Week 7 Newsletter – Spring 2014

Weekly Newsletter 7

Last week we had our Quarter’s presentations. Everyone’s went well, and our team is really starting to push forward on our project after focusing on the presentation. We’ve started looking at how accurate the phone is in gathering pieces of the puzzle. The two factors of the puzzle piece and the phones GPS working together have turned out to work relatively well.

From there other programmers have started getting the digging motion and using this to trigger picking up pieces in the games. Towards Friday we tested this and the trigger really seems to work. We hope it can really fit in with the game as people will believe they are digging for something when they are in the game.

Using MapNav we have had some issues with maps taking time to load. We’ve had a breakthrough will map caching using Slippy Maps which manages to perform faster. Using smartphones we really need to save time and memory as much as possible so every bit helps. From here, we are looking to work out a good way to have a playable area for the players and keeping memory as low as possible.

Two our our programmers are working on Smartly Generating Treasure piece points on the map and are coming close, again it comes down to see which one we can implement on phones without having them crash! This will hopefully be tested in the coming weeks.

Our artists have now started narrowing down the styles and are looking to provide some concept atrt and models to include in our game. It has been a struggle to obtain some information from our target demographic and we hope our choices will be the right ones!

Coming to the end of our sprint we have done our retrospective and have come up with a few things to work one in the future. What we do know is everyone is enjoying the team environment we have!
Until next week!

The Runaround