rubyquest - Day Eleven

Last wednesday we had asked if we could demo our game live at Waffle Wednesdays, a weekly morning event where people from the Miami tech scene get together to eat waffles and discuss all matters tech. Sometimes, people do presentations so Team RubyQuest thought this would be a great opportunity to get some early feedback on how we were doing.

The only problem was that while we thought we would be just showing our game and getting feedback on that aspect, the expectations were that we would be actually pitching our entire application as if it were the official Pitch Day that's happening on March 12th, 2015. 

We only found out about those expectations today, Tuesday, at 10am, so that gave us less than 24 hours to prepare a slideshow, rehearse it and have a presentation ready. That would have been enough time except for the fact that we also have class and we also have to keep working on our project, so that was much less time.  

Where to Begin?

We asked a TA to help us and we had no idea were to begin. Our first ideas were really bad and we got negative feedback, but that helped us notice that we were approaching this pitch from the wrong angle. We started brainstorming and liked some ideas, and started putting things together at around 4:00pm. 

A key question asked by almost everybody was: 'why are you making an HTML5 game while everyone else is making a Rails application?' which seemed obvious to us, but obviously was not to everybody else. We realized that we needed to really show why we are making this game and what we hope to accomplish, which is to give back to the tech community that we are now a part of and that's been great to us, by preparing the next generation of coders in a very fun and immersive way. 

Here's were the concept of gamification comes in. We want to complement the user experience by offering a very engaging environment. Getting deep into a story to us is one way to achieve this and that's why we are making RubyQuest.

In Other News

We are almost done with incorporating the Puzzle functionality which is a big part of our game. After speaking to the 'guru' of our game, we get taught a lesson on Ruby, and an input box appears on our screen. The user needs to input a response to the challenge posted, and that input gets sent to our server, which checks our database, and comes back with either a successful or erroneous response.

We have the AJAX post request working on our server side, we just need to finish implementing it on our game.

After eleven days, we have really learned a lot, and every day we keep learning more and more, we feel very confident that we will be ready to take on the next challenge as soon as Wyncode ends, and the junior developer quest begins.