Sorting Fruits and Vegetables

Ontario Farming Sort                                                   Jason MacKenzie   100428687

For this eighth and final homework assignment I once again teamed up with Jordon Mattison, Alex Golenshchev and Sidd Panchal. Our goal was to create a game that would help teach the players which fruits and vegetables are in season in each different season. To do this, we decided on a simple card sorting game. The ultimate goal of our game is to be the first player to have your section of the deck sorted with the fruits and vegetables that are in season together.

Players start the game by simply splitting the deck evenly among the players. The answer key (kept face down between the players) is used at the end of the round to determine which players sorted their cards correctly. Players are to sort their cards into the four different categories:

• Ontario Summer Fruits 
• Ontario Summer Vegetables
• Ontario Winter Fruits
• Ontario Winter Vegetables

Ontario Summer Fruits and Vegetables

Ontario Winter Fruits and Vegetables

Once the sorting has been completed the players use the answer key to record how many cards they have sorted correctly. Players can also gain bonus points for the following achievements:

• Being the first to sort your pile of cards (+2 points)
• Correctly sorting the most cards (+2 points)

The player that scored the highest wins that round, best of 5 rounds wins the game.

The only issue I can find with the game is the fact that it can only be played so many times. Because it is a game meant to teach the players what fruits and vegetables are available in each season, it would not take long before the players learn the proper sorting for each card. This would mean that the only way to win would be to sort the cards faster than the rest of the opponents. This severely limits the amount of times this game can be played. This could be fixed with the addition of more and more fruits and vegetables (that may not necessarily be from Ontario). With more fruits and vegetables the game play and amount of times it is playable could be extended. Players wouldn't be able to memorize 100 different fruits and vegetables from all over the world so they would have to guess.

Hopefully our game achieves its goal in teaching the players when Ontario fruits and vegetables are in season. If they didn't begin to memorize the proper sorting then the game wouldn't be teaching them very well.

Chaiyya Chaiyya Dance Party                                                    Jason MacKenzie 100428687

For the last of our prototypes in this semester I teamed up with the same group I’ve done all the prototypes with, Matt, Brian, Xin and Nick. The goal for this prototype was to make a big party game based on the Bollywood music video “Chaiyya Chaiyya”.

http://www.intermission.nu/wp-content/uploads/dil-se_chaiyya.jpg

This was an interesting video that took quite a few views to determine some repeatable type of dance. Most of the video was the background dancers doing whatever they wanted and the two main dancers doing similar dances but with large variations. There were only a few small sections where the dancers were doing the same thing, and these sections were at most only 10 seconds long.

For our game, we decided to create spinners that serve as the major playing part of our game.

•  A player spins each of the two spinners four times to determine the dancing moves they will have to use. This begins a ‘round’.
• There are also time stamps found under the sample positions. This shows the time that that move is used in the music video.

The two spinners display the top and bottoms position you will be using

• The player has to keep each top and bottom spins together. For example the first spin of the upper body should be used along with the first spin of the lower body, and so on.
  
• Player then chooses a 20 second segment of the song and must use their four dance moves in any order he/she desires. They then perform their dance moves with the 20 second music clip.
  
• The player is judged by the other players and given a score between 1 and 5.
  
• The next player uses those same four dance moves in any order. They can use any 20 second segment of the video to dance to. They are also judged on their performance.
  
• A round ends once each player has used those four dance moves.
  
• The next player starts a new round and play continues until each player has started a round.
  
• Players then add up their scores from the judgments and the player with the highest score wins!  

The only issue we faced in the designing of this game was finding examples of the dancing from the music video that had a clear, identifying dance, instead of the dancers doing whatever they wanted or some variation on what the main two dancers were doing.

This game could be easily improved if we had access to some type of level maker in a pre-existing dancing game. For example if we translated the dance from Chaiyya Chaiyya into a game like Just Dance and used that to pit two people against each other at once. Not only would this make the game move a lot faster than the ‘one at a time’ game play we have now, it would also allow us to include more than just 20 second clips from the music video.

To improve on this game I think it should be expanded to use more than just one Bollywood dance scene. In my experience a party game (especially ones involving music) can get boring very quickly if there is only one available song to be repeated by up to 8 people. Also realistically, if Bollywood wanted to hire a company to make the ‘ultimate party game’, not only would they offer more than just Chaiyya Chaiyya, they would also be sure to send in some professionals to get the developers interested and knowledgeable about the dancing found in Bollywood movies.

I believe that a game like this has potential, but it is lacking in content and developer expertise. Still, I hope those who play it have some fun mixing up their Bollywood dance moves!