The Evolution of the Devcathlon

This week we continue with the further development of the Devcathlon. The class was again split into groups, but this time each person will be working with someone new; other than a person from their previous group, during the initial development stage. The new members of my group, Mockup 4, are John Ly and Anthony Du. For this part of the development, all groups were charged with creating three new badges, three new events, and at least three new levels.

Finding a Level System

Creating a level system was fairly hard; we wanted to do something original and not to copy other games. For one moment I thought of using an anime called Naruto and its ninja ranking system, but like I said earlier we wanted something original.

So after putting the idea off for a few days, jokingly I blurted out, “How about the evolution of man”. Apparently the guys liked the idea and decided to go with it, John who was in charge of developing that page, found an awesome image that depicted what we all thought, with some humor….

Knitting a Badge

Next we brainstormed with the badges, this part was even tougher. At first there was some mixed communications with using the term badges and achievements among us three; but we cleared it out by declaring that a badge is an achievement, like how a trophy/badge will show that achievement. Also another thing that was puzzling us was how to increase levels. Sure enough after Anthony and I, explained to John that a person can gain leveling points by receiving badges.

Once the confusion was out of the way, we then thought if a person and a team receive a badge or just a person. After a long discussion we decided that just a person may receive a badge. So now we had to think of ways for a person to get one. We all threw out option for a person win a badge, like for winning the match for his team or for a person to have builds that never failed. We then took some of our earlier ideas and developed them further. Such as, the idea of a person with builds that never failed, but the user must have 25 consecutive commits without breaking the builds in order to receive a badge. Later the ideas for the other two badges easily came. One of the badges is for winning your first match and the other is for gaining the most points in a match, in which you receive the Most Valuable Player badge.

Finding the Main Event

Lastly, the 3 new events, was really hard; because, our professor had already made a list of events that will be in the Devcathlon. We contemplated really long and hard for this one topic. We came up with some ideas, but nothing was sticking down. So why not come up with an event that may lose points for the team instead. So we generated an event called “Falling Coverage”; which is, if the team does not meet a decided minimum coverage then the team will lose points from winning. Also vice versa for the “Falling Coverage”, an “Increase in Coverage”; but the team must maintain that increase with out falling for a certain period of time.

Apart from creating new events and such, we further developed the web user interface of the Devcathlon. We redesigned some of the existing pages, such as the user’s profile page. Also we added a really cool feature into all our respected pages, the ability for sections of the page to expand and collapse. With adding in the new page functionality, we maybe able to combine web pages; to reduce the user from having to navigate from one page to another.

Conclusion

This part of the advancement to the Devcathlon game was fairly rough on my team. Coming up with new ideas for events, levels, and badges was really hard, plus we spent more of our time redesigning the web user interface to the game. We also tried to meet as often, but with members of the team taking other class, also having the Super Bowl and the B.J. Penn fight all right smack in the middle of the development period. Lastly I see why a project has different development teams, but all working towards the same goal of making the product work. Well so far so good with the evolution of the Devcathlon, I can’t wait to see what new ideas the other teams came up with.