A relatively quiet week this week, what with our development team being away. It’s handover week next week though, where Go Free Range pass the baton on to Dynamic 50 (our new team).
Earlier on in the week we sorted out the beginnings of a new workflow dynamic for the next Data Visualisation milestones. We’ll [...]

With only a few weeks left before we swap development teams, this week was really the last one where any major new development of the site could take place. What with holidays and hand-over time, the next two weeks are already full. Somehow though, we’ve managed to nail quite a slab of stuff…
You can now [...]

The most exciting thing this week (apart from coming back to work after a week by the sea, of course) was by far me and Toby trying out the Boris Bikes. After a donut laced meeting at Channel 4, we tazzed it around Westminster, crossed the Thames, and dropped the bikes off at the South [...]

Milestone passed. Pretty much. There’s a few things on the way that relate to Season One still, such as awards. But – we’re in Season Two now. Hurrah. The season change -over worked. It has a name now as well – instead of ‘downtime’ and ‘breakweek’ (both terms used as placeholders in the stories we [...]

We’re a week away from our second milestone, nicknamed ‘Aldgate’. The player focused things we wanted to have nailed by the end of July were content and visualisations. Where content is concerned, we’ve got lots of different mission functionality now. We’re almost at a point where we could assemble a narrative for a Career Mode…even [...]

Since January, our alpha players have been racking up the points like nobody’s business. Seriously, loads of points. In the earliest iteration of our visualisation (which is still on the homepage, but will soon be replaced) the dominance of teams is represented by giant coloured blobs over segments of the London Underground. These blobs have [...]

Following on from Matt, Alice, Kim, Ben and Dan, here’s my contribution for the meme

1. Ipad as board game/hungry hippo
I was ever so excited to use the iPad not as another consumption device (but this has become a very strong user story for me – Comics, more music, tv programs from the 80’s, more games, more things) but as [...]

Tons of dev this week. It’s been about missions mainly. We’ve got a big list of missions in a big spreadsheet. Missions like “Ghosthunter” where players visit haunted stations and pick up/drop items. There are other ones that are more like one-off/badge achieving journeys with a story attached. So I went through them all and [...]

A double whammy this week, in that it’s a weeknote for a fortnight. A fortnight-note. Week 28 was a hot week that was so hot it felt like we weren’t moving at all. Our office was sweltering and bright and I dreamt of the hum of all those fans. No major milestones or user stories [...]

With the developers off the job this week we spent it wrapping our heads around things. At this stage, I’m finding we’re bouncing between the big things and the small things. On the one hand talking about the different aspects of behavioral change that we want the game to promote, and on the other hand [...]

This week we came up with a naming convention for these weeknotes. Critical milestone achieved. This is my first full-time week on Chromaroma, so it feels good to have that one under my belt. I’ve also implemented a new and, we think, better theme to the Chromaroma blog. Getting the real important stuff out of [...]

Week two is a cold week. We’ve got Go Freerange for two weeks in every four, so we’ve split the time up into hot and cold weeks. During the cold weeks we’ll create user stories and have big conversations about them. We’ll cover the walls with marker pens. We’ll drink litres of coffee. The hot [...]

Workshops in Birmingham. The Chromaroma creative team meets the Chromaroma dev team for the first time in person. Post-it notes. Coffee. A chinese feast round-table. Day 1 was spent spewing forth all our ideas and deepest desires for the game. A real creative day that left us all feeling full of beans.

The second day was [...]

This May I was invited back to Manchester to speak at the broad and brilliant Future Everything conference (formerly Futuresonic).

My talk, entitled ‘Open Data: Navigating the Data Terrain’ was basically about Chromaroma, the background to it, and why we’re trying to make the invisible visible. Throw in some references to John Thackerer’s Macroscope’s, John Snow’s [...]

Last week I was on a panel at Future Everything discussing open data, data visualisations and Chromaroma.
A lot of the talks were either way too academic, political or “artistically led” for my palette, but the highlight was an inspiring presentation by Ben Cerveny (VURB & Stamen advisor).
I have written up notes for what they are worth below:
What is [...]

This weekend David and I found ways to be in London (Richmond to be exact at the Paypal HQ ) for 9.30, bleery eyed and full of bacon we were there to attend the second Gamecamp http://gamecamp.org.uk/. Organised by @katylindemann @trippenbach @rainycatz, @jameswallis and @rachelclarke this was the second time a gamecamp had been [...]

Here are a sample of the design processes we have been through in the development of the visual interface for Chromaroma.
These first 2 are really experiments with how to visualise things on the London Underground network. The last one feels a lot like a Kandinsky as it explodes into abstraction.

Here are some more developed designs [...]

Development has started in earnest on Chromaroma. We are now in week 5 of development time.
The excellent Tom Taylor has built a very impressive prototype of the system in Ruby which is now live on alpha.chromaroma.com.
It currently scrapes journey history data from  pay-as-you-go oyster users who subscribe to the game. It contains most of the [...]

After all the toing and froing it appears we have a game. Tom is powering through the requirements and is producing new game rules, and new features every day.  So far we have:

Teams
Speed Trials
Capturing Stations
Holding Stations
Basic Points delegations

That is all.

If you fancy being an Alpha Player read on.

December is action month

Seed money has been agreed.

The big Pitch to Channel 4.

This article describes 8 kinds of social game operating today (mostly on Facebook) and provides many examples.

Social games as an industry is about the conversation. … Social games are still very unfamiliar terrain to most, and so this article is all about grounding that conversation so that it can begin.

2nd Post

After months of prepping, pitching and talking to people it looks like we have a green light.  A slightly dimmer one that I was hoping for, but one never the same.  We have been given some money to work up our ideas into a real proper pitch, concept document business plan and a video.
The [...]