January 1 - January 7
This first week back after Christmas break, we refocused our effort to work on a proposal for the creation of our project's website as well as developing strategies for player motivation in the game. Our client, the psych CRL team at Northeastern explained the objectived for their experiment and we designed a badge or task oriented method for encouraging the child to fully explore the world.
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January 8 - January 14
We divided the desert biome into regions in which different environmental elements, such as water and plants, other animals would be located so that the user was guided throughout the linear level of the desert. At the end of the biome would be one badge that the user had not been able to obtain in the beginning sections of the level. With this setup, they had to work to get to the end.
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January 15 - January 21
We formalized our work on the gameplay into a proposal and expanded our efforts to the cover game tutorial and order of events for the game from beginning to end. We specified the goals of the user and in-game elements we wished to include. The proposed order would be to start with a splash screen, followed by the tutorial, and each of the biomes (possibly proceeded by a title page explaining elements of that biome, plants, animals, etc.)
January 22 - January 28
We created a mockup of the GUI as we envisioned it including the task coins. As well, we created a level map of the desert biome which identified which elements would occupy each area of the level.
January 29 - February 4
This week we redirected our efforts to concentrate on the structure and sitemap of our project's website. After looking at several sites which we felt had successful navigation, we each proposed possible layouts for our main page as well as one content page.We created a working sitemap which divided the site into the following sections: Our Game, Developer Forum, Game Development and About Us.
February 5 - February 11
After presenting our individual ideas for the layout of two pages (one and two), we decided on a combination of two of the options presented. We took the templates we had developed and began applying the content to their structure.
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February 12 - February 18
We began bringing our sample pages into CSS. Anna was a HUGE asset to our ability to do this! Most of us had never touched Dreamweaver or CSS so we had to pick up things as we went. Will worked on implementing an expandable navigation on the left side for content areas that required a sub-nav.
February 19 - February 25
In preperation for next Tuesday's presentation to the critics, we organized the work we had accomplished up till this point into a more visual form. Anna refined the three strategies we developed with the class for the player's motivation, Kim worked out transforming the tutorial layout into flash, the website was cleaned up and updated as much as it could and graphics of our GUI elements and game biomes and species were produced.
February 26 - March 4
We continued to prepare our materials and organize our presentation into a clear and logical flow to communicate our concept to the critics. We collaborated with the psych team to line-up their slides and materials and rehearsed the information we would cover.
March 12 - March 18
Following our break, we continued pushing forward on the website development by completing the creation of the About Us and Developer's Journal pages. The question of GUI elements relating effectively to gameplay was addressed and everyone concluded that they should remain but be slightly changed to be more successful.The CS icons now will appear once the user rolls over an object in the environment they can interact with, the icon appears and they click the object to perform that action. The icon is more of a notification of the action that can be taken.
March 19 - March 25
We revised the website to include a process section within the psych module content area. In this section, we will include any process sketches and renders of the species and the world from the second semester. Additionally, we all shared ideas of possible layouts for the Game World section, the area in which our final game will be highlighted. The programmers also presented us with a problem in using rollovers to bring up our CS icons, more brainstorming will have to be done in order to find an alternative method.
March 26 - April 1
Combining two of the ideas for Game World organization, we have begun compiling mockups of the treatment of text and image within this section. It will be modeled roughly off of the interface content section in the game evolution area. After a discussion with Ann, the text-heavy appearance of our site was presented as problematic. We addressed this issue by planning to incorporate thumbnails to represent the teams, as opposed to straight text, and also to add some more informational graphics to the more text-heavy areas of the site. The rollover issue is resolved to use a click on the species followed by a click on the icon to perform the action within a defined distance.
April 2 - April 8
Several problems with implementing our interface elements into the game have arised. We met with the programmers and discussed alternative methods for using the context-sensitive icons as a form of notification of the action occuring instead of something the user must interact with. The approach that was decided on was to have the item only be selecteable within a short distance, ie. a plant only when the creature is 10 feet away, can be selected. When it is selected the white selection circle appears and then the icon pops up to allow you to take the action.
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April 9 - April 15
The meter and loading bar were made into .pngs so that once the programming team figures out how to swap bitmaps we can insert the elements into the game. As it is now, the placeholder meter and timer are large and obtrusive and cannot be modified wothout recoding the game engine. The introduction screens to each world were produced and include the species and plants found in each biome. In addition, a new icon, "the special feature" icon (for fun and for real) was created to unify the actions of hiding, camoflauge, and mimic into one succinct command.
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April 16 - April 22
Wrapping up the contents of the website, we have been inserting current "showroom" style animations of the creatures into the game world section and have been revising the tutorial. Instead of waiting for the interface elements to be integrated into the game, a task that most likely will not be completed, we will demonstrate our imagined "look and feel" of the UI in the tutorial and through our development sections of the website.