Prototyping Stage…

Having spent the last few days getting to a stage where we can prototype our game, we’ve arranged to go into Boringdon tomorrow and get the children to test the game, in it’s current state.

At the moment the game consists of 6 screens:

screen 1 – contains instructions
screen 2 – circle
screen 3 – rectangle
screen 4 – square
screen 5 – triangle
screen 6 – animation at the end of the game

Eventually the shape pages will be random (we’ve already sorted that) but for the purpose of prototyping we wanted to see how the children work through the screens and how they react to the game.

At present we don’t have any audio cues, for two reasons, firstly we havent had a chance to record any, and secondly we want to see how important they are to the children. We hope that the game is easily understood and navigated, without the need for additional instruction. We do intend to add audio cues, this will just act as a test for us to see the importance of them.

We have a quick animation at the moment at the end of the game, but this will be adapted and made more interesting.

Here’s the game we’re taking in to school for prototyping:

Click To Play

Thoughts…

Whilst making the prototype today we came up with a few issues and areas to look into:

Audio – good and bad sounds? Audio instructions too?

Animation – shapes combine at the end of the drawing processes????
eg – spaceship, tractor

Need to add welcome screen and end screen

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On the subject of right and wrong:

Is it really necessary to have the right and the wrong sounds? As this game is designed to back up their learning the children should in theory already know if the shapes they are drawing are the ones they’ve been asked to draw.

Decided to leave the game play as it is for now, going to test it next week and see how the children react to it, and ask the teachers for feedback. See if they think sounds are required for right and wrong.

We now need to take the prototype we’ve made into school and get it tested by the children. As well as answer to the question about the sounds.

Next Step…

After sorting out the layouts yesterday, we made a start on the movie clips of each of the 2d shapes, required by curriculum, being drawn. Simon spent ages, frame by frame drawing and changing the drawing sequence. But the results are brilliant, the children can follow the pencil drawing the shapes.

If you look at the:

“watch” screen you can see the finished video – ie the pencil has drawn the circle already.

“trace” screen you can see where the outlines will be – this isn’t definite at the moment. We still need to work out how thick to make the outline etc.

“try” screen you can see nothing! We haven’t started sorting the white board effect yet. That’s the next step.

Building the game…

We started building our e-learning game today. We’re only at the basic stages, but we’re cracking on which
is the main thing.

Here are some screen shots of our progress so far:

	The question area
	The 3 screens where everything will happen (l-r) the video screen, the trace screen, the try screen.
	Adding the video control buttons, the audio question button and the go back buttons.
	Introducing text to the 3 screens, this is the font the children are familiar with.

Next stage is sorting out the shape drawing videos, that can be tomorrows fun!

Filming finished

I have now done the filming for Vlads Augmented Reality project, its all in Hi-def… I managed to borrow a really good camera for the shooting. Now that the filming is done I will begin to start editing the footage, once thats done I’ll start layering on the Augmented Reality. I have looked at adding the google maps application onto the video this is to show the link between the position of the person in Plymouth and where they are on the map, reference to Grand Theft Auto/GPRS.

Screenshots will follow shortly…

Results from our E-Learning presentation

Yesterday we received our E-Learning results for the past to hand ins. We ( me and Suzie ) got 85 for the Project Proposal and 90 for the Presentation on Friday. Thats 20 marks above a first!!