Presentation

Here is a link to the slideshow presentation that we gave earlier today. It's quite a shame that blogger doesn't have any capabilities to host documents.

Oh well.

Presentation

Enjoy

Mission Complete

We have finally finished our game. Game play has been tested for bugs and all known bugs have been fixed. We have smoothed out the GUI and everything flows very well. The game is already up on Google Code and is available for download. There is also a youtube video which demonstrates game play. Just search for 'Geography Game Play'.

Edit: Direct link to video http://youtube.com/watch?v=PTPkOi1Z_Y4

Current Status

We've realized that we aren't going to be able to make today's deadline as initially hoped.

We're nearly done, but there are major concerns about the quality of the storyline. Obviously, since this is an educational application, that is our main objective: teach children. That being said, we don't want to rush through these little learning segments. They are very slow going, because we have to incorporate facts in a colloquial-like tone.

So, our new goal, is to be completely done with the project by the absolute latest, next Friday. We feel like this is more than enough time to sit down and get quality storyline, and to fix any bugs that may present themselves in the final testing of the application.

After the game is completed, we hope to dive into Android. We think the best way to approach it is to create a basic Android app, much like the graphing program we did for the XO at the beginning of the summer. Then, if willing, we could continue the Android project into the Fall and create a rich, useful application.

Update

So, what have we gotten done. Our application works almost flawlessly with the XO. The toolbar is there, and everything works nicely except our music. We have a couple of different songs that play depending on the screen that is selected. However, while run in Sugar, mind you not just on the XO - only on the XO with sugar (gtk on the XO still works fine), the program only plays the first song over and over again.

Personally, I've been working on making the quick synopses of each country we're covering. I've done about 2/3's of them, so that's progress.

We have a general idea for how the traveling to a country will work out.



For example, this is the first photo for the US. There will be a text window below this picture to handle information about the current location and the story line. There will then be a left and right picture with two different landmarks from the US. We're still toying with ideas of when to let the user leave and travel to a different country. We feel like it would probably be best to make sure the user travels to each of the 3 pages per country before his/her lost bird is shown so that they, hopefully, absorb and learn more about the country instead of blindly looking for the bird.

Ben has found some music that we liked, however this said music requires a license from a company. We've been in contact with them, and they are unwilling to give us free use of their music, so we're still toying with ideas of where/how to come up with new songs.

And that's about it.

Game Content + GUI

This is benCho. The project has been going well so far. We have a stable design for our interface for the game and have been working on filling out content. Currently, our main goals are to populate the game with informational content from Wikipedia. We would also like to finalize the GUI so that everything looks and performs smoothly.

The Week

Fairly uneventful week. We've been making changes as we go, fixing up little things. The big one I started to work on near the end was porting it to sugar(again). The toolbar will now show up in the app; however, the secondary windows don't want to load.

I'm hoping it's just a quick sort of fix. Something to do with the loading and unloading of everything, but I'm not so sure. I hope to look at it a little more tonight yet before I go on vacation next week.