This was the chilled out week. We presented on Monday, and after that had a team dinner and postmortem with our advisor.

This week we spent time on preparing for our final presentation on Monday (9th Dec). We also worked on a lot of features we wanted to have working by finals.

This week we mostly spent time working on the feedback which was provided to us by the faculty during Softs. We worked on having a better navigation system so that the users aren’t confused anymore.

Also, some of us took some time to rest and enjoy the Thanksgiving festival with our dear one’s.

This was the week when we sprinted towards our working prototype for Softs presentation.

We did a user testing session on Wednesday in which we tested our game with a set of users who went on Pittsburgh Movies mission. Our users had to go to locations where movies have been shot in Pittsburgh and click photographs of those locations trying to recreate similar shots as we have presented in our mission description. Both of our users had a lot of fun doing the mission.

We also worked hard to create a trailer and a teaser for our game, they can be found here : https://vimeo.com/80311284 and here : https://vimeo.com/80317199

Our front end developers Chitian and Lei also worked really hard towards having a stable release for the Softs and fixing any and all bugs in our app for a wonderful experience for the faculty on Softs.

This week we organized an open house on Wednesday, where we invited the faculty and students in ETC to come to our room and look at our progress since halves.

The open house was a good motivation for the team to have a mid week deliverable instead of a deliverable at the end of the week for the client meeting. We got the photo taking mission working while ironing out the UI and also getting the Pittsburgh movies mission in the game.

We also got some really good feedback from the open house regarding how we can have a trivia based game mechanic too in our game and other suggestions regarding refining our UI and some more features we can add.

Eben also introduced us to some of his friends who are interested in helping us with testing our app. We have sent them a build of our game and hopefully they should be able to test our game over the weekend and provide us feedback on the same.

For next week we are planning to have some more user testing and prepare for softs.

This week we started our SCRUM sprint towards adding the features we decided to add based on our Halves feedback.

Chitian and Lei added the photo taking capability in the phone and Kelin worked towards having a UI for photo based mission.

Meanwhile, I have been working with BVW students doing their project shadow assignments, to make a mission for photo based mission. They worked towards a Pittsburgh Movies mission in which the user would have to visit some of the locations in Pittsburgh, where movies have been shot. Particularly Dark knight rises, Perks of being a wallflower, Doctor Gadget and a few more.

For next week we have planned an open house to get faculty’s feedback on our project and also showcase our app to other students in ETC.

Most of the time this week was spent on pondering over the feedback we got from halves presentation. The team decided to add a new feature to capture photographs of the locations visited by people. But instead of making it a monotonous picture taking feature, we have planned to add a context to taking photographs. For example if you are going to see The Duck in Pittsburgh, instead of asking our users to take a picture of the duck we ask them to take a picture of them kissing the duck, this provides a context as well as an activity for them to do.

We also worked towards having features like having a mission boundary for scavenger hunt type missions and giving our users hints when they are near a location they should explore in the mission. This week we spent a lot of time planning our next steps and we just need to start working on our plans next week.

This week was mostly spent on preparing for Halves. We had our halves on Wednesday, 23rd October. Preparing for our halves presentation wasn’t just about preparing a presentation. It helped the team to reflect back on our vision, and how we are able to come close to it day by day. It made us think about what we have been doing as a team and the motive behind all our actions. The motive being encouraging our users to explore and know about the culture and art and places in Pittsburgh.

We got some really good feedback from the faculty for our halves presentation, some of it was orientated around having our game heavily dependent on the content instead of the tool we have been creating. Some of it is concentrated on small features like, the badges being a bit confusing, not quoting the applications we researched. For the presentation most of the faculty was pretty happy with the way we presented and how the team carried themselves during the presentation.

On Friday, we discussed the halves feedback with Eben, our client and thought about the next steps. For Next week, we need to discuss the feedback with our advisors and start working towards improving our app based on the feedback.

This week was dedicated towards getting a stable build and using it for User testing. We were able to get 10 users to test our application. We did user testing on East Carson St. of the mission Mural Finder. The field testing went pretty good and we got some really good feedback from our testers.

Most of our users enjoyed doing the Mural Finder mission in which they had to find 8 murals in E. Carson St. But we did got some criticism in terms of not having a fully furnished UI, the badges being a little confusing and they getting lost a little bit as there were no directions or boundaries on our map.

Meanwhile, our development team implemented a lot of the UI developed by Kelin, Andy and Gus refined the code for our server, and we discussed our progress with Eben our client. For next week we have Halves presentation, we have started preparing a presentation for that, but we still have a lot on our hand.

This week we spent a lot of time struggling with getting our app built on an iPhone, we have been facing several issues with getting a build running on iPhone. The most irritating being the fact that we have to use CMU’s iOS developer account. By the end of the week even though we were able to get our app working on a phone instead of a simulator. We still are facing a few issues on the front of adding new devices to our provisioning profile.

Meanwhile, Kelin our designer has been doing an awesome job in terms researching about the UI for our app and working on it. Andy and Gus got the infrastructure for a check-in up and running.  Also, we had a prototype with the Mural Finder mission up and running this week.

So, we did struggled with the limitations of a shared developer account but we still got a lot done this week. Next week we plan to integrate some of the UI’s that Kelin has made, shine up our prototype and do playtesting.