Hackday Dojo
The Brighton Farm organised Hackday at the Brighthelm Centre was a wonderful chance for the coding dojo group to get together to work on something different and fun.
We reserved six places for the dojo regulars and arrived with no idea what the group would be working on for the day. Given the project-focus of the Hackday it wasn't run as a normal dojo session, we left the Randori behind in exchange for pair-development, stand-ups and iterations. Using the 5 minutes before we started to get an idea for the resources available we came up with the idea for generating a real-world interactive game using Inform 7 and the many different sensors that had been brought by Thom Hopper.
Tristan (from whom I stole the photo) has described the result as a "crazy Heath Robinson unholy mashup. A text-based adventure game was
enhanced to allow real-world interaction, such as pouring hot coffee on
a temperature-sensing chip, or scanning cards embedded with RFID tags. Extremely inventive and successfully delivered on time - a testament to
Scrum and the the agile programming techniques that they used."
Tom describes it as "one of the most obscure combinations of technology I've ever been involved with: a text adventure game written for the day hooked up to a web server, a temperator sensor and RFID reader. Somehow we managed to balance a plot on top of all this and got the various bits of tech (Inform 7, web server, SFTP server, Java Robot classes, RFID reader, USB temperature sensor, a load of custom Java serial code and probably some other bits I've forgotten about) working towards a more-or-less-coherent goal... all run over 3-4 hours, obviously in an Agile fashion :)"
Jez gives a very detailed account of the day. He summarises: "The eventual demo worked a treat. Thom had adapted the temperature sensor at the last minute to be embedded in the bottom of a cut off Coke can. Hot or cold liquid could be poured into this and be in direct contact with the sensor. This would post a message to a web server which the demo laptop was polling. The java Robot API was then used to write the appropriate command into the Inform game window at the prompt."
He rather interestingly comments on the two different focuses for the game-play development: "I was focussed on producing a single simplest interaction to prove that the system would work, whereas Simon was interested in the story as a whole (i.e. start with the solution and work backwards)." The narrative game-play vs technical implementation should have been split into separate development groups sooner, but this dynamic for is an interesting issue for iterative text-adventure game development.
For my part, although starting with helping out with the game development, I ended up finding myself pulled into the facilitator role. I'm not sure whether this helped the group retain focus, avoid obstacles, and coordinate - but I would like to think I wasn't just loitering around as this beautiful piece of madness was developed.
My sponsored fortune cookie said: "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" (Winston Churchill). The result was crazy, but certainly did work!
Discussion:
http://www.farmhackday.com/2007/11/21/built-at-hack-day/
http://www.jroller.com/jnicho02/entry/fun_at_brighton_hack_day
http://www.tomhume.org/2007/11/brighton-digita.html
http://blog.cogapp.com/2007/11/22/hack-day-roundup/
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