In order to get the best possible user experience and game design we have drafted over and over again the rules and screens that will assemble the Soundscape app.
Check out these very raw sketches of our app that lead to the game design of our app:
General Android knowledge - Check!
Basic proof of concept game - Check!
Now it is time to start thinking about how we are going to spread the joy!
We have spent the last few days thinking, designing and researching the principles of communication between a client and a server. Registration, authentication, communication (and many other words ending with "ation"!) are an essential part of projects these days and a whole new world at that.
So we set up a server at home and currently playing with it in order to learn how to work with it.
Join us next week for some more exciting news! :)
After last week's successful POC, this week we set out to take the wonderful design sketches we have and turning them into a live app that will demo the GUI of our game. After a furious week of coding, setting aside the actual functionality behind each screen, we have an app that allows a user to experience the core aspects of our game
It is finally time to start bringing our vision to life! After a long week of reading up on the Android SDK, we are starting to lay the foundations for the project. This past weekend was a long coding marathon to get a small technological proof of concept running. Our main goal of taking the core technical features of our program and bringing them to life was achieved - we have a working Android app that can record up to 20 seconds of sound and additionally acquire a GPS lock!
In order to find out what is the difficulty level of recording each sound, we went to check it with the help of 10 anonymous students. We gave them a list of sounds and ask them to sort it from very easy to super hard.
Our main problem in the last project was that the user didn't have any motivation to record the sounds. Here we addressing that issue by developing a game app which defines the recording activity as a way to progress in the game. According to Caillois (1961), a game is an activity that is voluntary and enjoyable, separate from the real world, uncertain, unproductive in that the activity does not produce any goods of external value, and governed by rules. This game, enhances the intrinsic motivation of the user to record the sounds and therefore to contribute sounds into our database. Intrinsic motivation refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable (Deci & Ryan, 2000). In our game, the recording tasks will be presented as challenges in a range of difficulty levels, so the user will be able to choose the task according to his own abilities; from very easy to very difficult. Having challenges in the game is an important matter when developing a game (Malone & Lepper, 1987).
Each and every time we would discuss about the concept and main features of Soundscape, we got stuck with the same question, over and over again: Why would anyone use it?
After consulting with different people, we wanted to examine a new way to motivate users to record sounds around them. We decided that the best way to motivate someone to do something is by challenging him- so we went for a game app that challenges people to record sounds.
When starting our game design we found it best to rely on games that we already know they work- and so we decided to create a sound version of the OMG Pop mega hit Draw Something. The rules will be pretty simple- you challenge your friend to a dual of finding and recording original urban sounds. Here are a few initial mockups of the game: