Well it has been quite some time since my last blog post and there has been a BOAT load of happenings going on in FOSSLAND. SkyTime, Lemonade Stand, are all on their way to become solid-fantastic things!

SkyTime:

We in the SkyTime Team were recently accepted to the White House in Washington DC because of our activity at the National Civic Hack-a-thon a couple weeks ago. We originally planned on working with SkyTime because we weren't happy with how it performed on the XO laptop. We needed to update the drawing functions to allow the our North Carolina school to have an optimal beta game to test. Little did we know that our work would send our fledgling program to DC!! Currently, we have optimized SkyTime for the XO by removing the alpha funcitonality, and replacing it with only pygame blit's. We also have localized the game to include English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. The images were replaced with updated graphical backgrounds, and a score tracker was implemented to allow the students to keep track of how well they are doing.

Lemonade Stand:

We ran into a bit of a road bump because our school server never got off the ground do to unforeseen circumstances. SO we rethought our strategy and decided it would be best to decentralize the badges process and place the badges within a separate activity entirely, but have that activity update a webpage whenever it connects to the internet. Currently, the game creates a datastore object and saves specific data to the object, thus creating a place for us to begin our badges work. The Lemonade stand game as it stands has had an almost total make over. New Screens have been added, as well as new graphics for each screen, new themes for the stand, new localization themes for different languages to be selling native products instead of just lemonade. Difficulty settings, game modes, and new random events have been added to provide more depth to the game. We believe that this will encourage players to continue to play for the badges that will be implemented shortly.

Sash:

This is the activity that we decided on creating to display the badges, but will also have the functionality to award the badges as well. Because of the current excitement surround SkyTime, Sash has been placed on a back burner and still stands as just an icon that shows up on the Sugar XO homepage. Now that SkyTime has been shipped out, we plan on bring some heat to the Sash to start coding in some badge and display functionality this week to further our milestones before we need to present our summer research findings.

That's the most current updates we have so far, nothing too much in searching and usability in this blog post, but we will without a doubt find more bumps along the road to throw some sweet links and code bits here for all you devs out there.