Sunday, April 27, 2014

Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure - First Meeting

Our group is...interesting. Our group leader did not remember when we had a meeting. One of our members has been doing all of the engine work. I don't really know what the last member of group is supposed to be doing. During the meeting itself, we spent a large amount of it waiting on the group leader to get there. After he finally did get there, I wasn't really in the loop about what was going on in the engine work, so I sort of had to sit next to the leader and our engineer and watch them try and figure out what was wrong with our install package.

I had to leave a little early due to previous engagements, so I don't know what happened after I left. That said, I have been assigned to working on getting the remainder of our design documents finished as well as reaching out to some artists that I know so that we can get at least some assets into the game. I have managed to get two of them interested and I'll try to at least get a third to see if they will help as well.

For now, I'm still hopeful that we can get things together for the end of the semester, but I do believe it will be more difficult that we had originally planned for. Into the future we go.

Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure - Beginning Trials

My HFOSS class has grouped people up to make educational games. My group has decided to make its own game. The result of our planning has come up with Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure. The idea is that you are a snake learning math in a garden. Like other Snake games, as you play, the snake gets bigger. In this case, Adder goes through various gates to increase his size by the number that is on the gate. Adder must grow until he is able to go through the door to the next puzzle. What makes it different is that Adder can also go through gates that will subtract from his size to allow for more interesting puzzles.

So far it seems like my role in the group is to be the main designer, which both makes me in charge of keeping our design documents up to date. So far I have already made documents for our puzzle design, mechanics design, and menu design. The documents themselves are not completely full since we are still going through the planning stages for most of the game. I'm quite interested in what will become of the game.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Project Team Proposal

So It is time for us to group up for our first real open source project, or at least first for some of us. I'm pairing up with danShumway, though we hope to have a few people join us. Regardless, here is our proposal:

Project 1 Proposal

Team Members:

danShumway (Daniel Shumway)
Pharas (Brian Escriche)

Project Choice:

We have decided that we are going to try and make our own game, Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure.

Description:

Python Math is going to be a small puzzle game for the XO designed to teach early math concepts like addition, subtraction, and order of operations. Players will be trying to get the length of Adder to a certain value to clear each stage which is accomplished by traversing through addition and subtraction gates to hit the right number.

Roles:

At current with the team we have -
danShumway - Documentation, Core Engine work
Pharas - Design, Engine Work

Source Repository:

We are hosting our repository on Github at this address

Upstream Mentors:

As neither myself nor Danny are the most proficient python hackers, we will be asking for help from deCause and Mansam.

Communication:

We hope to keep the majority of our communication going through both email and in person meetings that we should be holding fairly regularly in addition to whatever time is spent in class working together.

Easy Parts:

We are hoping that the engine itself will be fairly easy to create as the idea behind the game is tile based.

Foreseeable challenges:

Due to the main design goals for the project, we are looking to have people create their own puzzles for contribution. Danny also feels that keeping everything reasonably well documented will be a little challenging, but I don't really see it. Time will tell.

Overcoming obstacles:

Hopefully we can reach out to people in the foss-box to help with puzzles and ideas for us to work with. Otherwise, I feel like we have a nice project which should opefully be easy to keep within scope.