Hand in for Disk

Today is the hand in for the assets on a disk. After a LOT of arguments as to who created what and what was actually needed on disk (Sorry Matt) its been handed in! Everyone has reached the stage that they are fed up and finding the pressure stressful. I am personally beginning to worry that I will not have enough time to program the game to the standard I want it at and am currently trying to get them done on the day I receive them so as not to fall behind. Thankfully Gaelle is back next week as I’m finding balancing programming with fixing design issues a bit difficult. Overall I’m staring to feel like we are cutting it tight but I’m determined to get this completed to a high standard as I want to keep my GPA around the same level as it currently is. 

The Demo

The Demo with the lecturers went OK. I would have preferred it to go a bit better but I personally found so many questions at once very intimidating. I think I myself at least could have backed up the project more as I think some of the choices we have made are significant for example the pen was chosen as we felt it would improve children’s cognitive skills and it mirrors how they would normally write a word within the classroom. 

I think the main point we brought away with it was the need for user testing which will be carried out this Saturday but I am confident having experience in working with small children that a child as young as three could interact with this technology with the right guidance in place.

Other issues such as design have already been addressed. There was a question abut having the game played on a tablet but we felt with the time frame and restrictions with the pen this would have been too big a task.  

Overall I am happy with the grade we got as I expected it to be lower and I hope to improve on this coming up to the exhibition.

Update on Programming process

So as of today voice recognition more or less works!! It works by feeding information into processing from a microphone. This information is then passed from processing to an action-script package through a port and is then split into an array. The first object in the array is what is used in the flash file. There are still a few minor issues but these can hopefully be easily fixed. 

We also tested the tracing with the pen and it draws the letter much more efficiently than a mouse does. I was worried it would not trace the areas the mouse was rolling over as the pen is constantly clicked but it did. 

Design wise I have helped with a few things such as the buttons for the coloring levels the frame for the coloring image the matching cards and the speech bubbles in the speech levels. I am also filling in for design until Gaelle gets back from France but I think she has almost everything sorted.

Overall I am confident I can get Alphaland fully functioning on time providing animation is completed soon.