We have chosen Theseus to identify ourselves and this project will be our metaphorical Minotuar.

Contact: Week 3

Exercises in the Week 3 Contact class involved coming up with and expanding on ideas in which TROVE data can be used over a number of categories focusing on games, educational, utilities and puzzles.

By being split in to 4 groups, each group was initially asked to think of ideas based around one of the topics. After brainstorming, the groups were asked to moved to the next location and continue where the previous group had left off and start narrowing down how their ideas could become more precise.

Many interesting directions for the application of data sourced from TROVE started to come forward across all groups. Utilities had some great issues of the data in regards to natural disaster risk areas and location services.

Moving on from the brainstorming, students were asked to congregate around the topic that interested the most and ask themselves why and what direction would they like to go for the project. I had decided on working a puzzle application that involved a maze.

This seems like a great opportunity to have some freedom to an extent and let yourself look into a field that interested you a little more personally than being ask to complete a particular set of tasks.

The exercise as a whole let my brainstorming work on different levels from an inception of an idea and then see how I could evaluate other ideas that had been put forward and iterate on them to make them into a more precise idea. Having the ability to walk away from the idea the end might we were not to become to attached to the ideas at first and just focus on the brainstorming and ideation of the ideas before having to start narrowing down what it was you wanted to focus one for the next few weeks.

Online Team Building Module

This course, and this degree as a whole, as a large focus on being a successful member of a team and knowing how to work within a team. We were asked to complete an online learning course of how to work in teams effectively.

The module was broad and focused on the different people that make up different types of teams. It was designed to help students learn that different people working together need to figure out that variety helps to build towards a successful project but there can be people you clash with. In this instances it was suggested that a person who understood both the persons needs to mediate and buffer between them.

The module was of great effect and a definite learning tool for students of all courses where group projects are asked of them.

My ability to work in groups will be challenged over the course of my studies with a number of studio course still ahead of me, it is good to have a knowledge the different types of people I may encounter in a teamwork environment.

First week of Contacts & Workshop

With this only being the end of the second week and first week of Contacts and Workshops, everyone is still adjusting to being back in the swing of studying and still trying to figure out what is going to be asked of us as students in DECO1800.

During the Contact on Tuesday morning, we were separated into groups for introduction activities and getting to know people which took up the first half of the class. In the second half, we were asked to look at Trove and see what content is available. Trove is going to be used for our assignment and a source of information to be linked to our web applications.

Some particulars for the project were discussed. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and API's (Application Program Interface) will be implemented to help students access the information within Trove and let them manipulate it for our needs. With this knowledge, we were then asked to think of some ideas that could be possible for a web application and the Trove database.

Thursday was the first Workshop for the semester. We ran through a description of what an API does and how we can manipulate it for our purposes. Some other tools were discussed with us regarding using Google Chrome's Developer Tools and shown previous DECO1800 student examples via a course website. It was reiterated that our knowledge of Javascript, JQuery and possibly PHP will be needed to be used heavily this semester and that we should be confident with coding in these languages.

Welcome to DECO1800: Interactive Technology (Course Expectations)

This being the first post, we have been asked to write about what our expectations are for the course. 

During the course I am hoping to hone my skills in design thinking through ideation and prototyping as well as work on my skills on web based coding languages such as JavaScript and JQuery. 

My concerns for the semester are that my ideas may not be able to be completed as pictured in my head due to my limited knowledge of coding but I aim to be practising and expanding my knowledge base as the semester continues. 

For this course, I will be taking notes in the pictured notebook. This will be used for everything relating to this subject and all working/lecture notes/ideas will be taken down in this book. At the end of the semester, all the pages will be photographed and posted on the blog for viewing.