Course Reflection

Meeting Expectations

The project met the majority of my expectations of the course that I wrote in the first week’s blog. The group project includes both the front-end and back-end work, as well as the visual design and interaction design. Through the semester, we ran a rough process like a real-world project from the concept generating stage, design proposal stage to the final product. And we actually made a playable game rather than a hi-fi prototype, which made me feel so exciting.

Learning across the course

Specific skills of design and programming were taught in this course. For instance, Photoshop, API Handling, JSON parsing, and so on. Also, we could reinforce the prototyping and basic web development skills through the project.

Personally speaking, I was weak at using Photoshop before the course. The project pushed me to use it and I really learnt a lot through the project with the help of my teammates. Additionally, as the project used AngularJS to dynamically change the web content, I learnt a bit about the working logic of it. As for the basic web skills such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, they are practiced again in this portfolio assignment. I also had the chance to practice using Bootstrap as it is used to layout our game website.

Recommendations

The lectures are mostly about theory, which had little practical use for the project. Also, the practical tutorial didn’t teach many useful technical skills. Hence, we had to learn the skills all by ourselves at the most time.

In addition, we need more help with the project. As our group encountered the environment configuration problem when installing Python development environment and nobody (include the school’s help center) could stress the problem, we had to change the back-end approach completely, which was quite time-consuming because we waited so long for their reply.

Lastly, I have to say that Trove is a really bad portable with disordered data. Many data could not be accessed directly when browsing the page because they are stored on the external databases, which made it even harder to retrieve by technical means. Besides, many images on Trove were of low quality and cannot be used in the game. We thus always had to find the higher quality versions of those images from other places instead.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a good course that taught and trained our designing, programming, and communicating skills. I'm happy with the final outcome although it is not that perfect at the current stage. I'm very grateful for all the team members who've helped me a lot on the project. Also thanks to the tutors and lecturer for all the guide and help during the course. It is their critique and guide that made the Truth Detective a better game.

WK13 - Trade show

We did the trade show last on week 13's contact session. Basically, it was a showcase of our final project. First, we did a two minutes pitch to illustrate the general concept, intentions and target audience to the tutors. Then we let them actually play the game, giving instructions and answering their questions while they playing the game. Also, classmates from other groups came by to play the game and gave feedbacks.

The majority of the players thought Truth Detective was a good game. The story was fun and the idea was appealing to them. Moreover, most players could figure out the questions and get through all 3 chapters, which was a relief for us because we all concerned for the game difficulty and afraid it might be too complex for the players.

Besides, the tutors thought the dialogue in each chapter was a bit long and suggested us to reduce it. Stephen also gave us a great advice for future design. He thought we could redesign the clues to make them nested instead of the current explicit and individual ones. For instance, only after a certain clue is found could the other clue be found. This would make the detective process more like a real criminal case which will increase the playability of the game.

Other groups' projects are also fantastic, everyone did a great job. I particularly love the 'FindMals' game, especially its neat interface and cute animal icons.