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:

  • Maze game with fog of war
    • Pre-Built Maze: Allows the designer to create a maze they know is simple and easy to navigate. Change the items spawns around but users must find all the items then exit.
    • Allows for user to easily navigate with a controller
    • Random Maze: Maze is randomised each run of the game. Users must still find the items in the maze before being able to leave. Performing their “Smart Search”
    • Users must navigate a maze with little light in order to find items before making their escape
    • Map can be preset with randomised items, locations and dangers
    • Map can be random as well as the items (harder to randomise the map though)
  • Identify Game
    • This game is all about picking out the dangers in each “line up” of characters.
    • A downside is that this game would be much more suited to being played with the mouse as moving a cursor with a joystick could feel bad especially for high skill players.
    • Players have to identify the suspicious character from a description (which is generated by the items picked to make them up) but all the characters are close thst its not easy.
    • Scoring could be done in several ways: How fast you can find the odd one out, how many you can find withing a set time, probably more.
  • Leadboards and Main Menus
    • All the games lend themselves to Leader boards for either time or score
    • Can be stored locally on the machine and expanded to be in / on the website where it is hosted (though this would be more difficult)
    • Allows options for “daily” leader board and All time leaderboard to be created.
    • Easy to animate the menu and include a high score board as well

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:

  • Martin Cheek (MD of Smartsearch)
  • Andrew Booth (VP of Technology)
  • Vicky Hester (Head of Talent Management)
  • Dan Jackson (Talent Management)
  • David Moftakhar (Software Developer)

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.