Week 9 Prac

For this week's prac, we were asked to come up with MakeyMakey controls for cat mario online.
One of the challenge was to not have the ground connected to your body directly.

So, since cat mario uses only 3 keys (left, right and jump) controls, i utilised my jacket to create a left and right movement.

I put folded aluminium foils onto both right and left of the shoulder of the jacket. and then made a jump button in an arrow shape.

From the first picture, legendary +Alex Balson wore my jacket and started playing cat mario. As ground somehow couldn't be connected to your body, I made a play-doh ball as a cursor where users need to touch the ball to the pads on the shoulders or the 'jump' button to move.

The 2nd challenge from William was to make the game being played by 2 players. so I made two earths, and one player controlled the left and right movements and another controlled the jump button. It was very challenging as a lot of coordination was needed to play the game.

I learnt quite a few techniques from this session of prac. I also got feedback from William and friends about my own prototype game. I realised that making 16 buttons and connected all individual 16 buttons onto the MakeyMakey would be quite hard. It was concluded that a coordinates thingy should be done and then if a 4x4 grid is used, only 8 buttons are needed to be mapped onto the MakeyMakey.

Week 8 Exercise

Given these applications: Email, Twitter, Super Mario Bros (the platformer game);
Come up with at least 5 different physical interactions
for each.
What are the elements/controls of each application
that would afford an alternative interaction method?
How would you map the interactions onto/into physical
objects/actions?

Email
1. Physically write the letter out with a pen/pencil, then slide it through a filter that scans through everything you wrote. Given two buttons, green or red, if user presses the green button, message is good to be sent. If red, message is not ready yet and should be reedited.
2. Use a piano stairs to type out the email.
3. clap twice while reading an email to flag that current email.
4. do a 'drum roll' sound with your fingers to send the email.
5. Using the webcam, swipe gestures from left to right to delete the email. and right to left to 'flag' the email.

Twitter
1. to retweet simply just chirp 'tweet tweet'.
2. to follow people, use hand gestures such as having both hands with ten fingers up facing the computer for 5 seconds. to unfollow people, close those two hands and bring them away.
3. to reply a tweet, simply say out the command "tweet 'username' 'message' ".
4. Make a NFC tap to tweet trigger. Tap the NFC to tweet and voice out your message to the tweet, then chirp to post the tweet.
5. Talk to a robotic bird and allow it to compile and let it tweet the post for you.

Super Mario Bros
1. Use a flight of stairs for user to run forwards and backwards. middle of the stairs means standing still.
2. Shout 'jump' to jump.. Or to make things more fun/interactive, shout 'duck' to jump.
3. Use a physical toy gun's trigger to detect as a shotting/firing weapon or even punching.
4. Set up a playground with real obstacles and replicate them into the game, that way user will actually play the game for real instead of just sitting down and using the computer game.
5. Use a dance dance revolution controller to control mario instead of the normal Wii or keyboard controllers.

Interview/Testing Week 7B

So as usual right after Interactive Prototype I was due, we had our user testing and interview/surveys in the B prac.
I asked several specific questions in regards to what I was testinng my prototype on.
There were two specific things that I wanted to test in this prototype:
1. When a mine explodes, what happens after that, immediately change to the opposite colour or clear off the area
2. the scoring system of the game:
   a) the old scoring system was scoring two points in the game to win. 3 marks in a line earns a point.
   b) new system is a best of 5 rounds based game. to win a round, simply make 4 marks in a line.

Here are the questions that I prepared from my Statement of Delivery II and also feedback answers that I got from interviewing the testers.

a) Was the exploding of the mines interactive enough? eg: The mine revealing itself for 2 seconds and then disappears or even should sound effects be added into the game.
        - The delay feels abit long.
        - The delay seems fine.
        - The interaction is there, but the it sometimes seems too slow to know whether the tile is safe or not when a mark is placed there. Try to find a way to reduce the delay so that users will know what's happening
        and there's no delay.
        - There's no problems recognising the mine. If you don’t realise it you obviously have issues.
   
b) What do you think of the concept of ‘opponent’s mark’ appearing after the mine explodes? Does it give too much advantage or it is a good implementation instead of just making the mines disappear and the same tile empty again.

   - It is a good idea. What do you think about mines goes off but generate another in another place.
   - It gives alot of advantage to the opponent and the game ends too fast when player is unlucky.
   - The implementation is good as it gives more advantage to the opponent.
   - Better if it returns to nothing. Because it gives the opponent too much of an advantage.


c) What do you think of the new scoring system concept? Is it better compared to the original ‘3 marks one point, two points to win’ concept?
   - The current scoring system > old.
   - U might necessary don’t need to have the best out of 3. The rules does not have to be inbuilt. Players can set the rules himself.
   - I like the multiple of rounds. I prefer multiple rounds compared to the old system. One round seems to end way faster and boring.

d) Is the help button necessary in the whole game at all? (This question is to be asked for further feedback on the future prototype as some users previously thought that the ‘help’ button doesn’t actually help them at all as it gives the opponent an advantage to know where the mines are.

   - Help button: opponent look away/close eyes
   - That could work. With opponent's looking away. Not knowing about where is the mine. hypothetically the idea would be good, but need to check if its actually helping the player, when testing.

e)      Any other feedback/suggestions to improve the game?

   - Changing the map of the game from a 4x4 map into a 6x6 map, with 6 mines. Score 2 lines of 5/6 to win the game. This would make the game end longer.
   - Fix the BUGs of player checks/wins!! I like the hovering effect. Make sure player who loses starts the new game (round) first.
   - With the 6x6 map idea, maybe try it with more than 1 MakeyMakey? So that you could build a bigger board and make the game longer.
   - The game can be 6x6. it can be theoretically 6x6, but for the prototype's purpose, just because of the constraints of the MakeyMakey, you can make a 4x4 one instead.
   - Scoreboard. Indicators to know who's turn it is. Instead of static number, make circles as scoreboard. More interactive.

Self Reflection after the testing and interviews:
- I think that the implementation of the new concept of mark1>mine>mark2 is good compared to the old concept although it gives a heavy advantage to he opponent.
- I also like the new scoring system, although one of the feedback i received was that I should allow users to have the freedom to set their own rules. eg: how many rounds/games should they play.
- I am considering to make a 6x6 map and then implement the usual 4x4 map for the MakeyMakey just for testing. as a 6x6 would mean a longer game, a bigger map, more mines, MORE FUN!

Will start on the MakeyMakey soon!! stay tuned!! thanks for reading! (:

Week 7 Exercise

So for this week's exercise, we were asked to think about the questions that we asked in our feedback for the first video prototype assignment.

I believe that most of the questions that I asked was very qualitative instead of quantitative.
(questions and feedback can be found here).

Although most of my questions were quite specific, most of the questions that I asked were mostly opinions based. So there was pretty much no right or wrong answer and it all depended on different individuals itself. I learnt that I should make my questions more quantitative instead too, eg. coming with a scale of 1-10 asking people what they think about this special feature, is it good enough.

I also learnt that I should not/never ask questions such as, "is the game fun?" or even "do you like the game?".

Week6 Exercise & Interactive Prototype 1 Plan

EXERCISE

figure 1: the game concept

Objects on the concept of the game This Means War.
So based on figure 1 above, which is a screenshot of the video prototype shows all the elements/objects needed to create this game in Flash/ Action Script:

1. A main window for a 4x4 grid layout.
This window would allow all objects to appear on the stage and with the grid layout, then players would easily distinct which square has not been marked and vice versa.

2. Tiles.
Red and blue tiles for users to show their mark. Yellow tiles for hidden mines. The mines are also considered as an object. The red or blue tiles need to know that if 3 (maybe) marks connect diagonally, vertically or horizontally, the player would earn one point.

- also another minor tile would be a grey 50% opacity tile. This tile would be used when users score points and this grey tiles will appear to sort of highlight the marks that connect to each other. This tile should also know that if it happens to appear in the game, the game should end. This means that player should NOT be able to place new marks anymore.

3. Players (as this is a two player game).
Two players should be created. Red player which is the first player and blue player which is the second. Players object need to know that when respective player clicks anywhere on the grid, their own colour mark will appear.

4. ? (Help) button.
The '?' button should be created at the side of the grid layout. Help button needs to know that if it is clicked, it will reveal one mine. Only one player could reveal one mine in the whole game.

5. Main Scoreboard.
The main scoreboard is to keep track of the number of mines each player has. it needs to know that when 3 marks (maybe 4) connect, it will add one point to the respective player. and it needs to know that if player scores a certain amount of points (2 points), the game ends and the respective player wins the game.

PS: i've started learning AS3 from the prac tutorials especially the pong prac.
I also found a good tutorial website that creates a good 3x3 classic tic tac toe that I could make use of for my prototype.

CRC cards for the scenarios that are to be tested in this prototype.

PLAN FOR INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPE 1
in this interactive prototype 1, i hope to be able to implement a working 4x4 tic tac toe with hidden mines on it. I will be testing the interactivity of the mines when it is hit by the player and also what happens to the game after the mine explodes. Will the same spot automatically turn into the opposite colour in the opponent's favour or will it go back to an empty spot instead? This would be the main thing that I would be testing during the week7B prac. I also would want to know which scoring system will work better, eg. 3 marks for 1 point or 4 marks for 1 point? Should the game have several sets and each set will count as 1 point?

Thanks for reading!! will be back with more updates on the prototype!

Interview (Video Prototype Feedback)

So on week 4B we had our feedback session.
I had 6 questions about my video prototype.
I managed to interview a total of 6 people including a tutor in a 1 and half hours.

1.       What do you think of the challenge addressed?

- As a mashup its good. 2 points to win is good. More challenging.

- The challenge addressed is very well described.

- The challenge is pretty interesting and looks fun to play.

- Very good concept. Really easy to understand.

- Simple enough for everyone to understand the whole concept of the game.

2.       What do you like most in the game?

- The surprises of the bombs.

- Fairly fast paced, randomness of mines has more replay ability than the original tic tac toe. Simplicity.           Simple games to play with friends.

-  That the game is easy to understand how to play and anybody can play.

- Getting back into this game.

3.       Do you think this will bring back the ever classic tic tac toe and even minesweeper?

- get back into the game. Can see kids in high school IT class. Play flash games.

- Yes

- No I don’t think it will I think it will overtake the classic game of tic tac toe.

4.       Would you play this game with your friends/loved ones? Any particular group?

- I would.

- Yea probably because it's a very casual game that can be played by everyone.

- Yes I would play this with my friends while having some drinks.

- Teens would play this game to bond with each other.

5.       Any suggestions or problems that you think might arise?

- Chance of hitting a mine variable might have some issues with that.

- turn mark into other colours immediately after the mines are stepped.

6.       Suppose I come up with the advance mode:

       Imagine the current video prototype game as the normal mode. And now there's an advanced mode. For everytime a player leaves a mark, a number will appear on the same place as a subscript. This number that appear reveals the number of mines that is touching the spot selected. So players now will have more thinking to do and it will need more thinking instead of a chance based game. 

- Good challenge. Good idea to come up with the advance mode. Make it more challenging. 

- The new mode will turn the game from a chance based game into a map based, which is good, more challenging. More testing is required on the interactiveness on it. 

- Awesome sounds interesting and will create a new challenge where a mine is around the game board.

- The advance idea wont change much of the mode of the game.