D.O.N. User Interface

No Pointing or Steering device. The game is played through Point and Click and the buttons on the mouse will remain constant functions. The player uses the mouse to navigate through the cities.

The layout of the screen will be a static map of a city or town. The destinations will be different popular restuarants and businesses. There will be weighted roads between different destinations. In the bottom left of the screen will be a checklist of the destinations the player needs to travel to. In the bottom middle will be the music player as well as the reset button, and the budget calculator. In the bottom right, will be a static image of the boss. He will occassionally give hints and advice as well as make random useless comments. He will be like unto the paper-clip dude in Microsoft Word. In the top left will be a menu button which will allow the player to return to the menu and navigate to other levels as well as exit.

This game is a puzzle game, which means that the interface needs to be very simple, so that the player can focus on solving the puzzle instead of being distracted by extraneous details.

The menu will be very simple. Each set of levels will have a button, and then each level will have a button. Players will win stars (two per level). One star will be rewarded for completing the level under budget and one star will be rewarded for finding the optimum path. As the player gets more stars, more levels will be unlocked.

Each business has an icon, which will be representative of the real icons of the businesses in real life. They should be easily identifiable.

The player will need to understand the numeric weights assigned to each road, as well as the total budget. The budget calculator will automatically subtract roads from the total budget, so the player does not have to compute the arthimetic himself.

Businesses will glow until you travel to them. Roads will turn red once you have crossed them.

The game design will be simple and straightforward.

There will be cute dings whenever a player goes to a business as well as a happy sound when the player successfully completes the level. There will be a music player so players can choose what music they are listening to, so they won't be forced to listen to annoying music.

D.O.N. User Interface

No Pointing or Steering device. The game is played through Point and Click and the buttons on the mouse will remain constant functions. The player uses the mouse to navigate through the cities.

The layout of the screen will be a static map of a city or town. The destinations will be different popular restuarants and businesses. There will be weighted roads between different destinations. In the bottom left of the screen will be a checklist of the destinations the player needs to travel to. In the bottom middle will be the music player as well as the reset button, and the budget calculator. In the bottom right, will be a static image of the boss. He will occassionally give hints and advice as well as make random useless comments. He will be like unto the paper-clip dude in Microsoft Word. In the top left will be a menu button which will allow the player to return to the menu and navigate to other levels as well as exit.

This game is a puzzle game, which means that the interface needs to be very simple, so that the player can focus on solving the puzzle instead of being distracted by extraneous details.

The menu will be very simple. Each set of levels will have a button, and then each level will have a button. Players will win stars (two per level). One star will be rewarded for completing the level under budget and one star will be rewarded for finding the optimum path. As the player gets more stars, more levels will be unlocked.

Each business has an icon, which will be representative of the real icons of the businesses in real life. They should be easily identifiable.

The player will need to understand the numeric weights assigned to each road, as well as the total budget. The budget calculator will automatically subtract roads from the total budget, so the player does not have to compute the arthimetic himself.

Businesses will glow until you travel to them. Roads will turn red once you have crossed them.

The game design will be simple and straightforward.

There will be cute dings whenever a player goes to a business as well as a happy sound when the player successfully completes the level. There will be a music player so players can choose what music they are listening to, so they won't be forced to listen to annoying music.

The Traveling Salesman - Extras

There will be a sandbox mode, where players can develop their own graphs to play. There will be a drop down menu of businesses that players can click and drag onto the screen. They will then connect businesses through a network of roads.

Once the player has designed there level, they must successfully complete the level. The reason for this, is that not all graphs are possible to find a route, and if it is not possible, then the user will have to add more roads. The money the user spends during their play will become the amount to beat.

Successful levels will be available to other players to download and play. Players will be able to rate levels based on how much they enjoyed playing it. Levels will be sorted in the download list by popularity and also by newness.

More about Traveling Salesmen - Environmental Dimension

Each set of levels for our game will be set in a different geographic location. The earlier levels will be in a small town, and the character will walk from place to place. As the game continues, the character will move to larger and larger locations, traveling from horseback, to car, to bus, to taxi, to planes and boats, and eventually to spaceships. Although most of the gameplay seems to be set in a society at our current level of technology, the ending levels will be in the future where space travel is possible.

The only people in the game is the salesman and the boss. The salesman will have a very simple avatar that will be seen moving from place to place. The boss will probably be a fixed image that will tell the player what do to through pop-up messages, and maybe give some hints every now and then. The relationship between the two characters is that the boss is in charge, and the player whose avatar is the salesman does what the boss tells him to do. If the player succeeds then the boss will commend him, and if the player fails then the boss will chastise him.

This world is based on capital. Everything that matters in gameplay is money. The goal of the game is to save as much money each level as possible. The world is industrialized, with common everyday businesses, like McDonald's, showing up in every level.

There will be no religions or superstitions built into the game.

The world will be made of bright colors with mostly straight lines for the roads.

The game will consist of buildings and roads. Each building will be some business from society. They will be brightly colored and easily recognizable. The roads will be black with yellow stripes.

The game takes place outdoors. The geography and architecture will be cartoonized versions of various businesses.

There will be a music player in the game. Players will have the ability to change the music to be something they enjoy. The mood of the game is a fun puzzle. We don't want people to stop playing because of annoying graphics or music. The graphics will be bright and colorful, but simple and pleasing to look at.

The details will be simple. We don't want extraneous details to distract from playing the game. Each screen will be very simple and the over user interface will also be very simple.

Reflections on D.O.N.

Last Thursday my group pitched our game design for D.O.N. (Drop Off Network), the game about the traveling salesman. I was very pleased with out presentation. Sarah made a visual representation of what a level would look like and I made some sample graphs to solve. We explained how our game would be played and the rules of each problem:

1. The player starts at any one business and has to travel to all other businesses along the roads shown.

2. The player can only travel on each road once.

3. The player can only visit each business once.

4. The goal is to find the optimum route that accomplishes this, although there is a small margin of error.

I realized that some of the graphs that I had drawn were impossible by those rules. This is probably were a computer is superior to humans. If presented a graph and told to find routes, the compiter would check everything and then say that none exists, while if told a solution exists, a person will continue to look and look, thinking that maybe they will find it soon, even if none exists. I wonder if this can somehow be incorperated into our game somehow.

We also need to come up with an explaination why people can't go across the same road or visit the same business twice.

We recieved some feedback on not having a reset button, so that we can better look for algorithms to solve this problem. However, I think we should instead collect data everytime the reset button is pressed so we can see the way the solution unfolded to people.