Inspiration for Campanile Village

Campanile Village builds on the geometry of the Kessler Campanile. The seats are land that can be plowed on a mountain side. The stairs are a border between the two nations. Originally, the pool with the waterfall was going to be for the Sea people, but that idea was scratched. In further expansions, the pool could be a place where people can fish for seafood or trade with a distant nation.

The application is a spin-off from several existing games and applications listed below.

1. Pocket God iPhone application contributed the villagers and interaction people may have wanted: example vid

2. Black and White game contributed the idea of making the user god-like in the Campanile Village and having the villagers give praise/worship to the user: example vid

3. Other ideas taken into the brainstorming process: Virtual Villagers, Harvest Moon, and Farmville.

Energy and You

“Hey Matt, I know that this little lightning bolt here is supposed to be energy of some kind, but I’m confused!”

Not anymore.

Here’s how it works: That lightning bolt in your upper right corner is essentially a meter, like the battery meter of your phone or laptop. It tells you how much God energy you have left. As you use God energy, the circle around the bolt changes color from green to yellow to orange and finally to red, which means you have no energy.

“But how do I spend this God energy, and on what?”

You’ll be using God energy any time you place an object from the library bar, on the top left of your screen, into the environment. You can move people around inside the environment, and give them orders, but that doesn’t take God energy.

“Alright, so I used all of my God energy and it was fun for ten seconds, but now it’s gone. How do I get more?”

Good news! God energy, unlike fossil fuel, is a renewable resource. If you wait around for a while it’ll slowly recharge on its own, but positive results from your efforts on behalf of your villagers will also recharge you with praise! Neat, huh?

Interview

My interview regarding our progress was conducted with a fellow student who uses the campanile and was familiar with the concepts of use case and scenario though his CS major.

As he reviewed the use case and scenario, he asked several questions that may help direct our refinement of the experience. He was confused by the term ‘zone alert’ which was simply the indicator which displays which zone you are currently in. Also, though he saw that placing new things in the environment took energy, he was unsure as to whether or not picking up characters or directing them also took energy, I explained that it did not. He stated that he was very much looking forward to picking people up and throwing them arbitrarily. This isn’t something I would think to do, but it should be possible if you like that sort of thing.

There seems to be a bit of confusion between us as to how energy works, we need to be sure to standardize all of our descriptions of it.

My Interview

Non-3710 Interview

• Didn’t like the idea of downloading things to phone
• Didn’t quite understand how the different groups interacted with each other since there are boundaries between them
• Wanted to be able to battle it out like a RTS with friends playing the other groups

Ideas and Reflections

1. With natural land boundaries like we have them I think as a player plays the game they can give different transportation items that allow the villagers to cross over these boundaries on their own, without the player having to drop them over them.
2. RTS style play could be a option for friends in the future development but right now it is a little to hard to implement.

Interviews

3710-classmate interview

• Thumbs up on the screen shots
• What is it that makes it specific to this space?
• Include more features
• How can you help your people other than that one cow thing?
• What else can you provide them with?
• Can you hurt the other villagers?
• Can I help my village battle your village in real-time?

Non-3710 interview

• time factor is annoying
• “like a facebook game, not really fun but addicting because you get to do stuff over and over again”

3710-classmate interview

• explain the mountain between the red and blue zone better
• explain the lightning bolt – what it represents
• maybe have a mode that controls a nation’s tendency to fight (easy vs hard mode)

Ideas and reflection:

• Make it more apparent how the user can help a village. Make the affordances of the game more clear.
• Include that the geometry of the campanile makes this application specific to the space. Point out the seats as mountains and the pool as a sea.
• For the little building, drag and drop them for villagers start building it. But in god mode, drag and drop will be an instant built hut.
• Perhaps get rid of the Sea People, as it may be annoying to point the phone sideways for Red and Blue Zone.

 

thumbs up on the screen shots
what is it that makes it specific to this space? the geometry of the campanile i guess – the seats as mountains and the pool as a sea
include more features
how can you help your people other than that one cow thing?
what else can you provide them with?
can you hurt the other villagers?
can i help my village battleyour village in realtime?

 

little buildings – drag and drop, then villagers start building it
god mode: drag and drop to instant built hut

time factor = annoying
“like a facebook game, not really fun but addicting because you get to do stuff over and over again”

Basic UI Layout

I’ve been working on a basic idea of our user interface and the results are in. The interaction is pretty simple, with your ‘cursor’ being your finger.The bar at the top will change color depending on which zone you are currently in or viewing, right now we’re sitting in the blue zone and looking around us so the bar is blue with the text “Blue Zone”. There are three icons, the folder icon is your library which opens on a single tap to show you the people and objets you can place in the environment, by dragging and dropping. Placing things in the world uses energy, which is the lighting bolt at the right side of the menu. The circle around the lighting bolt will go from green to red as you use energy, and slowly regenerates over time. Last, the info icon is the help menu which will have basic rules and controls. You will also be able to flip the phone into portrait mode and the menu will stay at the top of the screen, which will look something like this:

I am currently working on a video which will explain all of this, and will be part of our presentation.

Use Case

1. Enter campanile
   
2. See “village” sign
   
3. take out phone
4. download app
5. sit or stand in RFID zone
   
6. start up app

From start up menu

1. Start new game
2. point phone camera at a zone
   
3. Alert of Current Zone shown
4. User pulls out stylus
5. In game
   1. Press Help button
      
      1. Exit help
   2. Press Item Library button (This requires energy to be any level above red, check top right of your screen)
      
      1. User selects a person from library
         1. Drags person object around
         2. Drops person object
         3. Energy level decreases by one (green to yellow)
      2. User selects inanimate object (ie: hut, boat)
         1. Drags inanimate object around
         2. Drops inanimate object
         3. This interaction wasn’t from the library, so it didn’t use energy.
      3. User selects animal or crop from library
         1. Drags around
         2. Drops animal/crop
         3. Thunderbolt status drops to orange
   3. Select a on-screen person
      1. Drag/drop
   4. Select a on screen inanimate object
      1. Drag/drop
   5. Select a on screen food
      1. Drag/drop
   6. Close App
6. Leave Campanile

In text form, it would read something like this:

Entering the campanile you see the game sign, which prompts you to use your phone and download the app from the website listed.

Starting the app and taking a seat anywhere in the campanile should allow it to determine your location using RFIDs placed around the area.

Using this location and the internal compass, the current Zone is determined based on where the user is facing. This Zone is shown as a labeled and colored bar on the top of the screen which can be either red or blue.

With a stylus or finger the user can press 2 buttons located on the zone toolbar, the help button and the library button. Also on the toolbar is a God power indicator that changes color to depict how much energy is left.

Pressing the help button shows the menu screen, including the basic instructions and the exit.

Pressing the library button creates a drop down menu of all the items the user is allowed to place into the game.

During normal play the God power indicator can move between green and red relative to the amount of items you place in the world and how much the people praise you, Green is full and red is empty.

The user can move or place objects and people any where in the game space with his finger or stylus.

Scenario: Tim Hall and his Red village

Persona:
Tim Hall
3rd year CM GaTech student
likes casual games
likes to eat lunch at Campanile
likes pop music
likes to text message friends
recently got an iPhone
familiar with AR technology
tech savvy

Scenario:
It’s lunchtime and Tim is at the Campanile; he sent a text to his friends but they couldn’t come. He sees a plaque that invites him to “help the little people by whipping out your phone.” Always interested in new things for his phone and wanting something to do while he eats, he is intrigued and goes to the link to download the application to his phone.

Tim opens up the application. Bullet points explain that the Red and Blue nations compete for resources, despite the mountain between them. The Sea people are a neutral nation separated from the Red and Blue by an open space of grassland. He quickly skips through the rest of the intro, eager to start playing.

Sitting in the red zone, triggered by RFID markers and the orientation confirmed by his phone’s internal compass, Tim sees his Red nation. Little red people walk around on the Campanile steps, minding their own business; some are planting crops while others are studying or building huts. Tim takes a bite out his pizza and wipes his fingers on a napkin. Taking out his stylus pen, he selects a person and waves the guy around, seeing what he can do with the person. Pressing on the screen again, the villager drops down the ground and shakes his fist at Tim, then walks back to his hut. Happy to evoke a reaction from the villager, Tim plays a bit more with other villagers, seeing that different things he can do to them to evoke different reactions – Tim likes it when he makes two villagers mad and they fight with each other.

Tim continues to observe the Red villagers as he eats his lunch. Looking at the top of the screen, he notices the library. Clicking on it, he sees the options to help one of the two nations. Triumphantly, he chooses to help his Red nation by giving them a cow and saw that all was good in the world. He notices that the thunderbolt has turned yellow, but within moments is back to green as the Reds worship him for his gift.

Quitting the application, which saves in real-time, Tim gathers his trash and leaves the Campanile, headed off to class, excited to come back to the Campanile tomorrow to play again.

Research Findings

Summary of Research Findings

Research Method 1: Behavioral Mapping revealed hotspots of the space, as well as the most trafficked paths. Based on our findings, we determined that:

• The user will most likely want to sit down to use the application
• The stairs going through the seats in the Campanile will be used to separate the virtual regions (Red and Blue)
• We will add a sign at the top and bottom of the stairs to attract attention and to recruit new users

Research Method 2: Activity Analysis helped us break down the application into tangible aspects. We determined that:

• RFID antennas would be strategically placed in the space to determine whether the user was in a red or blue zone.
• The combined usage of the phone’s internal compass to determine which zone the user will edit

Research Method 3: Paper Prototype allowed us to observe participants interact with our UI. Based on our observations, we determined that:

• Gravity would be in effect (ie: a villager on a boat will not sink)
• We only need to keep user actions to a minimum
• The application AI will have random encounters between different groups

Notes on the Paper Prototype

As is visible in our gallery pictures and in Liz’s post, the paper prototype consisted of 5 sheets of paper. One sheet detailed general rules of our simulation, three were pictures of specific zones of interaction (red area, blue area, sea people area) and the last was a visual  overview of the campanile. What happened with the first two trials was unexpected, although in hindsight perhaps it was the predictable outcome. Users placed resources and people evenly within their zones, with red and blue people receiving roughly equal shares of the village pieces and the boat and fisherman going to the sea zone. Yes, it is true that people often placed things in the sea zone without regard for solid surfaces (i.e. putting things in the water,) but we did say these were sea people after all so maybe they can handle it, like Aquaman. Trial three was my biggest surprise, with our participant carefully spreading the red and blue people evenly throughout each zone in positions that suggested cooperation and coexistence, rather than our imagined team-based antagonism. It could be that our characters are just so darned cute that he couldn’t imagine them fighting.

If any ideas came out of this, I would say perhaps allowing for cooperative play with the opposite team, and perhaps evenly distributing resources automatically since our users did this anyways. The unexpected results may be because our participants didn’t sufficiently identify themselves with one of the factions, so if we perhaps more explicitly assigned/gave them a side to control and took control of the other factions away, the user might be more motivated to see a particular side succeed. The issue is whether we even want this anymore.