James' Portfolio
Cover Image

Smartsearch Game

Posted on 4 mins

Work Experience

Introduction:

Smartsearch approached the UTC with an idea that they wanted to make a game to showcase there company at events. We initial met with them in person and spoke with Dan that was our a lead contact at Smartsearch and the team. We also met with David who is one of the software developers at SmartSearch he assisted along the way with more of the team management to ensure that we were on the right tracks and that we made a viable product at the end that could be used to bring people to the SmartSearch stand and get them interetsed.

After the first meeting:

When we first met in person we decided that it would be best if we had weekly meetings to ensure contact with Dan and the team. This ment that we could share progress, showcasing the work that we had done. In the first week we were tasked with creating a mood board of ideas for games that we could create and games that we would like to make that fit the initial ideas that we were given.

We came up with:

We presented all the ideas to the smartsearch team and left them with our thoughts. In the end Smartsearch came to the conclusion that they liked the “Maze game with fog of war.”

First Development Steps:

We needed to find a platform that ment we could share code with each other without the requirement to install tonnes of software that could cause issues for others that don’t have powerful computers at home. The conclusion for this was to use GitHub it ment that we could share the code. We also needed a solution for the team management for this time we tried GitHub projects but I think the next time I work on a project I would rather use Trello which is similar but has more advanced features when working with others.

Development:

We continued the development for around 12 weeks, we had weekly meeting with Dan and David to share the progress and get reports on what we need to work on for next week. We aimed to have the game working before the launch day. On this instance we did not meet that requirement but we just had a few small things that needed to be changed there were mostly backend features. But we got those features added the morning of the launch. Making sure that we moved all the test machines to the correct build.

Launch Day:

On April 29th we launched the smartsearch project we met with:

We presented a small PowerPoint where each member of the team choose what part they wanted to speak about. They choose parts that they were most involved in, As my expertise where with GitHub and the hosting of the files and the website I spoke about why we used Github and the future plans for the game to make it more future proof.