[Sugar-devel] Enhancement suggestion - Maze

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Joshua,

On 30 Nov 2009, at 06:23, Joshua Minor wrote:

> Looks great to me.  Can you wrangle doing a release?  My dev/testing environment is way out of date.

I have a gameplay question regarding the 3 local player mode currently implemented. Are the local users meant to be cooperating or competing with each other? I notice that the level moves on if any one of the 3 local players reaches the goal (this suggests 3 folks on one computer are cooperating to potentially compete against remote player or players). Just wondering if that was the intended behaviour. I only ask as I'm pondering possible Journal state usage. Maze level, seed is an obvious one I currently find frustrating as I often want to carry on from previous rounds; Journal state could also keep a leader board of previous players (or teams) for the last N levels, i.e:

- maze would keep levelling up as it does now

- after N levels a quick leader board animation could show who (or teams) did best (think a quick Pacman chase animation depending on who's doing best).

- there would be no total score kept so kids could join at any time and soon catch-up

Still tweaking/thinking, but FWIW here's the current basic face rep:

	http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/maze/repos/garycmartins-face-clone

In various sizes, the 3 local player faces currently look like this:

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Regards,
--Gary

P.S. For the record I'm still very interested in a face avatar identicon generator to potentially replace all uses of the XO buddy icon throughout the Sugar UI, so face variations would augment the current colour identity metaphor.

> -josh
> 
> On Nov 29, 2009, at 8:32 PM, Gary C Martin wrote:
> 
>> Hi Josh,
>> 
>> On 29 Nov 2009, at 21:22, Joshua Minor wrote:
>> 
>>> The border size change sounds fine.  Just check that it works okay when the maze is relatively large.  (Hit + a bunch of times to get a large maze).
>>> 
>>> When you use the other sets of keys to control your blip in the maze, you get other shapes (circle, triangle, etc). I tried a bunch of shapes, but even something like a star gets lost when the maze is even slightly large.  Faces would probably get lost too.
>> 
>> I did try a number of Maze levels to check how well the face details scaled. Here's a more exhaustive set, it's a pity pygame doesn't seem to offer too much in terms of anti-aliasing, but I think the face still survived the scaling pretty well (and could fit in a cube/triangle if needed):
>> 
>> <maze_face_size_test.png>
>> 
>>> The face idea is pretty neat.  My other activity, Speak, has a bunch of face editing stuff in it.  I think that would be great to factor the face editor out into the Sugar layer (to the same place where you edit your colors).
>>> 
>>> It would be more like the Mii editor in a Nintendo Wii - where your character shows up in whatever game you are playing.  You can see a remake of it here: http://www.myavatareditor.com/  Hit the random button a few times :)
>> 
>> I'm not sure we would want to introduce a more complicated Sugar UI for this. If you take the current buddy colour picker and have it just generate different face shapes along with the two random colours, kids could just click through until they find a colour and face shape avatar that they like. Walter recently posted an 0.88 working feature proposal that allows undo for the buddy colour picker (actually more like previous <-- large current icon --> next), so as not to be frustrating when if you pass over one you liked and want to go back. That would work well if face shape was added to the identity mix.
>> 
>>> I had not heard of identicons before - neat!
>> 
>> Lots of different types out there based on hashes of either IP addresses or email addresses. Mainly tessellated/rotated geometric designs, but there are a few examples of monsters and faces (though too fussy for my liking, they would need to be clean/strong stroke/fill designs for Sugar UI use).
>> 
>> Just bouncing ideas about to see if anything sticks :-)
>> 
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
>> 
>>> -josh
>>> 
>>> On Nov 29, 2009, at 11:39 AM, Gary C Martin wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 29 Nov 2009, at 19:17, Wade Brainerd wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> I love the faces!  Joshua, what do you think about Gary's change?
>>>>> 
>>>>> -Wade
>>>> 
>>>> OK, if faces get the +1, I'd like to also suggest that we vary the face design. It could just use some hash of the colour and/or user name, and then use this value to vary some base features like an identicon**, (square eyes, round eyes, several mouth shapes, noses, face shape, etc). That way we get colour identity reinforced by shape identity in an engaging way (get your friend to join your shared maze and see what funny face they have).
>>>> 
>>>> ** such identicon type thoughts have been drifting about the Sugar UI, at one point Michael suggested to me activity icons could potentially use some such scheme to make Journal entries more unique. Buddy icon shapes are another obvious candidate. Perhaps we should make a standard 'funny face" image avatar generator? ;-) (only half joking).
>>>> 
>>>> Regards,
>>>> --Gary
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Hi Tim,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 29 Nov 2009, at 09:15, Tim McNamara wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Something I would like feedback on. After several sessions playing Maze with 6 year olds, I've noticed that it's sometimes very hard to distinguish the difference between opponents if they have the same core colour. E.g. blue w/ light blue stroke is hard to distinguish from blue w/ dark blue stroke. I think a solution would be to increase the stroke width. This would make the distinguishing factor easier to see.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Any thoughts?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> You could give it a quick try and see if it helps:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 1) look in the directory ~/Activities/Maze.activity
>>>>>> 2) edit the text file called player.py
>>>>>> 3) at line 45 note the line that says "border = size / 10."
>>>>>> 5) change it to read something like "border = size / 5." to double the thickness (see attached screen shot):
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Testing such changes on real children would be gold class feedback! :-)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I'd like to suggest a different change to try. How about a simple face inside the circle to use more of the stroke colour? Here's my quick hack on the code, with screenshot, if you want to give it a try (if folks like this face idea, shout and I'll submit a proper patch):
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
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>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>