Friendly Frogs Post-Mortem

Well, the third prototype is now over and based on the amount of questions we got I think the clients enjoyed what we came up with.  And in the end, despite any troubles we may have had over the 4 weeks (and there WERE troubles) I think our end product is actually very similar to the goal we set in the first place.

During the post-mortem the group agreed that the biggest issue for us was not a lack of communication, but there being too much miscommunication.  Several time people would talk about or even code up or just simply not know how a section of the game was supposed to behave.  Inevitably I have to fault our producer on this as in the end, I felt more like the producer of this project, which was incredibly hard to balance with my engineering duties as well.  On the plus side, it was a glimpse into what it's like being a designer/producer. And while I loved the design aspect of shaping the game into what I wanted it to me like, the production role was not enjoyable.

Despite everything that happened though, I'm very happy with our end product and I feel like I learned a ton of things this project.

Week 3 Update

I focused and really cranked out a ton of code this week.  I'd learned a lot from the previous week (even if I got hardly any code out) and I finally feel like I at least somewhat understand how to use HTML5, CSS, and Javascript.  Javascript in particular really isn't that bad since it feels identical to Java for me, which is easily the language I'm most comfortable with.

In the end, all my work on canvases the previous week was thrown out since they we're being too annoying.  I have a background image that's fixed, a character image that sits on top of it, and the arrow for the gauge that I draw in different positions depending on the situation.  6 buttons on the bottom of the screen allow the player to control the conversation, although we don't have any actual dialog.  Instead we simply have placeholders indicating if a button is a positive, neutral, or negative response.  Depending on which is clicked, the character will smile, look neutral, or frown and the gauge will move in the correct direction (or not move at all in the case of a neutral response).

AB was working on the navigation, which is working, but as of right now still needs the last few touchups to get the days of the week and conditional characters based on those days in.  We'll easily be finished by Wednesday for the presentation to the client.

In terms of the game itself, I feel that it does have the potential to be very fun, the issue in us attempting to convince people of that is that it's missing the conversations which are what drive that fun and play.  I feel like we've done a good job of setting up the entire framework of the game, however, and hope that it will be apparent how they could create conversations for it since they're much more experienced in the subject.

Week 2 of Friendly Frogs

Compared to the previous prototypes, we are nowhere near as finished with this current project.  Learning HTML and Javascript wasn't bad at all (ignoring the case where getting a background to show up on a canvas refused to work despite multiple tutorials saying it should) so that's definitely not to blame.  It's hard to put my finger on it, but I know it's impacting all the groups and not just us.  I think a large part of it has to do with it being hard to work in a lab setting when others around you aren't working.

All that being said though, I'm not concerned about us not finishing on time.  I'm planning on really buckling down this coming week and fully expect to have it completed by Thursday.  I've read up and understand everything I need to get my section of the code running, I just need to actually get it done.  The code behind our game isn't particularly challenging, and I'm most concerned about he conversations since they're really the heart of this game.  Worst case scenario the prototype will show what we're aiming at and that it works, and the conversations will really just be filler that the therapists can replace.

And I do feel that this will be a fun and enjoyable game both for people with autism, and those without.