5 Week Project: Week 1

    Tonight I spent some time writing up some information on the 5 week project I must complete with my team for school. I figured it would be easier than writing up a blog, so it will double as my post for tonight. If you don't feel like reading fairly boring details on a sodoku program, please feel free to not read the post, you wont be missing much.

    During this week all five members of the team were spending their week completing research which will be necessary to complete the tasks which are ahead of us.  Aside from building on our knowledge base, we found that the research phase also became a feasibility study.
  
        Initially we had been under the impression that facebook was able to host the applications which are created for their platform. It became apparent during the first three days of the research phase that this simply was not the case, and in order to complete the facebook application we would need to come up with a server. We had neither the resources nor willingness to purchase a server, so it was decided we would have a team meeting about the issue.

          
    On Thursday of the first week, we all met at the school for the meeting. We discussed our limitations, what we were worried about, and our options. We soon realized that we could eliminate the issue entirely by building a desktop application rather then a web application. This was discussed in great detail, and all group members came to a consensus of what we intended to do. We decided that we would pursue the desktop application, and adjust our initial Gantt chart to show this change of course.

            We then discussed the functionality of our application, and how we would adapt our web application plans to our new desktop application. We realized that without the complications of a web application we are able to add more functionality to the application and worry less about things like PHP and the facebook API. At this point we sat down as a group and brainstormed different things we wanted our application to do. This was important because it allowed the group to come to an understanding of what each group member was thinking, discuss good and bad ideas and really have fun with the idea.

            At the end of the brainstorming session we had a pretty detailed outline of what our Sudoku game would do. We decided that the game would offer both single and multiplayer modes. The single player mode would allow a player to generate puzzles of various difficulties, and race against the clock to complete them. The data about the users performance, average time and number of puzzles completed would then be entered into a database which would keep track of player information. By completing a certain number of puzzles or completing a puzzle in a shorter period of time the user could then unlock different ‘avatars’ for multiplayer mode as well as skins to further customize the Sudoku experience.

The multiplayer mode takes the classic Sudoku idea and turns it on its head. We aim to allow this game to be played over the internet by two parties running the software on their own computers. The screen of each player would display their custom avatar, their opponents’ avatar, their puzzle board as well as an outline of their opponents puzzleboard which shows the boxes which the opponent has filled in, but not the actual numbers they have used. When a user completes a line or block of numbers they are awarded the opportunity to mess up the opponent through various tools which are chosen at random. These tools include but are not limited to;

• Making some of the opponents blocks read only for a period of time.
• Inserting a random number into one of their blocks.
• Applying a blur over the opponents board
• Erasing several of the opponents numbers

I'll update you guys as the project leaves planning and codeing starts. It should be a fun project.
Thats all for tonight. Cheers.