This week was probably the most productive week during our whole project. Our team was working really hard towards having a working prototype of a mission working on an iPhone. Even though we weren’t able to get a fully working prototype by the end of the week, we ended up being quite close to one.

The mission we were working towards was to find 10 mural paintings on E. Carlson street in Southside, within 2 hours. Since we haven’t been to an expedition for finding Murals ever. Our team planned on having a mural finding expedition, we divided our team into two sub-teams and went to Southside to find Murals. The challenge was that the team which finds the maximum number of Murals in an hour would be getting a lunch treat from the other team. The scavenger hunt within our team ended up being a lot of fun, which made us confident that this mission could be a lot of fun. We ended up fnding around 8-10 murals on and around E. Carlson Street.

Even though we worked really hard towards getting a working build on an iPhone, our progress was bottle necked by not having a concrete UI design for the app, and sharing the iOS developer account with CMU which made getting the app working on an iPhone much tougher.

Our team’s goal for the next week is to improve upon the UI design of the app and to get it working on an iPhone and share and distribute it through Test Flight.

This week we had our Quarters presentation. For our quarters presentation we had a fleshed out idea for our project and a small demo showing the check-in feature for our app.

We also got some really good feedback from the faculty about how to make our game design much more focused and interesting. Most of the advice that we got was on the lines of focusing on making our missions more interesting, and tackling the problem of making our game much more than just checking-in at locations.

On Friday, during our client meeting we shared that feedback with Eben and undertook the challenge of coming up with a working prototype of a single mission by next Friday. The team is really enthusiastic about building a working prototype for a mission. We have already defined the mission structure and how it would be handled at the back-end infrastructure of MySQL and PHP.

That’s it for now, hopefully we would have more news on a working mission on an iPhone by next week.

This week was the action week. We are out of the brainstorming phase and moved into the implementation phase.

Andy and Gus have been working on getting a server running PHP and MySql, which would be able to store the check-ins and information regarding a mission and a user. Lei and Chitian have been working on getting a development environment for iOS up and working and having a small iOS app functionality ready which can let a user check-in at a location.

Kelin, the only artist in our team has been working hard on finishing the marketing material for our project. We have the half sheets, project poster, team photo and our awesome project website up and working.

This week we also had a meeting with Jesse Schell and he gave our team recommendations regarding how to prioritize the features we are planning for our project. Also, how to make our game more personable towards the users by encouraging the users to complete all the missions in the interest category which they are passionate about.

For the next week we plan to have our small demo app working by Monday afternoon, the team is really excited about having a working prototype as soon as possible. We are also preparing for our Quarters presentation coming Wednesday

We just finished with the 3rd week of our project, and we are in a pretty good place at this stage in our project. This week we finalized the game idea we want to work on.

We started with the motivation behind the project to help people explore Pittsburgh and build a great community around the culture and festivals of Pittsburgh. The next process was to figure out user experience and develop personas to create a game mechanic for our game.

We came up with two major categories for Target Audience :

1.) People new to Pittsburgh : A person new to Pittsburgh, initially would be interested in visiting the tourist attractions in Pittsburgh. They would also like to make new friends and have new experiences in the city. And once they get familiar with the city they would also be interested in the culture and traditions in Pittsburgh.

2.) Pittsburgh Native : A person who has lived in Pittsburgh for a long time and knows a lot about Pittsburgh, would like to visit some of the hidden interesting locations in Pittsburgh. They would take part in the sharing and celebrating the festivals and the culture of Pittsburgh.

Then we also compiled a list of interesting places and important festivals celebrated in Pittsburgh.

Finally, we came up with a cool game dynamic in which a character which is signature of Pittsburgh will accompany the players in all their missions and give them information about the places they visit and the experiences they have.
Potential characters include : A Steel Mill worker, The Ghost of Andrew Carnegie, The Scotty Dog and a Steelers Fan.
The missions would consists of checking in at a location or an event, scavenger hunt for locations to take pictures similar to the pictures provided to our players, group conquering of a location in such a way that 5 or more people
need to check in at a location within a day to conquer that location.

Some of the example missions that we thought of are :
-Go take a Ducky Tour
-Go to Mattress Factory and and take a picture in front of the mirrors
-Go to Primantis and have a burger with French fries in it.
-Go to top of Cathedral of Learning building and take a picture of Pittsburgh skyline.
-Explore 10 bridges in Pittsburgh to become a Bridge Master

This weekend our team also went on a Team Adventure to experience Pittsburgh. We went on a Ducky Tour and it was quite an adventure. Our team came to know about some of the interesting places in Downtown and the history behind them. It was definitely motivational for the team to go out and research about Pittsburgh, thanks to our advisor Shirley for suggesting that.

This week was all about nailing down our vision for the project and to bring in ideas from the team together towards a common mission. Our advisors Shirley and Jessica were instrumental in helping our team to get inspired about Pittsburgh and its Culture, and gave us really interesting ideas about the type of adventures one can have within Pittsburgh.

Our team had our first meeting with our client, Eben Myers from Etcetra Edutainment on Friday. We discussed about his vision for the project and his expectations from the team in terms of deliverables. We also presented some of the ideas that our team had brainstormed about for the project with him.

We are team Pittsburgh Challenge. We are a team of Programmers and Artists who are passionate about the city of Pittsburgh, and build upon the spirit of a community in Pittsburgh. We are privileged to have Shirley Saldamarco and Jessica Trybus as our advisors, and Eben Myers from Etcetera Edutainment as our client.

During our first week, we had a couple of Blue Sky brainstorming meeting, we decided the name of our team (Yay!!), we met our advisors and figured out the perfect seating arrangement for the team.

Our teams vision is to build a Mobile app which encourages people to do physical tasks together with other people in their community. Make people get out of their homes, meet other awesome people with similar interests in the community and collaborate/compete with them to perform tasks and activities which they love to do. We want to build upon the social thread which runs through the community of yinzers.

For next week, we plan on brainstorming about the marketing material for our project, design the logo, the website and the poster. We also plan on having a meeting with our client Eben and brainstorm the ideas which we have came up for our project with him.

By the end of next week, we plan on having a strong grip on the vision of our project and the expectations from our advisors and client. That would help us to reach a point where we can start working towards the technical and visual design for our project.