In this recitation, we as a group of four looked into each other’s final project essay and helped each other to improve their ideas based on their initial state of the scheme.
Ellie intended to do a game called “Navigating in Space”. It was basically a first-perspective game in which the user can control the direction of the spaceship by moving the joystick to avoid the meteorites and space junks which floated in the universe. Ellie already had a background and the model image of the meteorites. She would mainly create the feeling of navigating by moving the background image. The joystick would actually control those various stones rather than the spaceship by writing coding the direction line reversely. During our discussion, we reached the agreement that the initial idea of this project was intriguing, but the playability of this game still had much space to improve. One piece of advice that we gave was to add a shooting function into the spaceship and make the whole game more involving. Actually, it could be more than a game. Since Ellie already designed the existence of space junks in the project, the underlying message could be conveyed easily. She could add more educational meaning into this project, for instance, setting some planets on the way of the navigation and each time a planet appears, pause the game and show some brief introduction of this planet. By increasing the educational meaning and playability of this project, Ellie could reach her initial goal as making more people interested in space exploration and be aware of the hazard of space junks more easily.
Mimi’s project had the most practical meaning among us. She wanted to create a maze in which the user could only figure out which way should they go by hearing the sound of the wind. The user would have to use earphones to play and by distinguishing the left or right channels does the wind blows, he or she chooses her way out. This game itself interested me a lot because usually, our projects would focus on the vision part rather than other feelings. Mimi’s project crippled our reliability, but transfer our attention to hearings. By establishing this project, she wanted to remind people to be aware of the importance of other feelings except for vision and also gave us an experience of the blind. She could improve her project by adding the punishment part. For example, if the user chooses the wrong way, there will be some warning sound and if the user doesn’t correct his or her choice, there will be a monster waiting for them at the end of the road.
Skyler also intended to create a game. She already had the demo for group members to play with. There would be a young snake at the beginning and its goal is to eat as many apples as it can. Users use the direction keys to control the movement of the snake and each time an apple is eaten, the snake will be longer to increase the difficulty of this game. If the snake touches the rim of the canvas or itself, the game will end and the score will be shown on the screen. It was basically a Gluttonous Snake game. What was different between her project and the traditional games was that the direction keys would lead the snake onto a reverse direction, which further increases the playability of this game. We all agreed that the game was great enough and only gave advises on beautifying the game.
Our definition of interaction was quite similar. What I still would like to mention is that Mimi’s project complete my definition at some degree. Heretofore, I focused on the interaction between different objects by vision but didn’t expect that any feeling like touching and hearing can also form a complete interaction.
I also received much advice for my final project. Aimed at my project, my group members’ opinions all focused on increasing its playability. For example, the game could be made into a multiple users game, in which another user can control the villain to fight back against the heroes. Also, adding some combination between different heroes instead of simply matching each button to each character will also make the game more interesting. I will selectively integrate these advice into my project to improve it.
In conclusion, this reflection was quite helpful for each of us to get new ideas on how we can improve our projects. Gathering each member’s perspective efficiently reveals the weaknesses of our projects.