Week 6

The team has made some progress this week in beginning to implement Guesstoric. In the contact session, the team discussed possible data structures and flows that may be involved in Guesstoric.

Data and Data Flow:

In designing a game like Guesstoric, it is important to understand the kind of data it deals with, how it is being stored and how it will be retrieved. The basic concept will be to retrieve data (from Trove), display the data on the screen, retrieve input data from the user and then analyse this information in order to display the appropriate feedback (“correct answer” or “try again” etc) to the user. The game will contain various data structures, brainstormed ideas for this can be seen below:

Player

-name

-score

Question

-level

-continent

-number

-correct answer (monument)

-keywords

A flowchart of data has also been drafted in the contact session. It was good to be able to stand around the whiteboard and discuss interactively as a group where the data flows within the game. A sketch of this can be seen in the following picture, drawn by Felipe and collaborated on by the whole team:

Flowchart of data sketch

The team also had a meeting on the Friday - in attendance were Felipe, Anuki and myself. We had discussed the sitemap for the game, and started to formulate wireframes that can be used towards the paper prototype. We went from screen to screen, discussing the necessary UI elements for each one and debating whether some elements should be changed/modified. For instance, it was decided through sketching the sitemap that the welcome page and the ‘enter name’ page should be combined, since we thought it was unnecessary and involved too many clicks if they were split into two pages. The sketches of the sitemap can be seen below:

(first) Sitemap sketch: Question & Score pages 

(second) Sitemap sketch: Welcome, Enter-name and Location pages

The visual elements and styling was also discussed this week, which was delegated to Anuki who also conversed with the rest of the team in making design decisions. The colour schemes and possible logos that were suggested are as follows:

Colour scheme with majority of team votes

Potential logo designed by Anuki

Potential logo designed by me

We also discussed the levels of difficulty for the game, with suggestions including having multiple choice for the easier levels, and using a timer for the more advanced levels.

Overall it seems the team is making good headway in implementing the app, however I feel getting information from Trove may be one of the most challenging aspects of the project, and so we should aim to start working on this as soon as possible. Leaving the Trove implementation to later in the project may become problematic. In the coming weeks we should aim to start playing around with Trove and how it can be integrated into the project, and start building a basic html/css template.