Working in a team
Our group was the only one made of four people. At the beginning we easily had lot of ideas, but then we found difficult to find a common point of view and how to define the direction of our project.
We found out that in a group is more useful listening to the ideas of each member and take their best part to create a great final solution. Being too gelous of your own ideas could limit the research.
Concept and design development
The most difficult trouble to solve was to develop a strong concept for this game. We spent a lot of time in discussing how to privide people a more enjoyable Carnival (considering how caotic is the Carnival situation): now people dont’t have a real interactive experience, they just wear masks to become someone else, to have a new identity for some hours.
Masked people enter in a role game mood. Moreover, we know that mobile phones are perfect for developing game’s applications, so we decided to create a role-playing game platform.
Another important aspect that we wanted to consider was allowing people to become creator of the games, because one of the technology aims we would like to underline is that it allows people to express themself.
Since these considerations we developed the idea of creating a website where people could create their games sometime before Carnival. We analysed a lot both user’s interaction (how to create enjoyable games, how to communicate the game’s mood, and so on) and the application global features and problems (flowchart and flowmap correct development) in order to create a designing complete and satisfying application.
It’s really important to think about all the aspects of the project: how to make people interested in the project, how can they feel confident in it, which are the risks, what might they need and desire?
Interaction’s aspect
The first idea about realizing the interface (and the easiest) was to realize different screens for different steps among which the user would jump, but it would create a poor interaction. So we tried to think about animations for changing the screens, in order to give users the possibility to easily create a mental model of the application.
We also studied an animation for the “Q” (the game’s master): the Q descendent becomes a mustache on a “face” to humanize the system.
Another big problem was to deal with a small screen such as the mobile phone’s one. Our first graphics was too rich of decorations (look at the image) that make difficult reading and focusing on the most important elements. So we developed a simpler one which gives more importance to message of the game.
Prototyping
After studying the concept it’s really important to make your project visible. This makes easier to discuss about it with other team’s members and to test if it could work. Storyboards and videos can show you a possible scenario and the most part of the steps you need to do.
For the first video we used a paper-prototype, not very elegant but useful to test our game.
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