Still Moving Forward

Jeremy and I and Eric had a good meeting about the art for the game.  Here's a quick mock-up that Eric did:

  This is the outside of the "game."  Above, you see a progress bar indicating how much of your gmail archive you have explored.  We decided that people need weapons because...why not?  So, for every 20 percent you complete, you will get a new weapon you can use to hack other "characters" to pieces.  We needed to do this to add more game play mechanics and keep people, hopefully, interested.  We shall see what happens...

Also, Nick is working hard on the comic program, and he is hoping to continue his work into the fall, provided there is funding :)

Good Good!

Both projects are moving along very well. This Friday after the RCOS meeting, Nick and I are going to meet with our artist, Eric Newsom. Eric is my good friend and fellow PhD student in the Communication and Rhetoric program here at RPI. We need to discuss how the comic strip art will look. Since we are using other people's gmail, there is no way to account for every possible expression, thus the figures will have to look ambiguous. I am confident Eric will do a great job!

Jeremy has finished gathering, parsing and merging emails and chats and has the foundation setup for the game. Also, next week Jeremy and Eric and I will meet to talk about art for the Game program. Each of these projects contains their own design, programming and artistic obstacles, which makes it quite a challenge!

Interface Mockup

We have a mockup for Gcomic.  It will probably change, but this is what Nick has done so far.  I think it looks great.  Please note that the image inside of the interface will most likely not be the image we use.  I am meeting with my artist this week to talk it over.

Also, Jeremy is plugging away at the game prototype.  Things are looking good!

More Progress

Both projects are on track.

Jeremy is working super hard.  There have been many "little" issues for the video game program, and he has done an amazing job working through them.

Nick is also doing a great job.  His interface looks awesome, and so far he has not run into any parsing issues.

looking good!

Making Progress

Nick and Jeremy are making great progress.
We are definitely right on track.

Jeremy has run into a few parsing issues, but they are not his fault (stupid gmail!), and we are still moving forward with the game prototype.

Nick has a wonderful interface design for the comic strip.  It looks great. 

So far, so good!

looking good

The team has been very hard at work parsing Gmail. The major problem is that Google doesn't seem to want anybody to have access to their own Gtalk Chat archives, which is unfortunate and very troublesome.

Still, Jeremy and Nick are doing their best. It's possible that both projects may have to use whatever chats we can get with the caveat that many chats are simply not accessible.

We are hoping that parsing the Gmail will be easier since Google allows for IMAP. (Even when you use IMAP, it will NOT download your chats!)

We are making progress!

Summer 2009 Schedule

Summer 2009 Schedule for Gcomic and Ggame
5/4 Week 1: Create program requirements
5/11 Week 2: Begin parsing Gmail (email/IM)
5/18 Week 3: Finish parsing (Hopefully)
5/25 Week 4: Ggame prototype complete
6/1 Week 5: begin Gcomic prototype
6/8 Week 6: Work with artist on Gcomic panels
6/15 Week 7: keep tweaking Gcomic art
6/22 Week 8: Ggame testing and tweaking
6/29 Week 9: Ggame debug and test
7/6 Week 10: See if we can connect Game/comic to other services, i.e., Yahoo! (maybe)
7/13 Week 11: debug
7/20 Week 12: test with users
7/27 Week 13: get user results back
8/3 Week 14: tweak code and advertise to get others to build upon our source.