One week to go until the final presentation! Everybody’s nervous and excited at one time.
Yesterday we had a meeting with Mandy and Christle van der Ven, who is now the new Recruitment & Staff Marketing Manager at IKEA Nederland and also part of our projects. We showed her everything that we’ve done so far and we were very happy that she liked it.
Finishing up all the things now and waiting for you for the final presentation that will take place on the 16th of January, which is on the next Wednesday by the way, at MediaLAB at 1630. See you there!
On Tuesday the 18th of December we had a really fun day. In the afternoon we went ice-skating at the Jaap-Eden hall and this obviously didn’t go as smooth as we thought, actually maybe a little too smooth haha! Aside from the flailing arms and falling people(hihi!) we really had a good time.
Unfortunately Annika and Gionata couldn’t make it and Margreet had to work(boo!) so she couldn’t skate either. But everyone was present for the delicious cocktails afterwards! The FabulousShakerBoys prepared a workshop for us to make two very nice cocktails.
The first one was a Bramble and the second one the infamous Cosmopolitan, but that wasn’t all of it. During the chatter and sipping the cocktails a few people attempted to sing. Yes that’s right, we had a karaoke set waiting for us. Although we were a bit shy at the start, we made it up by going full throttle after a few cocktails!
After all the festivities we had pizza.. this wasn’t just “pizza” this was a battlefield.
On the 12th of December we had a very interesting lunch! We had a brown bag lunch with our colleagues from Creat-IT and the students of ACE! During this lunch the MediaLAB presented their projects and give the audience an inside look on what we have been working on. After everyone settled down and enjoyed their lunch the presentations started. The first group to go was Blending Amsterdam Reality and they presented a fascinating project where physical objects meets media interaction. For an in-depth look visit their project page. The second team that presented their project was the Wait. Think! team. They presented an application that helps the people on train station pass their time better, instead of just waiting for the train. Here’s a link to their project page. Last but certainly not least we presented our recruitment game we’re developing for IKEA. These presentation are recorded and documented and can be viewed here: Brown Bag Presentation
Nothing can go smoothly and apparently now is the time for our problems to occur. Yesterday we had a meeting with a specialist on game mechanics and we hoped that he will give us some advices on how to develop our ideas. However, the reality didn’t meet our expectations. Since the beginning of the project we were really enthusiastic about everything and tried to do our best, but it seems like we overestimated our possibilities. The verdict was that we cannot handle this project within the given time and also with the budget that we are provided with. The project became too big and in order to finish it on time and in a proper way we have to make it more simple. It could be done in two ways – we either change the whole concept or leave only one game instead of three.
We have done a lot already to work out the existing concept so we decided to stick to it but leave only one game. The only thing we have to change in this case is the story (to fulfill the games that we are going to leave out).
We are also currently looking for people who can help us in programming and animating. Today we had couple of interviews with programmers and luckily we found the person that matches our requirements. We are looking forward to meeting him in our team and we believe that he will help us to bring our project to life.
