Improve an existing casual game with incremental innovation.

Skills to Practice and Learn:

a)      Requirement Collection & Analysis

b)      Estimation

c)      Pair Programming (结对编程)

d)     Collaboration

How to collaborate in explorative situation (new and fuzzy requirement, new language, lots of ambiguity)

e)      Learning a new tool/language and become productive with it

f)       Basic UI design, User Experience design

 

hint:  you need to learn about new concepts/skills/languages from text book,  reference books,  and the almighty web. 

 

In the history of computer game,  there are many well-known casual games (e.g Tetris/俄罗斯方块， 纸牌游戏等)。 Users might be bored about this game after playing it for so many years.   Your challenge is to improve the game and make it interesting again!  

Your assignment is this:

1)     Pick a relatively simple casual game that people are familiar with.

2)     Ask its users (e.g. yourselves,  your roommates)

a.       Has the game become boring to you? why?

b.      What else do you want in this game? 

c.       How can it become more interesting so that you will play more of it?

d.      What are your wishes/fantasies for such game?

3)     Collect the list of wishes,  study their feasibility,  estimate the cost, and come up with a short list of enhancements for this game,  you can call it “game++”.  

4)     Here are some examples of incremental enhancements:

a)     Turn the game territory (游戏平面) from 2D into 2.xD or 3D.

a.       Turn the 2D game board into a tube, or tire (轮胎形状)

b.      Turn the  board into a globe

c.       Turn the flat board into a cube (but play on the surface of the cube)

d.      Turn the flat board into a cube (but play on the 3D grid inside the cube)

e.       Turn the flat territory into a Mobius Strip.

b)     Combine it with elements from another game

c)      Provide customization,  

d)     Playing over network,

e)     Computer AI as a player.

f)       adding more props (道具) to the game…

5)     Use a new technology -  WPF, Flash, HTML5 or SilverLight to implement your game++.

6)     Project requirement

a.       Each pair should work in the “pair programming” (结对编程) style.

b.      All final code and related documents should be checked into TFS,  talk to TFS admin for details about where to check-in your code.

c.       Post the application on the web so that others can play right away,  or can download and play.

d.      Write a blog to summarize your experience in Pair Programming (the pros and cons of such style).   You need to attach a photo to show you’re actually working together in Pair Programming style.   You need to show how different the actual time spent versus the original estimation of a feature;   In the blog,  each member of the pair needs to comment on the strength and weakness of his/her partners.

7)     Criteria of scores:

a.       On-time delivery

b.      User’s feedback of your game,  e.g. users might leave comments on your blog to compliment your creative ideas;  Your roommates might tell other people about your game, etc.

c.       The game logic,  play-ability,  and coherence of new features

d.      The following things are NOT a factor in judging the merit of the project:

1. 1. 1. Code size
      2. Number of new features (a game++ with 9 new features is not automatically better than a game++ with 2 new features)

 

2 week work time.

Use your imagination!