Finally, the report of our work is submitted and there are only adjustments left to do on the game. The last two weeks have been entirely spent on completing the report and hopefully today the game will be available for download on the project homepage http://web.student.chalmers.se/groups/tda501-11-group4/.
Today we also visited the new building at Lindholmen campus – Kuggen. It looked nice and interesting, hopefully we’ll have the privilege to spend some time there next semester.
As a wrap-up, thanks to all the readers of this blog. I hope it has been fun reading, and that it will be fun playing the game!
// Joakim(, Magnus, Erik, Viktor), group 4
John Stoddard from Ideo will talk at HDK this Friday lunch, 12 to 1 pm in their auditorium (first right and then left entering the building). Note that the last day to sign up for the event is tomorrow. Link.
Next Monday between 6 and 8 pm the symposium “Industriousness in a Post-Industrial Age: Practices of Production after Industrialism” will be held at HDK, with Reginee Debatty from wmmna among others. Link.
Both Debatty and Ideo have had great influence in the field of interaction design. The events are in English.
Monday May 30 after lunch we’ve added a final session in the course. We are curious about what you think about the course, literature, workshops, exhibition, and also your first whole year if you’d like. Torg 3 at 1.15 pm.
During this session we also have a number of proposals for projects, summer jobs and exjobs. Peter Ljungstrand will introduce possible summer jobs in the TA2 research project,
including both participatory workshops and implementation of ideas.
Semcon HMI will introduce themselves and a master thesis work that may start soon. This project may also be arranged as a project course running this autumn.
Finally Olof also will present some new thesis proposals.
Rough preliminary schedule,
13.15 Peter Ljungstrand, TA2 summer jobs
13.30 Course debriefing
14.15 Semcon HMI, information and project work
14.45 Olof Torgersson introduces further thesis proposals
So, last week was exhibition week! We got to show off our work for the past three months to a very exciting crowd, I would say. 
At least we had quite many people trying out building their own robot and taking it through the two levels we managed to get done by Tuesday. An approximate number of 300 robots were created through the whole week at Nordstan, and during the final weekend 193 play sessions were completed.
By the time of Monday we were not entirely finished with our area setup or the actual game, but some last-minute fixes on-the-spot made it working finally. As for the physical setup, unfortunately we had to skip one of the touch screens because it did not work properly. However, this gave us more table space and an opportunity to not cover the laptop computer connected to the lone touch screen under the cloth. Instead we placed our projector directly on the table between the screen and the laptop, to avoid suspending it in the ceiling or having it placed on top of the laptop. We also had to replace one of the other laptops intended to run the game, with a desktop PC to make the game run smoothly.
Regarding the game, we had it working on Tuesday being able to build robots and save them by connecting and store the data of each robot as an XML file on the desktop computer running the game. The game could also be played using the robots but the highscore did not quite work since the timer did not reset when a level was finished. Though this was fixed by the time of the weekend and finally the players could test their skills for real.
After this eventful week it can be summarized as a fun and interesting experience, especially it was fun to see that our work were appreciated by many people and that it may have potential to become really great if further developed. Now the work on the report begins, and we will also try to adapt the game to work with a regular mouse and keyboard without problem so that it can be published for download on our website. So keep your eyes open!
// Joakim, group 4
It’s packed down. Thanks for your work!
