Newsletter 01

Project Overview

INVOLution is an ETC project that is focused on creating a social interactive   experience, which is designed to foster a virtual conversation among the citizens of Osaka, about Osaka. The goal is to create a virtual space in which citizens can share metropolitan “secrets” of Osaka as well as the pride of their city. Through this, we will also create a means for outsiders to get an intimate and real time glimpse of what makes Osaka come alive for its citizens.

This Week

The team spent most of this week settling into our new environment at the Osaka campus. We had to setup our apartments, work space and other necessities for living in Osaka, Japan. The INVOLution team was able to meet with our clients this week to discuss what the clients wish to achieve with this project. We learned that our client really wants to emphasize on creating an innovative way for citizens of Osaka to share secrets of the city with each other. Secrets being text, images or video about something which other citizens may not be aware of. Our team did a lot of research into things that are popular in Japan in order to try and better acquaint ourselves with what would best suit the requirements of the client and make this project a success. We’re excited to work on this project that will allow residents to share with each other in a new and fun way; and we are looking forward to the semester ahead.

 

Newsletter 02

Design Brainstorms

Our team got together in order to discuss what would be the best way to implement what the client wants and what platform(s) we should focus on. We needed to research what would be the most feasible in terms of, time for implementation and accessibility and we also had to discuss what our target demographic would be. After doing some research we decided that the best path to take would be to develop a website utilizing HTML5, Javascript and PhP. This website would also have a mobile version which can be accessed on smart phones.

Website UI Mapping/Navigation

Later in the week, the team met to plot out the possible navigation of the website. Based on the client’s requirements, the website would have two main functions. Sharing, which allows for a user to share information by posting videos, images or text; and Discovering, which allows a user to be able to search through items posted on the site by other users and find new things to do and see in Osaka. We used these two major requirements to aide us in forming a “skeleton” about how a user would navigate the website.

Website Server Research

Since we chose to develop a website for our project, we needed to determine what type of web server environment would best suit our needs. We also needed to consider the server environment that our clients would possibly host the website on after we hand it off to them at the end of the semester. Our programmers suggested an Apache server environment, which was ok with our clients. This environment is now being prepared for development; during this time our programmers are working on developing a mock website using a local WAMP server installation.

 

Newsletter 03

Team Poster

Every project team has a poster to advertise the project and give a public face to the team. The poster has the name of the project, the names of     the team members and faculty advisor, and a URL to the project website. We used a color scheme which has a mix between light and dark, we wanted our poster to advertise some of the attractions present in Japan and have a flashy yet calm feel to it. We also use our logo to connect the various attractions showcased in our poster. This basically symbolizes the goal of our project which is to connect people in a new and fun way.

A Change in Design Direction

After our client meeting, it was determined that while we were making progress and working towards a fair direction for our project, we were not hitting the nail on the head and getting exactly what they wanted. The idea behind our website fulfilled the conditions of allowing users to discover and share; however, it was not a very innovative idea. We possibly also did not put enough emphasis on the idea of a secret for our design direction. Team INVOLution got together and decided that we would step out of the box brainstorm for some new design ideas, which go beyond simple sharing and discovering, which we can pitch to our clients.

On Hiatus

Next week the INVOLution team will be attending the Tokyo Game Show conference in Chiba, Tokyo. This will be a great opportunity for us to see what is currently trending in the games industry in Japan and also provide us with the opportunity to do some networking with others in the industry.

 

Newsletter 04

Tokyo Game Show

This week the team went to Tokyo Game Show (TGS) located in Chiba, Tokyo. TGS is held annually and is one of the world’s top game conferences. One noticeable aspect of TGS 2012 was the great increase in the number of mobile, social and networking games being showcased at the conference. The products being displayed at TGS gave our team a lot of motivation and some creative ideas to pull from for our project. Also, this year the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University had a booth setup on the exhibition floor in order to showcase projects done by students; and to potentially attract prospective students and clients.

Moving Forward

Our team will meet on Monday, September 24 to brainstorm and discuss possible new design directions for the project. The goal is to find an idea that is more unique and fun and fulfills the requirements of our clients. We will then meet with the clients on September 27 to present our new ideas. On September 28, we will have our quarter presentation. The purpose of this presentation is for the faculty and the clients to get an idea of our design direction, what we have done thus far in the project, challenges we have faced and how we intend to move forward.

 

 

 

Newsletter 05

New Ideas

On Monday, September 24, the team spent the day doing a huge brainstorming session. In this brainstorm session, the team put a lot more emphasis on the idea of people interacting and sharing in a new an unique way. Ideas had to be centralized around the concept of making sharing and discovering information fun and accessible. By the end of the day, we had some new ideas that the team felt very strongly about. These ideas were presented to our clients on Thursday. Three ideas were presented and we requested that our clients choose the idea that they want us to work
on for the remainder of the semester. We shared the pros and cons of each idea and discussed the feasibility of developing a prototype for each idea considering the time remaining in the semester, as well as the experience of the programmers on the team. The team is currently awaiting our clients decision to move forward.

 Quarters Presentation

The schedule for this week was a bit tight because the team not only had to brainstorm new ideas and discuss them with our clients, but the team also had to prepare for quarter presentation. We had to find the best way to present all the work and decisions that have been made by the team thus far in the semester. For our presentation, we had 7 guests from the companies Cat Remix and iMedio. These two companies focus heavily on news ideas and ways to design media for businesses. Since our guests were not very strong in English, some of our presentation was done in
Japanese in order to help them understand our ideas and the decisions that we made. We give a big thanks to Mika Sasaki who helped us tremendously with this. Our ideas received pretty positive feedback, which was invaluable to us coming from residents of Osaka that we
are focusing on for this project. The guests also offered to be playtesters for our project, which makes us feel even more motivated to develop something meaningful that can capture their interest.

 

 

Newsletter 06

Taking Shape

Our clients chose the design for an app which we are at the moment calling “Bubble Secret”. The clients sounded pretty excited about this idea and look forward to seeing the progress we make moving forward. Earlier in the week, our team met to dig deeper into Bubble Secret and work out the design for the mobile app. Some of the key features that were discussed in the meeting were: Creating a Bubble, Finding a Bubble, Opening a Bubble and the Rating System. Research and first iteration work has begun on the User Interface (UI). The team needs to determine the best color palette that works with this app as well as what is the best way to allow users to navigate the app. The programmers have also begun work on the back-end and front-end (server and client) aspects of the app. Bubble Secret’s core functionality will be heavily reliant on saving and retrieving data to and from a remote server database. Our app will also have some simple games that users will play in order to unlock the information in a bubble. A game idea which is currently being worked on is a puzzle based tile swapping game.

Hardware and Technology

With the consent of our client, Team INVOLution has decided to move forward this semester developing the app for Windows Phone. This decision was made after considering the time remaining in the semester and the experience of our programmers. Our app will utilize XNA and Silverlight on the Windows Phone device.

Visit to Cat-Remix

Team INVOLution and Team Locomobio were taken to visit a company called Cat-Remix this week. Cat-Remix is a creative company where artists elaborate on new ideas for new businesses. Both teams really enjoyed the visit and were amazed to see some of the works of the company. We are very grateful to them for taking the time out of their busy day to accommodate us and share some of their work.

 

 

Newsletter 07

User Interface Design

Based on our design meeting last week, Team INVOLution was able to do the first draft of User Interface (UI) art for the mobile app. We researched various mobile app UI and their features in order help us determine what kind of UI design could work best with our app based on its features. At this point in time we have created the UI for the main features of the app, which are: Creating a Bubble, Finding a Bubble and Opening a Bubble. We have sent our first draft UI design to the client and we are now awaiting feedback to know if we can move forward with this UI design. In the meantime our team will work on theming for our app and how it can be applied to the UI.

Meeting with Arnold Blinn

On Friday, October 12, Arnold Blinn, from Microsoft, visited the ETC campus in Pittsburgh and Rebecca Lombardi organized for our team to have a meeting with him on Skype. We discussed our project idea and design with him, and he gave us some very valuable feedback that will undoubtedly help to push things forward in implementing our project. Team INVOLution is very grateful to Mr. Blinn for taking the time to meet with us and give us feedback on our project.

Next Week

Our team will follow a suggestion from Mr. Blinn and try to utilize Microsoft’s Azure service to host the services for our project. This is an alternative to asking the ETC to setup a remote server for our project.We also requested some Windows Mobile phones which are estimated to reach us by the middle of next week. The team is doing their best to push forward and have a first iteration working prototype of our app which can be used to play-test next week.

 

Newsletter 08

Windows Azure and SQL Database Integration

Following a recommendation given to the team in the previous week, we dedicated some time to switching over the server side architecture to utilize Windows Azure and SQL Database. The change was a lot easier than we thought it would have been. Implementation was fairly easy due to the time that was spent previously on implementing and hosting Windows Communication Foundation services on a remote server. With the  project architecture solution set in place, our team was able to implement the core functionality of our app. We were able to use the Windows Phone to store and retrieve information from the database stored in the cloud

Theme Ideas

One very important aspect of our app is theme. The theme and art style of our app will greatly influence how citizens of Osaka view it. We spent a good portion of time this week working on possible themes for our app, thinking about what kind of look the app could have that would be readily accepted by Japanese residents. One of the ideas was to have is a Lantern theme. In this theme, lanterns would hold information instead of bubbles
and the UI would have a look and feel that is reminiscent of paper. It was inspired by the many lanterns that residents of Japan use.
The other theme idea is steam punk water based. Osaka is a city that is near the water and has a feel of old mixed with new. That is the basis behind the inspiration for this theme.

 

Newsletter 09

Integrating the Different Parts

For our halves presentation we wanted to present a demo of our app which is able to perform the core functionality. So we had to bring together and integrate the back end (server code) and front end (user interface code), as well as put in our temporary art for the user interface. Even though the user interface is going to change, we believe that we have hit a very important milestone with our project by having all of these pieces for our mobile app put together and working.

Halves Presentation

On Monday we had our halves presentation for faculty, client and fellow students. Halves represents the midpoint in the semester and is an
important opportunity to reflect on everything we have done to this point–our design decisions, playtest results, accomplishments, and
challenges –as well as what we will be doing moving forward. We presented a live demo of our app by running the Windows Phone emulator from the computer and projecting it onto a large screen. This helped us to display the basic function of our app and also show that it works. We also emphasized how important it was for us to get feedback about theming from our guests who were residents of Osaka. After our presentation, we allowed our guests to try out the app for themselves on the Window Phone devices. They were excited when they saw that something they posted in a bubble from one phone would be detected and displayed on a different phone. Their reaction gave our team a reassuring boost, because it showed that the design had the potential to really attract the target Japanese users.

A Trip to Tottori

As a part of our Japanese elective, the project teams located in Osaka were taken on a two day trip to visit Tottori. While in Tottori, we visited the International Manga Expo, Mizuki  Shigeru museum, The Conan Museum, The Toy Museum, Sand Museum and Tottori Sand Dunes. It was a great cultural experience and we were able to learn a lot more about Japan. We
even got to stay at a ryokan which is a Japanese style inn, complete with a hot spring.

 

Newsletter 10

Deciding On Our Theme

Following up on some of the feedback that we received from our guests at our halves presentation, the team met to finalize on a theme for our app. Based on how residents of Osaka reacted to the possible themes we presented at our halves presentation, we learned that any theme that is too strongly tied to Japanese culture will not be as interesting to them as a theme that has a Japanese basis with a “Western Flavor”. That is to say, the youth in Japan seem to find western culture very interesting and as such creating a theme which has a sense of familiarity through the use of Japanese culture, but has a look and feel that is inspired by western culture could be ideal in attracting users. The team spent most of this week working on the design and look for the new theme artwork. Adjustments were also made to the user interface to compliment the new theme. We are a bit late in solidifying our theme, but with our theme in mind the team is able to move forward at a much better pace.

Gachapon!

Team INVOLution decided to move forward with a theme that revolves around the concept of Gachapon machines. Gachapon machines are  extremely popular in Japan and are used daily by many different people. Gachpon machines contain many pods, each of which hold a random collectible item, and it is impossible to know what item a pod contains until it actually comes out of the machine. People will spend many yen at these machines trying to get a specific item. Each gachapon machine contains a specific series of collectibles, which is normally displayed on the outside of the machine. This theme idea inspired the team to include a feature in our app where the user uses a gachapon machine to get a random bit of information. The user will be able to choose the category of the information they receive, however, the type of information, its quality and the area in Osaka the information is received from is completely random. We would also like to implement a collectible system to go alongside this gachapon feature. This will give users incentive to use our app
outside of just sharing and discovering information, and may even motivate some users to share information more often

 

Newsletter 11

Mini Game Development

Last week Team INVOLution was able to solidify a theme for our app. With the theme and artwork style in mind, the team focused its resources on creating the first complete mini-game. The first game would fall under the transportation category. This means that when a user finds a pod of information which falls under the Transportation category, there is a chance that they will be presented with this mini game to complete. Depending on the player’s performance in the mini game, they will be awarded with a certain number of tokens which they can use at the app’s gachapon machine in order to try and get a new collectible. The user will have the option of playing the game or not, this is to accommodate the possibility of a user wanting to have direct access to the information while maintaining the unique gameplay feature of the app. The game which is temporarily being referred to as Steam Punk Evasion, features the avatar that is in charge of the transportation category Steam Punk Cat (SPC). SPC has four gachapon pod passengers in his plane and he must deliver the pods to their respective station stops before he completes his route. The player can move SPC left and right on the screen and try to avoid colliding with obstacles which will slow him down and delay him from dropping off his passengers. Based on the number of pods the player drops off as well as the time they complete SPC’s route, the user will be rewarded with a certain number of tokens. We are trying to create a system in our mini games where the player is rewarded despite how poor they perform. Despite the goal of our games being simplicity and fun, we are aware the game is still taking some time out of the typical Japanese resident’s daily schedule. As such, we want to still give them some kind of reward to let them know the time they take to play the game is appreciated. This model is used mainly because at the core we are creating an app, if it was a game from end to end then we would most likely utilize a different design model. Though if they perform very poorly, then the reward will not be extravagant, so the player will hopefully be motivated to come back, try again and do better the next time. Thankfully the programmers and artist were able to work simultaneously. Steam Punk Evasion was created using “programmer art” initially and when the artist was finished with the artwork they were integrated. The team was able to get the “toy” working, and all that remains to be done with the mini game now is to make some adjustments to the art assets and some additional programming tests.

 

 

Newsletter 12

Working on Steam Punk Evasion

This week our team continued to work on our Steam Punk Evasion Mini Game. Some changes were made to the artwork for the station and the enemy birds. This was so that the station would look more like it is floating in the sky and the perspective for the birds did not look mismatched with the perspective of the other sprites in the game. We also wanted the enemy birds to look more menacing, so that when players see them they will think that they should avoid them.
We plan to finish up the extra core aspects of the game next week and then have some external users play the game to get feedback on what works well and does not work well. All being well we should only need to add polish to the mini game.

A Trip To Tokyo

Due to a trip to Tokyo for our Japanese elective class, our team only had 2 days (plus the weekend) to do work on the project this week. From November 15 to 16, team INVOLution went to Tokyo to visit some of the game companies based in that location. We were fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to meet with members from Sony Computer Entertainment, Konami and Square Enix. The team was able to gain some insight into what it is like to work as a game developer in Japan and what some of the differences in terms of requirements would be between a Japanese
work environment and US work environment. Our team was also able to discuss our project with Michael and Lionel from Kojima Studios and get some feedback from them about the app. We were also given the opportunity to visit Keio University and speak with a professor there; he showed us some of the projects currently being worked on by students. Keio University has a PhD program in Media Design which is said to be similar to the program offered by the Entertainment Technology Center.

 

 

Newsletter 13

Right on Track

With soft opening right around the corner, our team worked very hard this week on meeting our deadline of completing all of the core functionalities of the app. We were able to make a lot of progress with our app this week and we were able to implement most of the outstanding features that had not yet been complete in the app. These features included:

– User Account Creation, which would detect the first a user runs the app and then store their information and use it for their duration of  utilizing the app.
– Token system that will be used alongside the Gachpon collectibles feature.
– Profile to view user information.
– Users are now able to view pod information upon completion of the mini game.
– Pod searching functionality for the users current location has been changed and now works better.
– General User Interface has been changed.

Visit to Capcom

On Wednesday, our team went to visit Capcom headquarters which is based in Osaka. Capcom is responsible for games such as Mega Man, Resident Evil (called Biohazard in Japan) and Street Fighter. It was a pleasant surprise when about 11 members of their development team came to meet with us. This was a rare experience for us because we not only got to showcase our project, and get game developers of Capcom to playtest our app; but we also got to show them our portfolio and get feedback from them on how we can better ourselves to make ourselves more marketable once we graduate.

Moving Forward

Next week we will have our softs presentations. Various people from universities in Osaka as well as employees of various technology based companies will come to look on our app and try it out for themselves. This is a crucial point for us because depending on their reaction to our app, it will gauge how successful we were with our design. To prepare ourselves for softs, we will be finishing up the implementation of the core features of the app and test to ensure that the app is user friendly. If we have enough time we will also try to switch the app language to Japanese to make it easier for our guests to use.

 

 

Newsletter 14

Collectibles and Localization

One of the biggest milestones for the team this week that we were able to accomplish, was to localize our app to Japanese. This way we could easily give our app to our guests at softs without needing to explain the UI to them. This would help us to know if we have a user friendly user interface.
Additionally we were able to get the basic functionality of using tokens at the gachapon machines in order to acquire information and a collectible working. Users can now also view pods that they have posted by going to their profile.

Softs Feedback

On Wednesday, November 28, our team presented our progress since halves and gave our guests a chance to use the mobile app and give us feedback on the changes we have made. We had guests from Cat Remix, iMedio and Osaka University come to try our app. They were pretty pleased with our app and found it to be cute and fun. Our team was also extremely pleased that they were able to easily understand the UI and our Japanese localization was a success. We also received feedback on things that were not very clear to them at first and ways in which we could make it a better experience:

– It is hard to know what the connection is between the gachapon avatars and the machine colors.
– When a pod is opened, they are not aware that is what they did. Some more visual feedback could help this.
– The User Interface is easy to navigate and understand.
– Mini game is fun and the art style for the collectibles is adorable.