Week 286

We made some good progress on sev­er­al projects this week. The big one is Home Rule. Alper and I kicked it off with some plan­ning for the next two weeks. Then we imme­di­ate­ly start­ed crack­ing on things. Alper got a pro­to­typ­ing set­up in Uni­ty up and run­ning, includ­ing iBea­cons inte­gra­tion, and pro­ceed­ed to do some “mate­r­i­al explo­ration”. Mean­while I did some pre­lim­i­nary game design, out­lin­ing mechan­ics and imag­in­ing a play­er’s expe­ri­ence when going through a full game loop.

On the Bycatch front, we had to fix a lit­tle prob­lem affect­ing some cus­tomers when they tried to make a pur­chase. All should be func­tion­ing prop­er­ly again, so why not go an grab your­self a copy?

Alper wrapped up his review of an inter­view by Dude about his mot­ley career, and had some rather dash­ing por­trait pho­tos tak­en for pub­li­ca­tion along­side it.

Alper also pre­sent­ed on Bycatch and our approach to play­ful design at IXDS.

I pre­pared and ran a work­shop on play­ful design for a group of stu­dents fol­low­ing a minor in exhi­bi­tion direc­tion at Rein­wardt Acad­e­my. We redesigned Peg­gy Guggen­heim’s famous Art of This Cen­tu­ry gallery to be more play­ful than it already was, and in the process got some expe­ri­ence with phys­i­cal pro­to­typ­ing and playtest­ing. All in less than 2,5 hours.

On the project KUMA front, we received and processed feed­back from KLM on the first round of mock­ups, and I spent some time with Tim going over all of it and mak­ing a plan for the required adjust­ments in the sec­ond round, which we’ll deliv­er in rough sto­ry­boards first.

I spent some time research­ing the 4G offer­ings of the major mobile oper­a­tors in NL for Cam­parc Mark II. I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to find that Voda­fone offers month­ly con­tracts for data sims. In the­o­ry this should suit our needs per­fect­ly so the next step is to test one in the field. If all goes well our Cam­parc balls will be able to roam the city absolute­ly free, which would be glorious.

And on Fri­day, I head­ed over to Aldo’s lab­o­ra­to­ry to review the first Cam­parc Mark II devel­op­ment sprint. Quite a few struc­tur­al improve­ments had been made despite delayed deliv­ery of var­i­ous parts. Get­ting a live demo of all the nice lit­tle details and mak­ing plans for the next sprint was a love­ly way to end a pro­duc­tive week.