Marriott Hotel App Live Brief

Now that the Christmas game is completed and published to the internet , we were starting on getting to work with the Marriott’s live brief.

If you are interested , here is a link to Part 1 of my Christmas game blog :

Christmas Game Summary Part 1

We were tasked with creating an app that the Marriott Hotel could use for there customers to help choosing what food they want upon ordering for things like weddings. When they discussed it with us it was described as a tinder for food , having features that allow you to swipe throughout the meals and select your favourites then they will display in an online shopping style basket. All the meals have images and descriptions of the meal.

Once we had a summary of what the client wanted we set up a team of 8 people to work on this project and then split into 2 teams of 4 consisting of 2 coders and 2 artists each. Both teams had a meeting and ours decided that we would get together some concept arts for the app/ screenshots of what it could look like. One member of our team did a sketch and another did a Photoshop version , the Photoshop version was the concept we went with. Here are the concept screenshots :

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In the slideshow you can see a team members concept screenshots of the app , it shows what it looks like , one screenshot shows the meal with name, which brings us to another screenshot which shows what happens when you click the information button and the other when you click the Marriott logo and the side menu comes out.

 

From these screenshots with the help of the lecturer we started to take the concept into Photoshop to make an animation that is able to demonstrate our app idea and how it will work. We opened up a pre-set art board  for iPads and started assembling what the app would look like with simple control and demonstrate where text would be , the demo gif shows the information button being pressed , the like feature and the menu button it also shows swiping to the next option in the meals category.

Here it is : (GIF does not work in internet explorer you may need Chrome)

The coding team have started to make work on making the buttons work and have made the information button work (open and close) and also the Marriott logo open the side menu. They have used circles at the minute just for testing purpose. I will write another post about this in about a week just to show how we have started on fonts and other things ready to create a final product.

I feel the team that I am on is good at working together and progress will be good, it will be better then the progress we made in the Christmas game because there is 4 of us and we are all dedicated to getting the job done , 2 of the members on my team are the ones that helped greatly with the Christmas game so we know what will happen if we do not try hard enough to complete it and leave it to last minute , this is why we are starting early as we can . Our teams communication is good and our organisation is also well done , our files are organised in a drive and the coders have good communication with the designers so we will make sure this app is completed and looks as good as it could be to meet the clients demands.

Christmas Game Summary Part 1

We were tasked with creating a game to feature on the college website for the duration of December.

At the start of the project we had the college marketing staff come into our class and give us a rundown of what they wanted the product to be and when they wanted it done by.

First of all the group of about 15 people split into 2 teams , and we decided to both come up with a screenshot to give an example of what the game could look like. We would then compare them and see which is better and which art style we would like to use to make a final product.

The two teams were “Cartoon Style” and “Pixel Art Style” ,  the 2 teams were also split into artists and into coders. The coders on each team were starting to work on core code for the game such as simple movement control. I did the game art rather than the coding however I tried to help when I could. I was placed in the pixel art team and started making my first graphics of pixel art.

As it was a Christmas game it needed Santa , so I decided to make Santa for the game.

Here is my Santa that I made :

As you can see , the Santa was quite simple and didn’t have any shading or variation to it however this was a base design that we we’re using for a screenshot.

This gave me a base concept of the Santa and I could then go ahead and add shades and also add reindeer. I looked on the internet for reference images of reindeer and this was the final product of Santa in his sleigh with the reindeer :

I then proceeded to make simple images to throw in the screenshot for the foreground and mid ground as show here :

 and a little log cabin.

 

That was some of the graphics I made that were used in the demonstration screenshot.

On the other side of production the cartoon team (consisting of about 7/8 people) were not really doing any work to help towards the project , I’d say 2 or so people were doing something consistent and others maybe produced 1 graphic between them , if that and their coding team didn’t do anything that I am aware of. So the cartoon team died out and was not doing any work to help. This left the project down to the pixel team therefore the pixel team were working in class to get a screenshot together , which in all honesty didn’t look good as I personally expected. Here is the screenshot mock-up we threw together at last moment to show the marketing staff ( the mid ground images at the time were themed to be grayscale) :

As you can see the screenshot has backgrounds on images and was not amazing. This was totally because the image was made when the marketing staff were in the room and we did not have enough made in time to create this screenshot. Fortunately the marketing staff understood it was threw together in a few minutes and from what I am aware thought it worked however the game currently was set to be a flappy bird styled game in which you dodge birds and chimneys however this was a bit basic so we decided to make a game in which you dodge birds flying towards you and also drop presents in chimneys that don’t have smoke coming out of them. If you drop a present in a chimney with smoke you loose a life and if you are able to drop a present in a chimney you get a point.

In my next post I will explain more about finishing this game off and getting it published on the site.