Validation….complete.
After some hard work and assistance from Rob and Kaz, the iteration one website is operational on FireFox AND IE……….
Everything on the website is “Valid” not “Tentatively” valid, so its firing on all cylinders.
Preparing to put the main content onto the website now.
Redevelopment
I’ve redone the Iteration 1 website. It now has a lot more html and css. Still needs some fine tuning. I’ll begin to add its main content soon.
Begin the interrogation!
Yesterday….(Its a Saturday atm) did the presentations, so now its time to hit people with questions. I’ve started a little but they havn’t been face to face interviews….. MSN. I’m surprised how much insight you can get by asking people and with the right questions and order of questions, issues and elements of the game take rise where you did not realise or not take proper notice of it. So far, I’ve asked 3 people, 2 male, 1 female, and they’ve all had different responses, with different ideas about the bad and good about gestural gaming and about flying games, which is really good.
Still alot of time till dead line, so I’ll get some good intel hopefully.
Ponderings of the past
I’ve been thinking of the technical details of this flying game. Effective controls is what will drive the system. The problem is pitch. Currently i’ve set the acceleration to be when the iphone is tilted back, and brake when the iphone is tilted forward. I’ve done this so because when the iphone is tilted forward, view will be temporarily blocked, so since players will most of the time, be accelerating, its best that players will be able to view the game, so its set to tilt back.
So if I was to set the pitch control of ‘going up’, to the control of ’tilt back’ then the player would be constantly accelerating and going into a higher altitude. This is vice versa for ‘going down’ and ’tilt forward’. But lets says, a player was at a high altitude, and needs to reach a lower altitude quickly. This means when the player ’tilts forward, it must accelerate. However, ‘accelerate’ has been set with ‘going up’. This is really difficult to explain in words, so I will demonstrate if you(the reader) wishes a demonstration.
So i’ve been looking in the past games of flight, looking specifically at the portable gaming scene of PSP, DS, iPod and mobile phones. The most basic is a d-pad like direction control and 2 buttons; one for acceleration and one for braking. What I want is to possibly losing the 2 buttons….Also, a thing that I found with most flying games is the expanse of space is possible too big, or seems big. If you were playing on a computer, that space is no problem, but your on a small device with a screen resolution of 320px x 480px.
I put forward a question. Is a flying game still be a flying game if there is no control of pitch…? If there was no pitch, which means the virtual environment becomes smaller, can this make mobile games more exciting since players are playing in a much more confined space to other players?
Website reconstruction
After an exhaustive day of research trying to get the grip of HTML and CSS, I managed to pull something out with some Photoshop work. I developed a splash page which will link to a Personal webpage, a link to the Blog and a link to Iteration 1. As the assignment progresses, I will build links to Iteration 2 and 3.
I’ve also developed the layout for Iteration 1. Still need to add text and develop the other webpages to the website. I’ve use the <map> tag on the splash page and used it again on the iteration1 page, but I feel there could be a problem as to how to enter text on top of an image….. If nothing works, I’ll just change the html.
What is the plan?
While sitting on the train, I went into deep thought on what I should do. The last few posts show what I’ve been thinking of. Thirty minutes of constant thought, I got fixated on the idea for the game so I’ve decided to go with the idea of a game, specifically a game of fighter aircrafts that will play three dimensionally in real life. I’ve decided on this because:
1. my interest has always been about games. I’ve played a lot of games and I know what I like in game.
2. Dasher idea I was left stumped on how to proceed. That’s all I can say….
3. the Dasher principled game would be boring after only minutes of play. (That’s just my opinion. I didn’t think of a specific kind of game for it so I wouldn’t know how well it could potentially perform, but this is just how my expectations for a Dasher principled game would be.)
After making the decision, I now considered the critical questions placed onto us by Rob.
1. The Idea?
Answer: a game which takes advantage of the iPhones capabilities making it ‘exclusive’ to the iphone and primarily using the accelerometers as a controller device.
2. The target audience?
Answer: twenty to thirty year old people, male or female. These is the younger generations. Being realistic, the iPhone is quite expensive, so I doubt the game could be played by someone for example aged fifteen. Wanting the product to sell, we must target those who can get an iPhone in the first place otherwise, its pointless selling something to someone who can’t get it in the first place!
3. How will I test it?
Answer: (still thinking about it)
Even more thought on the game….
I started to think, how can players interact with each other, able to make new friends…
Then I thought of Counter-strike : source (CS:S). It has a friends systems where other players can add other players. Then I also realised the CS has a microphone chat system which can also be done with the iPhone. Players can then talk to other players on their same teams, for maybe making the next strategy, or just simply chat. So it could be something like Teamspeak or Ventrilo.
Also would like to incorporate the option for players to have, if they have, music on the iPhone, to listen to their own music while playing. I got this idea from playing the Need for Speed games (nfs7 and +). They had a few nice songs but I wanted to listen to my own songs. The best way was to turn off the ingame music volume settings and have Winamp in the background. I think a lot of people would enjoy this option.
Game idea further thought.
I considered the game idea and it lead me to believe it had the ability to expand out A LOT more. So much so that it could be an “MMMO” or massively ‘mobile’ multiplayer online game. HAH..
Currently, I’m leaning towards developing a fighter plane type of game. I’ve noticed a few technical problems that could be encountered but I will leave those for another post. But this current inspiration comes from a talk in the morning with Julia and her ‘pimp’ game (lol). I was thinking that in her game, people could ‘get things’ after doing something specific like unlocking some new item. Then while on the train it hit me! What else have I played that allowed for unlocks…..While Recently having played Battlefield 2, it lead me to think maybe this originally single player game could include multiplayer options. Battlefield 2’s unlocks worked through EA servers. Server that could only be connected to online. The iPhone has WiFi and bluetooth……..omg.
This game could become like ‘Battlefield 2′ except the gameplay would be different and it would only have aircrafts. The game could have a global ranking systems, have unlocks as one levels up, people can construct clans and go to war with other clans developing a global clan ranking system…….
My brain is currently spinning as now what seems to be possible can occur, that MANY things can occur.
Game idea
I’ve remembered about an idea of a game that I had thought about a while back. The game could be a flight game or a driving using, the accelerometers to act as controlling the direction of the vehicle or plane. Tilting the the iPhone forward can act as the accelerator while tilting the iPhone back can act as braking system. This system could be set to be inverted since there could be problems when tilting forward since the user will have a bad viewing angle of the screen. Titlting left or right to induce the direction of left or right respectively. Then developing a few virtual buttons for selecting option settings.
