Review Of Applied Methodology

The "Agile" development method I worked by in this project had it's advantages and disadvantages. For example due to me not having much experience with software such as Processing the technical feasibility of this project was initially hard to comprehend. Being able to adapt the design and  specification of my project as I became more confident with software served as a comfortable way of working and resulted in the development of the project making massive progress in 2-3 days intervals. An example of this is when I started coding the "If" statements into the sketch, I would first create one "if" statement and thoroughly test it's functionality by changing values and the output. Once I was confident in the use of "If" statements I then aimed to produce the sketch which was specified in my initial pseudo code using the combination of "if" statements and "functions".

 Once that was completed I then got feedback from friends and family who gave feedback on aspect of the sketch such as difficulty and presentation. The feedback received suggested that my sketch lacked a sufficient level of difficulty and the static background wasn't visually attractive for the audience.

This feedback would then serve as the primary focus in the next iteration and is reflected in 2nd piece of pseudo code. The way in which the difficultly issue was addressed in the second iteration is by implementing an additional three trackable objects which resulted in a total of five trackable objects for the whole sketch. Theses additional objects enabled me to implement more stages to the encryption puzzle resulting in the user needing to solve the distances of five objects before the sketch is completed. I believe this greatly increased the complexity of the sketch therefore solving the difficulty issue addressed in the feedback. These changes were undertaken in a process of constant implementation and testing as I wanted the distances between the objects to vary and not be predictable to the user.

To solve the "static visuals" issue I implemented video backgrounds which were made using the Adobe After effects software. After Effects enabled me to use the static image of a safe as a background aswell as apply dynamic distortion effects which hindered the visual clarity of the background image. This method enabled me to apply multiple "layers" of distortion effects which easily allowed me to disable certain effects as the user progresses in the puzzle. The disadvantage of doing this is that the file size of the project increased massively as the project folder now had to accommodate five different video files. The production of the videos was done relatively quickly due to the disabling of effects method I used which was helpful as the videos were rendered and altered multiple times before I was satisfied with them.

One issue I have with this type of project methodology is that after every iteration I had the feeling that my project still had aspects which could be improved which ultimately results in an endless cycle of development until the deadline is reached.