Auction system for DataMiner

We have finalized the concept of our dataminer game. The software would have two main parts:

• mining for new articles
• an auction house system to buy, sell and speculate on articles.

There will be 3 types of highscores:

1. A highscore based on how much corridors the user has already mined
2. A highscore based on the total cash of the user
3. A highscore based on the value of the users inventory. Each article has a recycling-value and the total value of the inventory is the combined value of all the articles in the inventory.

To make the dataminer more focussed on the articles, we would add a auction system to the program. This will allow users to buy and sell the articles they mined. They can speculate on how much an article will be worth in the future. This creates an economy within the game, partially dependent on the base values of the articles, and partially created by how much an article is worth to the users.

The mining part of the game will generate the articles to keep the economy alive. The user starts by mining at the surface. He will get articles from all categories. When mined deep enough, he can choose in which direction to mine. Depending on the direction, he will get articles from other categories. The articles are in a tree-structure, and the further the user has mined in a certain direction, the more he can refine his search for articles. If there is a world-cup football, a user will probably want to find articles in the category sport-football, since those will be worth more at that time. This makes users follow the news, to know which articles they have to look for, further increasing the purpose of the game.

DataMiner Concept v0.2

Again you can enjoy our beautiful drawing skills.

This is the storyboard of the refined concept.

No trading options, shop or bank.

Less buttons, less complex, more fun!

Also the minigame is dropped.

As you can see, the type of article is free to chose if you have unlocked this option.

Concept

Take a look at some early concept art for our miner. This is by no means a final draft, but just a way for me to get a sense of direction.

I tried to keep it as simple as possible because this is a course about GUI and not drawing/animations. All drawings are only a few lines so they can be easily reproduced.

For your viewing pleasure

Dataminer

We will probably develop the dataminer application, unless we get enough arguments to go for the article rating system from the other groups.

What users will use this application?

• users that just want to play a game and gain levels
• users that want to read random articles of todays news in a certain genre.

We want to give the users the feeling that they are booking progress in the reading of newspapers. This is why we keep track of their progress.Some options are:

• some kind of monetary value gained while mining
• a level of a player, indicating its strength
• how deep the player can mine, expressed in meters
• the combined length of all shafts a player has mined

For each article a user mines, this indication will rise. This way it is also possible to make users compete against each other with some kind of highscore.

At specific levels, a user will gain bonuses, like being allowed to get articles from other newspapers, refine the genre the articles come from,...

When the user mines an article, he gets the choice to keep it in his backpack for later reading or reading it now and throw it away. The size of the backpack is fixed. If the backpack is full, the user has to delete some articles if he wants to keep the newly archived article.

The concept of this application is to make younger people more interested in the news, in a playful way. This means our testing public will be restricted to mostly children and adolescents. Unfortunately we won't be able to do the mom-test, but will replace it with the baby-brother-test.

The highscores will allow us to gather more people, because current players will invite their friends to beat them and they will keep playing, because people always want to beat others.

Article rating

We are still not sure which of the two ideas we will work on. To have a better idea of which one will become our final project, we decided to do a little more work on both of them before deciding. In this post the news-rating system will be explained, the one about dataminer is already here.

The basic idea is that we want people to be able to comment on the news and share it with their friends. We would add a box on news sites, where you can directly see what your friends thought of the article you are viewing. You can also add your own comments and ratings there, or even click a button to see some related articles on different news-sites. 

Here is a mockup-picture of what it could look like:

A second part of our program would give users the possibility to see all of their friends comments on the news of that day and give comments on the comments, read the articles their friends liked or read similar articles. The comments could be sorted by news-category, rating given to the article,...

Both features would contain the same data, so the user can choose to only use one of the features, or both. 

The good side of choosing this idea is that there is a big public able to use it. Even our moms could use this kind of software, while they won't start playing games. That gives us a varied test public when we make changes and it is easier to evaluate if our changes were good.

The down side is that it isn't very original and that it is only useful if many of your friends also use this. The mining game won't have that problem, as it is also playable when you are alone.

We will discuss which idea seems best for everyone in the coming days.

2 Options to Rule Them All

Option 2 - DataMiner

Choosing what application we will make

In todays course we first had to choose if we wanted to do the project about news or music. We have chosen to do something about the news, because there are already so much applications that do something with music. Also some team members already worked with music and wanted to do something new.

We had a brainstorm session about what we could do with the news. Here are a few items we came up with. Some are more realistic than others.

• Gambling on the sensation value of the news of the next day... will a bomb explode, or is it yet again news about the lack of government in Belgium?
• A game where people can unlock better newspapers: they start with the "story" and end with "de tijd"
• Make a site where people can comment on news articles and rate them. You can then see the articles your friends liked most.
• We could add a possibility to comment on user comments, as most newspapers don't allow this
• Give newsarticles related to the article you are viewing or some words you enter in a search box.
• Gambling on how long a current topic will survive in the news
• Make a game where a miner can mine data and increase his skills while mining the news. Lighter lecture like "Story" will be like mining sand, while "de tijd" will be some very though rock. It is possible to get better skills and equipment to be able to read thougher news.
• Add hidden content to news items

We have 2 favourites within these possibilities: the mining game and the article-rating site. We haven't decided yet which one we will make.

Introduction

Welcome to anarCHI.

You are following Steven Vermeeren, Tanguy Monheim (posting as Tman), Sam Agten en Bart Gerard in their struggle to understand the world of human-computer interaction (CHI).

This blog is part of the evaluation of the course gebruikersinterfaces.