A week ago over 5000 people streamed through the foyer of the Brighton Dome to see and build hundreds of amazing things at the first Brighton Mini Maker Faire. Luke and I went along with 2 laptops, a scanner and a pile of pens, paper, glue and scissors to make a video game with what felt like most of those 5000 people.
We arrived at 9:30 in the morning and were still working out how to plug out laptop in to the big plasma screen when the doors opened at 10:00. From then until the doors closed at 17:00 our table was a tornado of cutting, gluing, drawing and colouring as dozens of children and adults dived in to the task of drawing bosses for our shoot ‘em up with wild abandon. For a while my picture scanning, data wrangling and game copying efforts kept up with the stream of submissions and people were delighted to see their creations flying around on the big screen within minutes of their creation. Soon enough though, the stream turned in to a deluge and by midday I had a sizable backlog of pictures to process.
Despite working non-stop all day with only a 20 minute break to grab a milk shake and have a quick look around I ended up with a backlog of dozens of pictures at the end of the day. At that point another problem emerged: the game is designed to slowly get harder at each level, but with so many bosses to add the game would get impossibly hard before half of the bosses were seen. Realizing that I had a lot more work to do before the game would be finished I released an initial version at the end of the faire and collapsed in an exhausted heap at the after party.
All of this is by way of being a long winded explanation as to why “You’re The Boss 2” wasn’t finished a week ago. Last night I finally got around to scanning in all of the remaining images, tweaked the difficulty curve to make it possible to get to the end and released “You’re The Boss 2 Extended” which can now be downloaded here.
Despite being one of the most exhausting days of my life, it was also one of the most enjoyable. It was incredibly rewarding seeing dozens of children and adults alike delighting in creating something fun together and watching Thomas Truax perform with his DIY instruments while talking to a professional gingerbread house maker made for a truly magical end to the day. I’m very proud to have been part of the first ever Brighton (not-so) Mini Maker Faire and look forward to taking part in many more (although I might bring along a friend to help next time!).
I hope you enjoy playing You’re The Boss 2 as much as we enjoyed making it.
I was a bit worried that my Terra Nova style talk on the philosophy of games, virtual worlds and magic circles would be too esoteric, but the room was packed and the talk generated some great discussion.
A video of the talk is now available at The Internet Archive thanks to @stevepurkiss and the slides are available on SlideShare. Thanks to everyone who came along to my talk and BarCamp and to @jaygooby and @profaniti for organising a wonderful event.
As usual I found most of the sessions interesting, but not always relevant as there’s a heavy design rather than development focus. The most relevant talk this year was Kevin Slavin’s final talk, Reality is Plenty, which argued that augmented reality is not the next big thing, just as it wasn’t in 2005.
Despite Kevin having a dig at Second Life and having spent a lot of time working on Augmented Reality with Blast Theory while at Nottingham University, I mostly agreed. While there are definitely use cases which benefit from augmented reality (fighter pilot navigation systems and things like Carbon Goggles which are all about making invisible aspects of objects visible) and virtual reality (simulation and virtual meeting spaces) there are plenty of others which are better served by other interfaces. Environments like Second Life are particularly exciting as they allow people to quickly prototype systems to discover which applications work and which don’t.
With both AR and VR it’s tempting to argue that they allow for intuitive interfaces as they model or overlay the real world: people know how to navigate a 3D space so they know how to use a 3D environment and they know how to use AR as they can see. Anyone who has done their time climbing the Second Life learning curve or trying to use AR to find their way around will know this clearly isn’t true. Apparently more abstract interfaces like maps, which talk to the mind rather than the senses are often much easier to use.
There’s a lot of work to be done to make both AR and VR as easy to use as 2D interfaces, let alone as natural as using real world senses. Now that the huge technical problems around networking virtual environments and tracking real world objects with mobile devices are starting to be solved, it is mostly UI work that needs to be done to make these technologies more widely used.
Even if the UX issues are solved there will still be many cases where speaking to the mind is much better than speaking to the senses.
