Third and Fourth Week + Facebook/iPad Seminar

If you're here to see my critique, it's downstairs in another post...

In any case, we have survived through the first CS3216 Assignment! I'll probably blog more about what our application does later. In the meantime, I'll blog about my third and fourth week. Third week was spent coding throughout the weekend as well. :S Jon Lew also talked, but I felt that his presentation could have been a bit longer. And I realised how hard it is to structure the talks for 3216 because each and every talk would have been very useful if we had learnt it at the start? Haha, I guess the learning curve for CS3216 is really steep. On the other hand, it's good that I knew some of the stuff (Twitter bootstrap!) + I did play around with Facebook API during the summer. 

Anyway, we did our Facebook/iPad seminar on....

I had very good team-mates for this assignment. We had two people who could really talk (Omer + Jim). and Trung did the slides really nicely. I talked also, but I'm really amazed at how my groupmates managed to articulate their thoughts so clearly. I am in awe of them :D (And I am happy that I didn't screw up as much as I thought I would.)

To be honest, I don't think we spent a lot of time on the seminar. Originally, we wanted to write .js script for the presentation, but we didn't have time. (Heck, I started on the slides at 4pm on Sunday.) On the other hand, we did meet up before that to consolidate our thoughts on the application so I guess our points were quite well-discussed among our team-mates. 

Prior to this, I've never really thought about how apps make money (i.e. what business model are they adapting etc.), but through the discussions with my group-mates and research, I've really gained an insight into it. The seminar also really helped, and I can understand why people spend so much time thinking about the business model of the applications etc. For a coder, I feel like I just build what I want, but to really release an application, we really have to think of how to market it.

I didn't really like the Pecha Kucha style, but I speak fast enough (not Ben Leong speed though). The problem I feel is to slow down and extract out the main points. There's no point in speaking too fast if your listeners can't digest what you are saying. I certainly didn't manage to listen to a few speakers who spoke too fast, just to cover their points. Maybe a good style would be to speak slow enough, and use fewer words to express what you feel (i.e. only say the main points and don't digress). That, I find, is the beauty of Pecha Kucha. 

Also, I had other apps that I really wanted to talk about for the seminar. Three applications that I thought about presenting for the seminar, or Free Advertisement For These Applications:

1) Cubie

I discovered this application only after we had to submit our three choices. It's like WhatsApp, but cuter, and available on both the Android and Apple App Store. You can also draw stuff on it. It would have been interesting to do the seminar on what is essentially, a WhatsApp clone (I mean, if products are good, people will try to copy them, right?), but I discovered this application too late to even suggest it. 

2) Puzzle and Dragons

I've been playing this game since the start of summer holidays, so that's more than three months. Basically, you train up your dragons and go into dungeons to fight other monsters. Those monsters may end up dropping eggs, which hatches into your own monsters. To fight in the dungeons, you have to play this sliding puzzle game, where you drag the orbs to form three or more in a row. The corresponding colour of the orbs indicates which monster of yours will attack. (I.e. if you make a three-in-a-row for the blue orbs, only your blue monsters will attack.) They make money by tempting you to buy "magic stones" (in-game currency) which you can use to expand your monster box, or attempt to get rarer creatures.

This game is really exciting because they have new dungeons every week, and I'm really tempted to spend money on it. Unfortunately, it's entirely in Japanese. (Yes, you can check out the engrish on its App Store for confirmation). We thought that it would have been unfair to choose this application for the seminar, as it was in Japanese and that could have limited people's comments on it because they can't really download the application and try it out. (You'll need a Japanese App Store account!) But I really liked how they took the Dungeon-Crawling + Pokemon Collecting idea along with some form of Bejewelled Puzzle concepts together to form this application. Nothing really new in that sense, but somehow, it's combined nicely such that the game becomes really fun. (And kekeke, they're releasing an Android version of it soon!) 

To be honest, I feel that this game can become really popular. I've got a fair few stares on the NUS shuttle bus whenever I play this game. Future Angry Birds? Perhaps.

3) Swordigo

This is a really good game that I finished over the summer, but once you complete it, you don't really go back to it. I heard it's like Zelda, but I can't confirm because I've never played Zelda. But the battles are real-time and you go around hacking and slashing at monsters and ... pots. There are tons of hidden treasures, so you must really think to figure out how to get to those treasures. I really found this game very innovative. It's a free application on the iPad, so do try it out!

Although these applications were good, I'm really happy at our choice (The Guardian), because it was really a good choice to talk about. I was also out of my comfort zone (because I'm used to talking about games more than serious applications like The Guardian), so I guess the choice of The Guardian on Facebook really broadened my horizons. In all, the Facebook/iPad Seminar was quite a good assignment, even though I did kind of doubt its value at the start of the course.