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 need to refine it according to Dynamic 50’s particular workflow methods, but we’re hoping to be able to secure a few hours each week for JSON edits. Matt and Robin (our data viz lords) require a really refined database so that the flash loads faster, so to prevent a viz development bottle neck, we’re hoping to review this weekly.

Other than that, we’re coming up to the end of Season Two. Seasons will eventually be three months long, but we’ve a lot to test in the transition period – The Interlude. Awards, point tallies, leaderboard reset, profile details. All the things that are affected by Season switches need keeping a close eye on, as they were only implemented last month. I suppose we could do a series of very very short seasons, but we’re really trying to keep the game as fun as possible for our alpha users.

Speaking of our alpha users, the way they’ve been playing the game has been really inspiring us. From where we’re standing, you can clearly see companionship between players. There’s also noticeable tactical behavior – from people who crave the Get Off One Stop Early (GOOSE) missions, to those hankering for more bike play, and even a few players going really out of their way to capture stations and complete collections. At this stage in the development and with some a small user base, it gives us a warm feeling to see people playing life in ways we hadn’t imagined.

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 score points for riding a bike. Hurrah! It’s all a bit basic still, but it works. Everytime you pick up a TFL bike using your keycard, Chromaroma will give you points. I can’t wait to see the visualisation of the rides. Testing of that begins next week with Robin and Matt developing and sketching respectively.

Last week was spent mostly doing the really boring work of making the system more robust (some changes and downtime on the TFL site meant we lost almost a week’s worth of points for a while), so on Friday afternoon, as I was typing up last week’s weeknotes, Dr. James Adam went on a little development spike to explore Groups.

We hadn’t even spoken much about Groups. It was always a few stops down the line. Yet, when James sent the screengrabs it all made sense. Even before we’ve built up the social side of the game, in one foul swoop Groups harnesses friend power and makes mini-communities and teams. Think of them as more like Guilds. Or clubs even.

I’ve been in Nottingham today with Matt laying out the next couple of months of data visualisation development. We spent the whole morning on the single player view aspects, and if we can get everything in that we want, it’s going to feel really game-like. It’s strange, because you can’t play it on screen (you play Chromaroma by travelling), so in effect we’re making an interactive film of you travelling around London. But, as usual, there’s more to it than that.

Toby’s been in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Wales all week. And I’m about to go and live in a cottage near Bakewell to look after some animals including a fish called Agamemnon. For a week.

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 Bank. Then back on another pair, and North to Brick Lane for a perusal round Rough Trade/meeting/afternoon working on café Wifi. Amazing.

They’re really good bikes as well. They weigh a lot, and only have three gears, but the gears are set in such a way that the bike feels lighter to ride than you’d think. The roads feel safer than I thought they would as well and, since they’re still a novelty, the tourists filing down to see the Houses of Parliament all look at you going “ooooh”.

So yeah, now we’re DEFINITELY plugging the bikes into Chromaroma. How could we not? We’ve already come up with a really non-obstructive and compelling way to add them to our data visualisations as well. More to come on that.

Toby’s away on holiday, so I’m in charge now. Evil laugh etc. But no, I’ll be working heavily on the prioritisation of visualisation features, and speaking to our new developers.

We’re really sad to be losing Go Free Range – their attitude towards development and business is really inspiringly fresh, independent, and honest. They’ve been offered a huge chunk of work from another client that will be taking up too much of their time to continue with Chromaroma. But, they’ve been amazingly helpful in helping us find a new development team. Really, they couldn’t have been more helpful or brilliant. If one day you need some developers to make you something that hasn’t been done before, go to Go Free Range.

Yesterday we also went to the Channel 4/4IP picnic, that wasn’t a picnic (foreboding clouds) but an afternoon in the pub. Met some really nice other 4ip folk, and folk from other 4ip funded projects. Everyone doing great things. Most of them still secret (ish).

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 wrote around the functionality), it is now and forever shall be called ‘The Interlude’. I like it, as it means ‘between games’ – there literally is no better word.

As well as implementing a giant new bit of functionality with Seasons, we also let three hundred more alpha players in. These new folks have been really on it, and firing feedback and bugs at us like they were trying to kill us. There’s still some work to do around being clear on what you need to do with your Oyster account in order to make it playable, but we’re learning all the time.

The big news all over the country this week was The Boris Bikes. We went to London to check them out. They’re built like tanks! I really wanted to have a go, but my key didn’t arrive in time. Dr. James from Go Free Range (our lovely developers) tried his key but right at that moment the Old Street bike post broke. That makes me feel a lot better about our Seasonal ticks and bugs. I’m not getting my hopes up TOO much, but we should have bikes on Chromaroma next week for testing, and as soon as possible after that for playing.

The next month will be all about the social and team-based aspects of the game, as well as implementing the new UI approach. Go Free Range and Robin will be spiking the approach within a fortnight, and will come out with the way forward. I’m really excited about it as the demos look fantastic, it’s just a case of tying them in with the actual game engine. Complex.

As well as logging bugs like crazy and looking at bikes in envy, we also went to the London Transport Museum, and got excited about their line badges in the gift shop. We’d not seen these before, and they really tick the boxes as far as awards and badges go. We had a grand old meeting with the chaps who run the museum, and spent the journey home writing up a shed load of ideas.

That is all.

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 though that’s not expected yet.

I’ve been on holiday since the end of last week to the middle of this one. Well, a busman’s holiday. We’ve had problems with some of London Terminals in the game, so on my first day back I hopped down to Waterloo to explore all the swipe points and generate a load of data that our developers can look at to see if it makes any sense. Waterloo is big.

Those journeys to and from Waterloo on Wednesday afternoon were my first with a working Oyster card. By working, I mean working with Chromaroma. I’m nearly there on the instructions/best practice/troubleshooting guide to getting onto Chromaroma first time. It’s been simple for some people, and not so for others.

I’d recommend listening to Chic’s second album ‘C’est Chic’ while travelling on the West London end of the District Line on a sunny day…

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 put them into ‘genres’ of mission and worked out the functionality required for us to create them. So for the Ghosthunter story, we need to be able to create a mission of this type: “Player visits stations A, B, C, D, E, and F”.

Anyway, enough of the boring mechanical stuff. We’re three weeks away from our next Milestone now, and the Go Freerange guys pulled out all the stops this week delivering the functionality that will allow us to make up balmy missions to be played out across the city.

The visualisation work is getting there as well now. How it will look, and work, and tie in with the gameplay is becoming clearer in my mind. And Matt’s visualisation design work is looking stunning. Robin’s been trying to decrease load times and CPU power-drain of the flash rendering of journey visualisations. It’s a toughy, but we’re getting there.

Our first communique went out this week as well, introducing a couple of new features such as Find Friends via Twitter, and a heads up for the introduction of seasonal play at the start of August (more on seasonal play in a further post this week). If you’re reading this and you’re an alpha player, get yourself over to your account page and have a look who’s there (and if there’s no-one there, help us out by tweeting about it and getting the social side of the game (however underdeveloped so far) up and running).

There was a good line by Justin Hall in the Wired UK Foursquare versus Gowalla article about games being a “social rehearsal for a location-aware future” which made us scratch our chins and mutter agreeing “hmmmm”s…

It’s been the first hot week that’s really burned, and that’s been grand.

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 were ticked off, which felt a little strange…but we did test some missions and do a lot of thinking/writing about genres. We’ve got a list of missions as long as your arm, but they’d be of little use without some context or narrative. So we now have five types of mission, and so far four types of Collection. When these are implemented into the next iteration of user interface it’ll make it easier to choose how to PLAY Chromaroma, as opposed to just USING it.

(I’m particularly excited by the prospects of the career mode – having an alternate storyline that follows me and adapts as I move through my own life in the physical world. More on that when there’s more on that.)

Onto what this weeknote should have solely been about – THIS WEEK. Week 29. A cold week. So a good week to spend initiating our new designer James. Things we’ve learned about James already:

1. James prefers tea to coffee.
2. He’s a flipping great designer.
3. He’s just finished university.
4. He has a professionalism about him that makes me feel like a prat.
5. He likes Boards of Canada (I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a prerequisite to his employment in Toby’s eyes)

James’ first areas of focus will be the data visualisations, game packs, and how achievements and missions look to the user. I did a bit more thinking about the latter, and started writing user stories for the data visualisations side of things. Now that we have a system that can generate the visualisations, we need to hone down the WHAT and the WHY of it all, so that it’s as engaging and potentially central to the Chromaroma online experience.

Make of this what you will, but Toby did lots of business planning, quickly followed by going on the hunt to find a Business Development person. Oh, and he also convinced Katy Lindemann to come aboard*. Katy will be helping us explain things to our potential partners in a way that doesn’t involve more “ums”, “erms” and manic hand movements than actual words. Katy is a digital strategist, which means she’ll be making what we’ve been making make sense. Hurray for Katy!

Apart from all this actual work, I’ve been reading One Stop Short of Barking and watching Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. It’s not just about another world and the London Underground, it’s also got Johnson** in it!

*I’m not doing all this train/transport punnery on purpose. It’s just too easy. Honest guv.
**As in, Johnson from Peep Show, or actor Paterson Joseph (who will one day make a great Doctor Who).

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 spending an hour drawing diagrams illustrating in/out points on the London Transport network and how to use these to count movement on foot as a game event.

We’ve also had a bit of a grump on. Mainly about the importance of the tandem development of data visualisations at such an early stage in the project – trying to resolve how at the moment they seem bolted on, but potentially/eventually should become the defining feature of the game and even the predominant game interface. It’s a chin scratcher that one.

Continuing our ongoing discussions with Transport For London our focus has been on Chromaroma’s potential in fostering positive behavioral change. What kind of changes do we want to promote? Can we expect people to go “Yeah!”? I think so. TFL’s aim is ultimately not to get everyone on trains and buses, but to get them around London quickly and safely. They’re also well into health. So we’re adding more things to the system to allow us to intelligently create game events that encourage the use of bikes and feet as well as buses, boats, trains and trams. More on that later.

Early in the week Toby went to the University of Derby graduate design show and saw some stuff he liked by a chap named James Rice. James sent us a PDF of ideas for Chromaroma and BAM he’s now part of the team. He starts the week after next, in a cold week, where we’ll probably not be so grumpy…starting the days more like these guys:

Finally, I’ve spent a few moments here and there becoming a total Underground geek. My conversion is nearly complete, and I’m currently enjoying learning about ghosts down there, more about Mr. Beck, how the Underground shaped London’s growth into the suburbs, and the War Cabinet setup at Down Street Station. Also, Annie Mole’s blog triggered a lot of ideas as well as a geeky thirst to get down there to the abandoned parts of the Underground that Ajit Chambers is pushing to be reopened.

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 the way first. And writing the last two week’s weeknotes. In case you’re interested, we’re taking the Week 1 as the week that Tom Taylor wrote the first bit of code for us. There were years of thinking about it, and months of ’sorting it out’, and plenty of ‘making it happen’ before then – but we’ve drawn a line in the sand thanks to Weeknotes.

We’ve been dumping all our ideas for features in a big spreadsheet in order to capture all those moments of inspiration for game items, missions, collections and such. And then the user stories…ah, the user stories. Loads of those. Loads of them. Tons.

The admin can blog his weeknotes about what he’s been doing over the week. 3 points.

The development team have made two giant leaps this week regarding the modes of transport we can capture, as well as linking up the game to other platforms. We’ll be announcing these to our alpha users next week, and inviting a few more people from the list to join in.

If you’re an alpha user, you might notice that we’ve tweaked the way the site looks. Most of the features we’ve added this week however have been in the back-end. Admin stuff. Stuff that allows us to easily monitor and create new missions, collections, and items within the game. It’s exciting for us as it’s widened the scope for creating mini-games and ambient experiences, adding magic, stories, and/or a sense of gameplay to your commute.

Just now me and Toby started talking about a small feature, and ended up filling six whiteboards with green, red, and blue marker pen notes. Just as there’s the river in the middle of the map of the Underground, there’s a doodle of a boat in the middle of our drawing wall. Oh yeah! Trams. We’ve added trams to the system. Next up – BOATS. At which point you’ll see a big picture of T-Pain on the frontpage of the Chromaroma blog.

And another thing, I’ve been playing a lot of Echo Bazaar. A lot. And Hua Rong Road (to no avail).

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 weeks will be full of hardcore dev. And more coffee.

As it stands I worked on Bank Holiday Monday adding stories for Toby and Matt to talk about, then I hopped off to Scotland for a week where the weather was like Greece and I went in a time-machine.