Tiny Techs

A little about our team

Two designers and two developers - a match made in heaven. Madison Brown & Ainsley Sedore in one corner, tackling the design and prototyping. And Sami Haddad & Kirill Afanasiev fearlessly tackling the backend. Together they'd create something that they're proud of.

Inspiration

In all honesty the inspiration of our project came from a lengthy discussion on what we were going to create. It wasn't a "ding" lightbulb moment, it was more of a - discover the idea as you go sorta thing. The discussion was mostly back and forth between web designers and the developers. We wanted to find something that could blend our talents together. Trying to juggle this and the difficult topic of the hack amateur was difficult. We found ourselves coming back to the idea of a teaching product that aims to educate. Then we started thinking about how we could achieve that goal. Would it be a web app? An android or IOS app? a website? While all these suggestions are good we came back to the main problem. How do you effectively create a product meant to teach elder people technology... with technology when they don't understand technology? This is the question that stumped us. Then we thought about maybe an AI leading someone through manuals. But thats been done before and the elder still have problems navigating them. We also didn't know if we could get an AI project done in time for submission. But what is better than as AI that took 24-hours to make leading an elder through a lesson? A real human. But not only would it be a human but it would be a grandson or a younger friend they have.

What it does

Which takes us to the question of - what does it do? Tiny Techs aims for elder grandparents, per se to play the game with their grandchildren or their younger friends. The more tech savvy person would help them along to make sure they followed the instructions. We are entrusting the user to be a good leader. The level we created has two main challenges. One is turning on and changing to input of a TV, and the other is switching a breaker back on. These are just an example of what lessons we could teach elders through this game. Not only do they get to spend time with their grandkids, but they can connect with them by doing something they like. It's a very easy game and has no death or forced restart so its not stressful (as some games are).

How we built it

Well, we started by collecting fonts, colours and styles we wanted to incorporate. We started off thinking we were going to do an 8-bit style side crawl game. We quickly realized that this was not the direction we wanted to go as designers. We were drawn to bright cute colours with lots of contrast. Not to mention, pixels are sometimes hard to see for people without the best vision. Madison and Ainsley started on the sprites and backgrounds. They kinda went a little crazy and dipped their toes into interior design in the form of a blue brick house with pink flower beds. They quickly developed the characters Petal and Glow on XD. Ainsley worked on building the backgrounds up (in XD as well) while Madison did the animations in after effects for the developers Sami & Kirill who started on building the game up in Unity.

Challenges we ran into

When we began to develop ideas together, it quickly became clear that we all came from pretty different backgrounds and wanted a variety of different things. We had just met 5 minutes ago, of course we weren't going to immediately fall into place, we had the disadvantage of trying to get to know each other in tandem with forming a coherent idea during the first night. We eventually found a mix of a do-able challenge. When we started to develop our game we ran into issues with Unity mainly. The developers first ran into problems with the source control not syncing every file, in laymen terms they would have to delete then re-download the whole file every time we commit which kinda defeats the purpose of source control. They also were having trouble finding up to date tutorial and information on Unity with the problems they were having. We also ran into the problem of having no de-bug or error highlighting in Visual Studio. It was a bit of an up-hill struggle for the developer team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We accomplished a couple things we are proud of. One being the Prototype we were able to get done on time since the game didn't end up being able to fully function. Sami is also proud of making the original music for the game. The developers weren't able to get the game fully functional but for their first time with Unity, they're pretty proud. It was their first Hackathon and they really brought their all.

What we learned

We learned that it is extremely difficult to build tech for people that don't know tech. Instead of looking at the issue as a whole and trying to solve the whole problem, we chose specific problems that could help to bridge the gap and get elders started with basic lessons. Technology is overwhelming if you don't know what you're doing. The developers also learning a more practical skill - Unity. They now understand the basics.

What's next for Tiny Techs

For Tiny Techs we'd like to fully develop the game and follow the idea through all the way. We would also like to develop a second level that gets progressively harder to play and the levels have harder items (wifi router, computer set up, printing on a printer). We'd love to have the game be fully functional and working with all the interactions.

Built With

• .net
• after-effects
• c#
• unity
• visual-studio
• xd