Bowling Visit@Ambience

 

We finally had a first real team outing in what seems to be like an year! Its not that we haven’t met before, but all those meetings were ridden with Foodforce discussions, so they don’t count. Anyways, if you know something about the team, you will shake your heads in disbelief. For the uninitiated, the reason why we never had a team outing in the first place is because of the strange assortment of people in the team. The team contains a reallllly lazy bum as manager(thats me), ultra-sincere all-work-no-play coders like Vijit and over-worked Manu. This meant that even Mohit who had a social life(yes Mohit used to have social life before Foodforce) could do nothing. But well, things changed and a queer set of circumstances meant that we had our first team outing (without Manu sir but still!).

Ok first the circumstances. We won at technical fests in DCE for some events, got some cash prizes which obviously I did not go to collect. To cut a long story short, Mohit went in my place to collect the prize, we decided on a treat and Mohit persevered in making me come to Gurgaon! We invited Vijit who was really reluctant to come! His reasoning being that he has never gone for a social outing with friends before too! So, eventually out came the senior weapon, I ordered him to come(I know I am evil!). But, since we had no weapon against Manu sir, we could not convince him!

The outing was sooo much fun. Also, I got to know that well we(especially me) are not really cut out for bowling… perhaps we should stick to Foodforce only. Also, I got my eyes open, and finally realized what an 8% growth rate can do to a country. The place was looking so foreignish, it was just not like India.

Above are two videos of machana from the outing…..

Jaane Kyun hum kho gaye

A very slow sad song composed and sung by me… 

Foodforce2 Beta Release

The Beta version of the FoodForce2 game has been released for the XO, Windows and Linux platforms. The game has been developed in Python and Pygame. It is fun to play and also serves as a learning activity for children aimed at helping them to learn strategies through independent interaction and collaboration for managing community resources efficiently, and solve issues of varied proportions. It can also be used as a tool by the teachers to teach children how to become better and responsible community managers.

The work would not have been possible had it not been for the dedicated efforts by Mohit(who has practically spearheaded the development), Vijit(who has been extremely hardworking) and Peeyush with inputs from Manu Sir from time-to-time.

Some of the innovative features that have been incorporated in the beta are:

• The storyboard has been implemented in the game, which includes different scenarios, each of them is related to a particular key learning area or a social issue.
• The game is playable over the mesh network on XO, the trading scenario has been implemented over the mesh network.
• Drastic reduction in memory footprint of the game along with optimizations for efficient game-play.
• A major UI Redesign of the game has been done to make things more intuitive for the child.
  

For more info about the game click here. The game can be downloaded from here.

We have seen close to around 550 downloads in the past 3 days. (Mostly because of excellent publicity and great review by SJ like this. Go, download the game and give it a try.

We recently organized a hands-on session with the students and teachers of Delhi Police Public School in Safdarjung Delhi, India. We have documented the test methodology and test results here. The storyboard used in the game has been documented here. Please provide feedback at the wiki or through comments and suggestions on this blog.