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Curious about how to play Darwin’s Island? Watch this informative video!:

Meet the team behind Darwin’s Island! Click to see their interviews and roles for the game:

Tiffany

John

Nicky

Patrick

Scott

Stephanie

Ryan

Loren

Tiffany Fok

What is your role and tasks for the Darwin’s Island game?

I am one of three illustrators, possibly the Porthos of the three musketeers. I draw things, people look and nod, then I draw more things and people nod some more. I like user interface stuff, so I’ve been working a lot on the menu system and design.

Who do you hope will play the game?

I hope my mother will play the game, because she recently purchased a galaxy even though she has yet to grasp text messaging. I also hope that she will stop telling her friends that I am going to school to make Avatar 2.

What do you hope to learn from the project or hope to take away from the experience?

Working with to others to create a consistent look is definitely a challenge, as I’ve mostly done projects on my own. It has been and will continue to be an interesting learning process.

What kind of changes has the game gone through since the inception of the original idea?

The art style has changed back and forth through the process of development, depending on the flow of ideas and the focus on the objective of the game. It’s been good change though.

What are some mobile games or apps you’ve been enjoying lately?

i have a homework app that allows me to list my homework and order it by due date. I like it because it colour codes it according to panic levels. Safe due dates are listed in blue, then a coupled days before it turns to orange, then the day before and day off it turns to red. AAAH! RED means panic time.

What is your favourite island?

I like ice cream islands. Like the still frozen bits sitting in a pool of melted ice cream. You know it’s going, so you have to eat it fast to make sure the ice cream beast didn’t die in vain.

No man is an island?

but all women are coral reefs.

John Pantherbone

What is your role and tasks for the Darwin’s Island game?

Web services (this very site you’re reading!), project management software, coders assistant, art team assistant, various documentation. Jack of all trades, master of none basically.

Who do you hope will play the game?

Probably the younger teenager crowd with smartphones. Casual gamers mostly.

What do you hope to learn from the project or hope to take away from the experience?

Experience in working in large multi-talented group. We have an awesome team with some great concepts and skills so it’s cool seeing them put to work. This is the first time I’ve worked on a mobile game too so I’d like to learn a bit about how the production cycle goes. To be honest I’d like to learn a bit about programming too, Scott’s been nice enough to let me touch a bit of the code. Hopefully I don’t break anything…

What kind of changes has the game gone through since the inception of the original idea?

I think for the most part the initial scope of the project has been toned down once we realized how long this stuff actually takes. The basic idea of the game is still there, but we’ve scaled down a lot of the extra features and accessories that weren’t totally necessary. If the games a hit then maybe they could be added in the future… It seems like a project like this would take 6 months to a year to do for most companies so it’s interesting for us to try to do it in a semester. We’ve got a lot done though so it’s pretty cool to see what we have so far.

What are some mobile games or apps you’ve been enjoying lately?

Even though it’s an Android game we’re working on I have an iPhone….but for games I’ve been enjoying lately, I have one word:
Enviro-bear 2010. Ok, that’s three…or two. Enviro-bear is a hybrid word I think…
but yeah, Enviro-bear 2010 is a chilling dystopic look at the coming events of the near future. It’s like Bladerunner…but with bears…driving cars.
Honestly, it’s the best bear-driving simulator on the market. My friend from Boston recommended it to me and I haven’t looked back since. The graphics are awful, the controls are terrible…but it’s bears! Driving cars!

http://www.enviro-bear.com/

What is your favourite island?

Random Island. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Island
No really, it’s called Random Island. I read this one news report about some guy getting washed up on some random island. Everyone was commenting and trying to explain that it’s the name of an actual island. What an awesome island. I’m thinking of retiring there.

No man is an island?

Is that an Abba song?

We did some in-class beta testing for our Building Virtual Worlds class. It proved to be a huge asset and learning experience for our project (and everyone else’s too). It’s always good to take a step back from what your working on and just have some other people come in to test it out. They can often point out a lot of things you may not have noticed or overlooked. Or similarly, they could find a whole new way to use your game that you would have never expected.

Some small things we noticed; the buttons were a bit too small for most peoples fingers. The fence drawing mechanism didn’t work as well as hoped (also because we were using an older version of Android). Overall, we had lots of good feedback and everyone seemed to like the art style we had going for our game.

Overall, it was a great learning experience. Plus we got to test out everyone else’s projects too! There’s some pretty awesome stuff coming out of this class.

and thanks to Derick for letting us use his Android phone to test on!

-john

Nicky Guan

What is your role and tasks for the Darwin’s Island game?

I am in the art team, I was working on monster body parts design (legs, arms, bodies…), logo design, island design, and design for the plants and fences. we were all involved in the discussion of interface design

Who do you hope will play the game?

I hope people from age 10 to 25 will play the game, since those are young people and a lot of them in that range are still in school, they may like that kind of game.

What do you hope to learn from the project or hope to take away from the experience?

Basically, I learned how to cooperate, work together with other team members, and I hope to learn more technical stuff, for example, improve my hands-on skills regarding to those design software.

What kind of changes has the game gone through since the inception of the original idea?

I guess the major change is the scope of our game, we are trying to shrink it down since our progress is slow and we dont have enough time to do all the stuff that we wanted at the beginning.

What are some mobile games or apps you’ve been enjoying lately?

Osmos, Seaweepers, and Snake.

What is your favourite island?

I am playing several island games on Facebook, the ones that I enjoyed a lot are Treasure Isle and Happy Island.

No man is an island?

*editors note: No answer.

Patrick Daggitt

What is your role and tasks for the Darwin’s Island game?

My role is Creative Director, I am working on making sure the game is fun and keeping the look consistent. Really I am just translating the original vision into bite sized pieces for the team.

Who do you hope will play the game?

Everyone obviously!!! But seriously? I think the game will be really big with younger audiences around 13-20 years old. These gamers are looking for something bright and fun in mobile games and are more likely to take care of a virtual pet/pets and enjoy it.

What do you hope to learn from the project or hope to take away from the experience?

I am learning so much its really hard to say what I will learn specifically. I think planning and communication skills are the biggest ones. Keeping the whole project in mind while you are looking at little pieces of it is really hard without a plan and a vision of how those piece will come together. There are a lot of really talented people in our group, so clearing communicating a look and feel we want to achieve has been a matter of detail. Communicating the details of a feature or element is simple, its explaining why it has to be a certain way that has challenged my communication skills.

What kind of changes has the game gone through since the inception of the original idea?

So many that I have lost count. The original idea remains the same but the game mechanic and the monster generator has changed many times.

What are some mobile games or apps you’ve been enjoying lately?

Although we are developing for Android, I have an Iphone currently so forgive me.

TOP 5
Solipskier – Fast paced side-scrolling ski jumping action with a heavy metal soundtrack!
The Incident – Chicken Little meets Katamari Damacy, nuff said.
Worms2 – A classic I can play everywhere!
Carcassonne – I love boardgames and this one happens to be my favorite.
Cut the Rope – This is just raw fun. Physics based but with a lot of strategy.

What is your favourite island?

The micro-nation of Sealand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

No man is an island?

This is extremely true, nothing can be done in solitude. Go teamwork!!! lol.

Big day. Testing our app on an Android phone and not on the emulator.

Today, the programming team went to Wavefront to use their facilities to test our game. Suffice to say that there were some major differences.

Most of the problems were UI related, as the resolution in our emulators were not the same as the actual phone. So, the margins layouts of the buttons I made looked completely different on the phone. Scott and I fixed it using more layouts and forced the buttons into those layouts as oppose to hardcoding their x and y values. Lesson learned.

Another issue we realized was that unlike our computers, phones don’t have that much memory. So while our computers were more than capable of handling hundreds of images at 150 dpi, the phone could not display those images at all. To compensate, we lowered the dpi of all our visual assets to 72 dpi and sent a memo to the art team that all their future assets should be at 72 dpi as well.

Being able to have access to phone also allowed Scott to get a feel for how the touch functions he wrote worked. He managed to make it so that the phone no longer is confused as to what the user is doing.

All in all, a lot of progress made. All of the sudden, there’s a light at the end of the alpha testing tunnel.

Not much to say this time. I spent a good 4 hours on Sunday and another 2 hours on Monday trying to get our inventory trunk to open and close when pressing the trunk unlock button. Scott was a big help in helping me figure out the last part to my code.

Initially, the trunk is displayed as an image view. So some of things I tried to do (that failed) was to:
1) replace the image view with another image view
2) have both a trunk open and a trunk closed image displayed on top of each other, but change the opacity when the trunk unlock button was clicked.

Eventually, I tried to replace the source image of the image view but caught in handling my Switch statements in Java. Scott saw how I mishandled it and helped fix that issue.