APD Week 10 – Play and Nature

APD Week 10 – Play and Nature

Click through of App - https://youtu.be/2ZUyQh6Tajw

Theme

For this week’s theme, Priyankar and I looked to a way of capturing nature by participating in it. We decided to go with the idea of a scavenger hunt, by using objects in the natural environment. One of the ideas I wanted to stick to was that as players we don’t disrupt the environment, not taking actual samples of objects and simply observe (In this case taking photographs)

Methods

We started by brainstorming ideas of how we could use the objects naturally found around us and create some sort of experience. We talked about sound cues, weather and how that could influence a game given Melbourne’s unpredictable nature. We finally settled on a scavenger hunt type experience, where players could compete against each other across locations and seasons. Priyankar used this to create a concrete ruleset for the way the game works, and as a way of showing how a game like this would work, I created a high-fidelity mock-up in XD of the user side app that a player would use when doing the scavenger hunt.

Context

The obvious inspirations for the idea were the scavenger hunt, the idea of going into a space and finding items is a form of play that we become accustomed to at a small age. This has been replicated with applications that allow lists to be dealt out to carry out organised scavenger hunts, or even completely morphed into something like Pokémon go where an already established video game is brought into the physical world.

The idea for a way to gamify gathering items in the wild came from the game Stardew Valley where the player has a soft objective to gather bundles of various theming and then receiving rewards based on completion.

Reflection

This app was only a visual protoype, and given the amount of time we had, as well as the expertise in mobile development that both priyankar and I had, I think the outcome was well scoped.
The natural progression of this would be to have the app work and be fully functional as well as testing this in the real world.