dear mr blog,

ug. just spend my evening listening to bits of jazz fm radio and exporting bits and pieces of the ui sketches for ryan to input into his magical programming world. knowing web/ flash makes splitting up the bits easier, because i know what makes a button, but it will be interesting to see how ryan puts these bits together in a non- flash/ dreamweaver world. still working on body bits for the monsters, and perfecting the ui icons and menu. i’ve been looking at iphone games and other apps to see what they’ve been using for their icons for settings, help, menu… some work and some don’t but it’s interesting how people just adopt bad ones anyways. i’m glad we have a huge art team. there is so many bits to draw.

now to find something more exciting to do on my saturday night. like listen to cbc radio and work on some flash. oooh. daring

(‘bits’ use count not including title: 7)

yours forever and always,

tiffany

…for $$$ to rent an Android device…but still! The school says they can help us with money to rent a phone from Wavefront: http://www.wavefrontac.com/

This is great because we need to test the game out on an actual device in a real world environment. Emulators help a lot, but can only go so far. Testing on an actual device can show things that may go unnoticed in an emulator environment. Wavefront has a great program where developers can rent mobile devices like iPhones, Androids, iPads to test out their mobile applications.

More info here:

http://www.wavefrontac.com/services/testing-and-accreditation/handset-test-services/handset-rentals.html

-john

over the weekend i made up a quick sketch of an island for our project. the shape is an important aspect because it has to fit well within the screen resolution, so i drew it in a square shape. my island kind of resembles france now.  saperlipopette. i added a few plants and geographic features such as mountains.. but i think the island needs a bit more depth to it.. maybe more slopes or plateaus or mesas or valleys. looking forward to presenting my stuff in class today. gggggoooo team voldemort!

quick meeting today after improv class,

talked about the pixelation of our monsters, how the layers will work together as a whole. concluded that there will be 235 different body type parts… 12 layers… times 3 sides… equals a lot. time to get crackin’!

nicky worked on an example of what our island will look like, included demo plants and possible ‘pen’ fence structures. i worked on some digital sketches of what our splash screen, capture net, island and inventory screen will look like. mmm. what else. scott did some crazy programming work, which he will have to explain himself at a later date, as i usually just sit there, mouth agape when he says all the stuff he can do with his magical coding powers.

excited to see how things will end up! hoooooray!

more later. i have to go and buy my new taylor swift cd out today. aaaah! out of the way pre- teens!

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On the programming side, Scott has diligently put together a Hello World-type program on an Android phone emulator.  At the moment, it is capable of displaying menu options and a sample monster stat screen.

This week has been excruciatingly slow as midterm projects and reports are all due this week.

On Thanksgiving weekend, I worked on creating a User Story of when our monsters get into a battle. As I worked on the document, I realized that we still had not differentiated the outcomes in the two main types of battle in our planning.

There are two different types of battle systems: when a monster hunts for food (carnivore –> herbivore) and when a monster attacked another out of aggression/randomization.

Hunting battles require that only 1 animal survives. A random/aggression battle only involves 1 attack from each monster. Our team never discussed on what happens to the victor/victim of a battle if one or both die. We’ll have to discuss this at our next meeting.

I also created a simple mock up of our UI menu screens using simple HTML. It will be presented along with Scott’s simulation for our previsualization presentation in our next Building Virtual Worlds Class.

News posts from the team up soon! Stay tuned!