With the presentation tomorrow, my GPS Phototrail/Seagull Hunt game is more or less as ready as it will ever be. Well, I guess there was always room for more testing, but I'm very happy with it.

A fair bit has happened on it since my last post actually. I went with the seagull idea, whereby a particularly evil gull has stolen your coursework. In the game, he will hide in various places on the campus, and you're provided with a photo to the current location. The closer you get, the more your radar goes off and an image of the gull appears on the screen. When you get there, he flies away to the next place. The time limit is determined by the distance between the last point and the next and if you don't make it, he'll fly away for good with your coursework in his beak.



There are three different difficulty settings, with increasing obscurity of images (for example, easy mode has a wide view of Babbage and Brunel, while hard mode has a picture of a grit container against a wall), and I've generally gone for a slightly cheesy, but comedic feel to the aesthetics of the game. Still seagull photos superimposed onto the location pop up from the bottom or sides and go back down again, and of course accompanying seagull sound effects nicked off the web occur on button presses and scene changes, etc. I've had great fun putting all that stuff together, and the fact that I've been working on this project consistently over the weeks has allowed me to add many additional touches, from a restart button that asks for confirmation, to little animated feathers falling down when you've managed to beat the game. I think the whole seagull story adds a necessary depth to the idea of it just being a simple photo trail.

Not only am I hoping that it doesn't rain too much tomorrow when I present it, but also that it actually works properly. In my tests I've found that the GPS signal is rather unreliable when you go near large buildings, of which there are a fair few around the campus. It tends to place your location too far back a bit, thus making it frustratingly difficult to get on the right spot on the map. I've tried to place the markers as best I can, and widen the area of activation, although wary that that might ruin the accuracy a bit. Another issue is the time limit, which I think may be a bit too generous. The problem is, you don't know how much of a detour you're going to need to take to make your way around buildings, which of course the game can't calculate, so I need to accomodate for this.

Still, I think it's a pretty successful game, and I've had loads of fun with it. This, and last years asteroids game have been the most fun projects for me, which kind of suggests that I'd be doing the right thing to go into making games for a living - especially little fun ones like this. I'm planning on uploading it to Mediascapes website, and I hope it'll be of use to future second year students doing this module.

A few references to stuff I swiped, just to be on the safe side regarding the 'ol plagiarism..

Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3, Photo 4, Photo 5, Photo 6, Sound 1, Sound 2