Jean’s Weblog

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUNAAAA

to me in class today for the name for the shooting one. iBall-istics.

That’s something to do with shooting isn’t it?

With the presentation getting closer, I decided to come up with a name for my ball game thing. It’s actually quite an original and awesome name… wait for it… iBall. It’s a ball game and it’s on the iphone… iBall. Revolutionary.

I haven’t been able to come up with a game that mixes the games that Rob suggested, so I just thought that it could just be a main game with sub-games. Maybe. I was thinking the main game with the ball and the maze would be iBall. Soooo… when you enter the game, there’ll be a menu of which sub-game you want to play. The shooting game can be called iBall-oon. Clever yes? Hahah I thought it was hilarious, it just came to me in class. I am lame.

So I was sitting there laughing at myself when I realised that I probably need more sub-games so that iBall and iBall-oon won’t look to lonely on the menu screen. Then iBall-ance came to me. Yeah, not as good as the first one… With this game, there would be something like a see-saw and the player would have to keep the ball on it for as long as they can. They’d be holding the phone horizontally and the screen would be facing them, so they’d just tilt it left and right in attempt to keep the ball on. To make it harder, there could be wind or something.

 The title of this blog has nothing to do with what I’m writing.

 Maybe I should go with the petrol idea…

Another idea which was brought to my attention was the situations when you really need to go to the toilet but you have no idea where to find one. Wellllllll, if the iphone was able to tell you the closest route, it’d actually be quite convenient. I think. I’d be the same idea as the petrol one where you could just type in where you are, it would look up the toilets in the area and let you choose or just give you the route to the closest ones. It could tell you if it was a block for only males or only females or both and if you’d have to pay to pee and other stuff…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUCHING!

As I mentioned before, I was out of ideas and desperate for suggestions. So I decided to send a mass email to my friends asking for any ideas on anything. Then someone suggested petrol and I thought it was a great idea.

With the petrol prices always being jacked up and everyone continually looking for cheaper places and how in order to save money the further we drive the cheaper the price of the petrol needs to be (annabelle principle), my friend suggested that the iphone be able to help us with it. So maybe, we could type in our location in the iphone and using the handy google maps, the iphone would find all the petrol stations in the area and display their petrol prices, clever no? We could then choose where we wanted to go and our trusty iphone along with its handy google maps would map out the closest route so as to save petrol. Genius. (quoted from annabelle)

Does Annabelle have one or two n’s?

So the presentation is next week and I didn’t have an idea which I definitely wanted to stick with.

The only idea that remotely stood out for me was the ball in a maze rolly polly one, but still I wasn’t really happy with it. So during the tutorial I spoke with both Kaz and Rob and they helped me expand a little on it.

Initially, I thought it’d be just a one player game, but to incoporate some sort of social aspect, I thought that a more than one player game could be possible by placing the phones next to each other and the maze would be extended along the screens. So the ball would roll from one screen to the other and the players would have to cooperate to get the ball to the end.

Kaz then suggested that there could be some sort of competition where each player would have a ball and they would all appear on each players screen. So if one person was tilting the screen one way, everyone’s ball would roll. And if two people were tilting the screen in one direction, the balls would roll faster.

Then I spoke to Rob who told me about Super Monkey Ball (or at least that’s what I remember it being called). Something about a monkey in a ball which could roll around. I also told him about another idea which kinda just popped into my head. It’d be similar to a shooting game, where the player would use their thumbs to touch the moving objects across the screen. It could be like skeet shooting, where disc things would be shot across the screen and the player would have to shoot it, however, with the iphone, the player would just have to touch what went across. Then to make it multiplayer, each palyer could have a colour and on each person’s screens the coloured discs representing each player would be either shot across the screen or just moving around really fast and each person would have to touch their own and if they touch the other player’s they would lose points. I’m just typing whatever comes to my head, so I’m not sure if what I’m writing makes any sense (does to me though lol). Rob then told me that my ideas reminded him of Super Monkey Ball and Super Mario Kart and suggested that I somehow merge the ideas together into one game.

Still working on that bit…

Last night I was watching Gilmore Girls, then I thought, “wouldn’t it be convenient if I could watch this on the way to and from school because I’ve got a whole bunch of free time”. So I kept thinking about it and wondered how convenient it would be if I could upload the episodes onto something that would enable me to watch it anywhere. Then I realised that there was the video playing ipod contraption that already allows you to do that. BUT does it allow you to upload actual dvd files? I heard that whatever you download it has to be in a certain format so that it will play on the ipod. So I guess I need to look it up to see if you can just upload your dvds onto the ipod and if that already is possible with the iphone. If not, I was thinking maybe some sort of machine that you could put your dvd in and then connect it to your iphone (so that you don’t have to go through your computer) and then press a button and it would just upload or whatever and then presto; portable Gilmore Girls, or whatever you wanted to watch.

 Was just a thought, but again, don’t think that it’s high tech or innovative enough to produce the “hey, that’s cool” factor.

 Oh, and also, I was talking to my friend today about it and he was thinking of putting a breathalyzer (no idea how to spell it) on the phone. Would that be possible? And would it actually come in handy?

Very first entry!

 umm…

I started off with Tiddlywiki at first but I couldn’t save anything I had written so I just stopped. Realised that everyone had already gotten a blog so I thought that I probably should get one as well. Got an account today and here I am typing, I mean blogging.

Realised that I hadn’t actually thought much on the project when I heard all the suggestions and ideas from other people. I only had a sort of idea when I heard Rob say in the tute that the iphone had some sort of thing built into it which lets it know if it was upside down, downside up, sidedown up or updown side. Maybe not the last two. But that got me thinking about that game where you have a maze and you have to roll the ball from through the maze from one end to the other. So I thought maybe the phone could have a game like that where you could hold the phone and just move it around and what not, if that makes any sense. Don’t think that the idea is that great though. Seems a little… childish? for something so sophisticated. And also, there are most likely better ideas which are waiting to be thought of.

 So yeah… I think that’s it for now.