Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Team Working Agreement
- Individual Responsibility Agreement
- Project Schedule
- Meeting Notes
- User Identification and Interviews
- Electronic/Print Advertisement
- Software Introduction
- Software User Manual
- Software Program Description for Developers
- Software Algorithm, Flowchart or Pseudocode
- Software Final Program with Comments
- Software Discussion
- Software Conclusions and Recommendations
- Software References
Executive Summary
Background and Purpose:
A group of Engineers from The Ohio State University’s Engineering 1181.01 course were tasked to develop games using the skills they have learned during their time in class this semester. They worked together to develop two new games, Minesweepers and Connect Four. Using Mat-Lab software the engineers were able to write script/code that allowed for each game to be played without flaw or error. After perfecting the code for each game they were able to develop pitches to each of their stakeholders including the users, the investors, and the software developers. With all the work they have completed thus far, the engineers will be able to work with the stakeholders listed above to further develop their games and implement their visions and detailed plans for the future of their games.
Results and Analysis:
At the beginning of this Software Development Project, our group had chosen to create and code the game “Guess Who?”. In this game a series of characters are placed on two boards and each player chooses who they want their opponent to guess. Then each player would ask their opponent questions about their character in order to narrow down their options. The first player to guess the opponents chosen character would win. After discussing this concept and going over how we might code such a game we discovered that it may be complex and there were a lot of places in the coding where we may run into error. Some examples of these possible errors would be that we needed to code in questions for each player to ask, but what if a player asks a question we didn’t consider or code in? This would result in error and interrupt the game. This was the largest concern along with a few others, and so our group of engineers decided to shift our plans and develop code for Connect Four
During the coding of the game, there were a few setbacks such as getting the board itself to show up. This was a crucial part of the coding, but with some discussion and reviewing the issue was fixed. Once such issues were solved, the coding for Connect Four came out very well and allowed for the game to be played as we had expected. Avichal Joshi and Abdullah Ibrahim were our strongest coders and understood more complex concepts within the Mat-Lab software, so they were able to fix all issues and help develop the large concepts within the coding of each game.
Outside of the coding, Lana Al-Tamim and Mercedes Shultz had a strong point in presentation and voice. They helped each other develop pitches to each of the stakeholders and present them as they saw fit. With each stakeholder, you must hold a different tone and voice in order to get what you need or want from that audience. For users, we were able to develop a pitch that was more playful as the audience is younger and tend to appeal to less serious situations. Furthermore, it was necessary to really focus on how fun, challenging, and entertaining our games were rather than an abundance of details about the development of the games or how they might succeed. Our pitch to the investors was made to be more serious and focused especially on how well the game will work compared to our competitors such as Battleship, Tic-Tac-Toe and so forth. In this scenario we are looking for someone to fund our games and it is important that they know they are investing into an app/games that will be a success when released to the public. Finally, our pitch to the software developers held a formal and technical tone that focused on the coding itself and how it lacked flaws and would be easy to work with when forming an app that can be released across all platforms as we needed. The pitches were very specific to each stakeholder and presented with great purpose to pitch the well developed games we as engineers had developed.
Conclusion and Recommendations:
Overall, the development of Connect Four was not a perfect process and our group had to work together to overcome a lot of issues, but in the end it worked out well. We were able to find a game that was plausible for us to code and used our knowledge to be able to do so. Now, we have a fully developed game that is working and ready to be played.
The pitches to stakeholders was also a success as we all worked together to determine what tones, formats, etc. we needed to have for each audience and how we needed to present our game with efficiency. Any issues that the group came across were fixed quickly and allowed for everything to run smoothly during this project.
In the future, I feel that the group would have begun looking at this project weeks before it was presented in class as something we should begin working on. I feel that with more time we would have been able to create much more creative, more developed, and larger ideas, perhaps even products. The coding of the game took up an immense amount of time and had we had more we could have looked into developing a more complex game such as Guess Who? Or maybe even developing more than one game to pitch. Nonetheless, I feel that the work we completed was done with efficiency and a great deal of hard work from everyone to create a great final product , Connect Four.