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.