teaching machines

Final Project – feltonj – Design Document

November 21, 2011 by . Filed under cs491 mobile, fall 2011, postmortems.

For my final project I want to create a utility my fellow nerds will find useful during their adventures in the fictitious land of Skyrim, from The Elder Scrolls series. In the game there is a mechanic that lets you combine two or more different consumable ingredients  with similar properties which results in the creation of a potion or poison.

The reason for the app instead of just referring to a wiki article is twofold. The first reason is that alt tabbing out of the game on the PC to pull up your internet browser is a pain in the rear as you have to alt-tab back into it twice, hassle I tell you! The other is it provides a way for those that play on a console to find out this information easily as well as those of us who play it on their PC.

As you can see an ingredient has 4 different possible property, but they are all initially unknown. The one shown, vampire dust, the player can discover one attribute by ‘eating’ the ingredient in game but the rest you have to discover.

Below is a picture of the game’s alchemy user interface. It lists all the properties you’ve discovered and lists the ingredients that share that specific property.

My app aims to do the following:

  1. List all the ingredients, with pictures
  2. List all the properties of each ingredient
  3. List each potion recipe
  4. Let the user pick what ingredients he or she has and populate a list of recipes that can be created with that set of items.

The application would rely heavily on a database which would store all the ingredients, properties, and recipes, most likely this would be an internal database for the quick response times and there would be little need for one hosted as any updates could be published through the Android Market.

There would be several different Activities.