Katie's Update January 14

Happy New Year!!!!!!

This is the first post for 2010. This semester I will be continuing my work on Snag'Em and assisting in technical details with the game as well as helping to run the study. However, I'll also be moving in a slightly different direction towards developing mobile, collaborative, location based games for exercise and/or team building purposes. World of Workout is the first such game and will be improved and studied to better integrate with the Snag'Em goals. Other games will include a campus-based version of high-tech tag, and a tech based scavenger hunt modeled after the childhood game of Hot/Cold.

Semester goals:

• Develop a functional Facebook App for use with the main Snag'Em game
• Develop a functional iPhone App for use with the main Snag'Em game
• Finish development of World of Workout and complete a control study on the game
• Begin development of location-based games utilizing GPS features in mobile devices as well as RFID, integrate some of these features into Snag'Em and World of Workout

For the sake of being concise in my titles, I am going to restart numbering at Week One for this Spring Semester. As always, this blog will be updated on a weekly basis. Creation and deployment of a more complex website which will put greater emphasis on the above projects will also occur this semester!

What did you do?

• Discussed plans for the Snag'Em study, formulated ideas for recruitment and retention within the game
• Made plans for the future of World of Workout
• Determined my role for this semester on the CREU project

What problems did you encounter?

• Recruitment for the study is more difficult than expected...we're each utilizing all of our resources in order to help get as many people as possible playing.
• It's going to be a busy semester, already we are experience time conflicts for meetings
• Paper deadlines are rapidly approaching, we'll need results soon in order to be considered for many conferences this spring/summer

What do you plan to do next week?

• IRB for World of Workout
• Improvements to World of Workout
• Research and Planning for location based games
• Resolve open tickets in Assembla
• Recruit as many "snaggers" as possible
• Finish papers for ITiCSE (1/15/10)

How many hours did you work?
~5

Samantha update 11/29 - 12/04

What did you plan to do?

Finish design questionnaire

Write up interaction types and a clear chart on what type of game can be for what (this idea can probably be expanded into a poster at UIST or CHI)

What did you do?

Finished design questionnaire and got some feedback, planned out poster on interaction types and the implications for social networking games

What problems did you encounter?

None

What do you plan to do next week?

Get more done with this new idea, and use it to solidify more SNAG ideas.

How many hours did you work?

~9 hours

Samantha update 11/21 - 11/28

What did you plan to do?

Create usability survey

What did you do?

Made a first draft of questionnaire, but through interview with some students decided to make some changes.

Wrote up some recruitment information which can be posted / handed out / put on flyers / etc

What problems did you encounter?

None, though I began running studies on cMotion this week and my family came down, so I was fairly distracted this week.

What do you plan to do next week?

Finish usability survey and make people take it!

Also, I'm designing games for other interaction types. Will talk about this in the meeting.

How many hours did you work?

~10 hours

Samantha update 11/13-11/20

What did you plan to do?

- Finish the Snag'em poster

- Fill in more of the paper

What did you do?

Created the snag'em poster (which is quite attractive, if I do say so myself!)

Compiled a list of conferences we can take snag'em to (good start is CHI student competition, then UIST!)

Did spend some time looking at paper, though not much.

What problems did you encounter?

I was really busy this week, which was a big problem. I did not get a chance to look at the paper as much as I wanted to.

What do you plan to do next week?

Create usability survey to see what people would want out of Snag'em game to help us focus our future development. This considers design choices such as groups, missions, etc.

How many hours did you work?

~7 hours

Christie's Weekly update

Summary Question (11/7 – 11/13)

1. What did you plan to do?

-Phone dev.

-begin using what I know to start the shell of my iphone game proposal

2. What did you do?

   -recycled code from pong demo to to start shell of game

• recycled code from iphone example to have an animated view transition

• created artwork for the game

• -lab demo for GRAD

3. What problems did you encounter?
- none so far. I am hoping that I have learned enough about objective c and iPhone coding in general to allow me to at least incorporate code from some of the examples I have tried into my game

4. What are you doing next week?

- Phone dev.

- animate the bugs in the game, learn how to instance objects

5. How many hours did you work?
- 11 hours

Drew Hicks -- Fri, Oct 23

We moved to ASSEMBLA!

What I did in the last day / week

Completed the mission page’s functionality:
- List of current and past missions
- Ability to generate a new mission when the current mission is complete
- Ability to select from a few missions to increase mission consistency

What I will do today / this week

Implement difficulty checking when generating missions
Create the networks page and create some interactivity with it

Total Hrs: ~12

Drew Hicks, -- Fri, Oct. 9

What I did this week:

Introduced Katie and Samantha into the code base

Worked with Katie to get mission generation functional

various database tweaks to get rid of redundancy

What I plan to do next week:

Missions - done!

start working on implementing events

brainstorm! new gameplay mechanics

Hopefully get set up on SVN

Get a functional version ready to test

Roadblocks:

Lack of sleep, but that's all!

Hours:

A lot! probably 15-20