Game Design Document

After much discussion today, we came up with a story for our game. The name is not yet decided. I have included a name just for convenience. I prepared a one-page game design document that sums up all the work that we would need to do in the coming weeks. 

Game Design Document

In the coming weeks several features maybe modified, but this is a good place to start with. Finer aspects of the implementation should be chalked out as and when we progress with the project.

Incentives to Participation

Found this in an article a while ago. Figured it might be useful in designing our game.

Incentives to participation

In different human-based computation projects people are motivated by:

• Receiving a fair share of the result
• Direct monetary compensation
• Desire to diversify their activity
• Aesthetic satisfaction
• Curiosity, desire to test if it works
• Volunteerism, desire to support a cause of the project
• Reciprocity, exchange, mutual help
• Desire to be entertained with the competitive spirit of a game
• Desire to communicate and share knowledge
• Desire to share a user innovation to see if someone else can improve on it
• Desire to game the system and influence the final result

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation

Questions to Address after the initial prototype

Here are some of the questions we need to address once we are done with our initial prototype:

1. Will our game be re playable ?

2. What will be the social aspect of the game ? ( sharing? )

3. Will there be an achievement system ?

4. What will make a person play the game ?

5. What makes the game Addictive ?

6. What is innovative about this game? 

7. Is it a competitive game? collaborative?

8. is it about collection or is it about images ?

The Two Game Ideas

The team went through quarter presentations successfully. Looks like all the faculty have an idea of what we are upto. Many even felt that we have a solid process in place. For this week, we discussed about how we wanted to proceed further.
1. There should be a facebook oriented outlook, which focuses on facebook and database specific challenges.
2. There should be game idea discussions and prototyping.


For now, we have decided to collect the Name and Location of the objects in the image. 


Accordingly, we have come up with the following two ideas about our game.


1. Lazer Tag - Shoot Lazer at the image where-ever you want. the objective would be to cut out the object. once the object is cut out, it would gain life of its own ( shown through animation and sound effects ) and would fly around the screen. Perhaps it could fly into your 'box' where you could use it for something later. this method tags the objects,but there is no method for verification. The idea is to extend lazer into other cutting tools like chainsaw, scissors, etc and make it addictive.


2. Flip tiles - To verify what has been cut from (1), we decided to have the flipping tiles game. the player is shown an image and it is covered with tiles. The player has to flip the right tiles to uncover the object. Minimum number of tiles flipped would merit more points. It is assumed that the chances for both the players to tag as well as uncover the wrong object is minimal. It is also assumed that it would be a good idea to introduce a character into the game. The character itself can be a 5 lined comic figure which happens to be your cursor. This would make the player to be emotionally attached to the game. 


So the team is currently prototyping the games (1) and (2) and would like to infer the results from play. The team is also concurrently working on setting up a database to host our game on facebook. A game that was developed for Game Jam ( Pepe ) is being uploaded onto facebook, so that the team will know about the process.

Meeting with the Client

-The team is in the process of aggregating the information collected so far into a report that summarizes what we have done.

-Also, we are preparing for a presentation that gives an overview of what can be expected for the rest of the semester.

Prototyped a rough interaction that possibly gives cues to what can be expected: Fun, Addictive, Simple, Quick and Specific

-This is a simple game where the player tries to reveal object hidden behind the tiles.

-By making the tiles arbitrarily small or by adding a game mechanic to it, we can make it a game which in turn adds interest to what is being pursued.

-As mentioned before, there can be the 'taggers' and 'finders' concept in this.

Notes from Meeting:

-Collect attributes of objects in image like location, name, number of objects, etc

-Additional tags to objects in the form of adjectives gives more detail about the objects.

-There can be a relationship between the objects or the attributes of these objects.

-Can model the games based on Wario ware which has a collection of interesting and addictive minigames.

1. the key would be to break up the gameplay in different forms and do lots of activities in a short time
2. helps to make the task very specific to what we want

-The pictures could be fed in from the database based on some 'criteria' that the people would be interested at that moment.. perhaps images from NEWS thats happening at the time ?

-Score on the Facebook profile and publish a story to get more people to play the game.

-the schedule will be comprised of play-testing and development simultaneously.

*-there is a need to design a good metadata format for storing the details of the objects.

More ideas and questions about Image Processing

Meeting Notes

---------------------

What about gigapan pictures?

- Would divide these images into smaller images, but not drop below a certain resolution (say, 800 x 600 for example)
- Game could be that each person tags sections of a large image.  Once they tag an image, they "collect" that image.  The collected images fill in the original large picture.  The person's end goal could be to guess what the large image is (or tag the large image with a general term like "landscape" or a specific name like "San Francisco")
- Game could have two modes and at the beginning the players choose to be either a Tagger or a Finder.  The Taggers draw squares around the objects they tag in the image.  The Finders try to find the object that has been tagged (all tagged squares are flipped over or hidden and the Finder must click on the square they think is the appropriate object to show what was underneath).

When tagging close-up images of people, do we want players to tag facial features like noses, eyes, and ears?

- If they draw a square around it, we can pull out the nose and show it in a search engine search
- We can extract out the cropped parts and show them to someone else for verification

-Use the fade-away memory game as confirmation to tags created in another game.

-Categorization of the image into - name, place, animal, thing

-How accurate do we want the tags to be?  If we use these tags in a search engine, we will be perpetuating the circulation of misinformation.

-Another mini-game could be to show players an image and the players must determine if a human is in the image or not.

-Could try converting colored images into black and white images, players then tag the objects with their appropriate colors (for example, a black and white image of the Flintstones -> players tag Fred's shirt as orange).

-a thought that crossed: the size of the objects in the real world has an impact on how the people perceive it in an image. splitting an image should be based on this.

Advisor meeting notes - Image processing game ideas

Here are some of the ideas from John and Shirley, along with some inputs from our side

All the following ideas pertain to the Image recognition game:-

1. how about recognizing the objects based on a given category?

2. how about associating objects together in some way?

3. how about a game of memory?

        -show the picture, give some time for the people to see the image

        -cover the image now

        -ask the player to point to the place he thought that the object would be

4. how about using the silhouettes of the objects in the images in some way

5. how about the 6 difference game? two images with slight difference between them?

6. how about collaborating and creating new pictures from the objects found ?

7. how about coming up with a game based on the colour of objects? biggest object coloured red? find the objects based on their colour..

8. how about a Mystery game? sherlock holmes, clue based ? finding objects in the image?

9. how about associating the object with a piece of music? or a musical clue to guess the object?

some more tips and pitfalls:-

----------------------------------------

*-since game is seconday and the objective of problem solving is primary, is there anything other game that can be thought of. ofcourse, this can be an interesting and fun activity..

perhaps some place that people would not expect it to be

-make sure that there is confirmation/verification of the idea of the game

-we also figure out where in the image, the object would be placed

-know your audience

-think if everyone would tag the same way?

-can you use the cave? or the huge ball (whatever it is ) ?

-a game based on the advanced technology that lets computers determine where the people are seeing in the image.

-use filters to get down to what you want.