Brainstorming and Time Arrangement------First Personal Team Meeting

This is the first personal meeting of our team, the contents are mainly about two aspect: brainstorming for designing the game, the arrangement of time for the rest of the days of this week.

1. Brainstorming for designing the game:
Firstly, about the type of the game, we decided to design an avoiding game, such as "Flappy Bird".

Flappy Bird

The first assumption is that user can use their attention to control the altitude of a ball, higher attention level can make the altitude of the ball rise higher; if the attention level decreased, the ball will also descended. Furthermore, some barriers may appear from the right side and moving to the left side, so user need to control the ball using their attention to avoid the barriers.

However, via discussing, this game does not have a high playability, we need make the game more interesting, and we also need to add more game factors and more interesting designs to increase the playability. Therefore, this assumption was abandoned.

Another assumption is a horizontal version flight shooting game. An aircraft moves from the left side to the right side, and the background will moves in the opposite direction. Higher attention level of the user can make the aircraft rise higher, while lower attention level will make the aircraft descended. Similarly, some barriers will appear, user can control the aircraft to avoid them, or they can blink to make the aircraft shoot and break the barriers.

An example of horizontal version flight shooting game

This version is seemed to be more interesting, but here we got a problem: if the user blink continually, they do not need to control the aircraft, because they can break every barriers. This can also make the game boring. For this problem, we decided to design some barriers that cannot be broke, so the user have to control the aircraft to avoid them.

Considering the operability, we decided to make the aircraft descend by itself when the attention level of the user reduce.

Also, considering the difficulty of the game, flight will continue while the aircraft descend to the bottom of the screen, which means the game will be ended only if the aircraft is broken by the barriers.

The basic type of the game had been determined, next, we discussed some modification about the details of the game.

Firstly, about how to control the altitude of the aircraft, and how to make the game more playable, we thought we can use the reversal of the gravity to replace the attention level to control the altitude, and the attention level can be used to reverse the gravity: if the attention value exceed a certain value, the gravity will be reversed, and the aircraft will rise; if the attention value lower than this certain value, the aircraft will descend.The aircraft will fly faster if user blink. The assumption of shooting of the aircraft was removed.

However, if we use attention level to reverse the gravity, this game will become very difficult, because it is very hard for people to control their attention precisely. Therefore, finally, we decided to use blink to control the gravity, and use attention level to control the speed of the aircraft.

Next, some game factors which can be added into the game was discussed, such as we can add a enemy plane to pursue and attack the aircraft of the gamer. These factors will be added as needed after the basic coding is completed.

At the end of the meeting, we decided to program two games simultaneously:

• A horizontal version running game
• A horizontal version flight shooting game

All of them are based on BCI control.

These assumption are just some preliminary plan, some new idea may appear in the next three weeks.

2. the arrangement of time for the rest of the days of this week:

• Before Sunday, the testing of API with some exist game need to be completed
• Writing some simple code to test if the headset can work normally
• Continue to learn the Python Programming Language 
• Continue to update the blog
• The important achievement should be recorded into the blog
• The detail of every work, every progress and our findings or idea should be recorded into the log-book
• Finding some picture and music materials for game design