This week we moved away from the conceptual part of the project and into the prototyping phase of the project. To maximise our productivity we each took a particular area to focus on so we could cover the whole project. Josh and I left Liam to develop the situation generator mechanic after last week where we worked out how we wanted it to run so he could go away and build it. Josh picked up the design of the website and I focused on the words and the situations that the generator would provide. As I will be helping Liam to build the website (he will do the back end and I will build the front end), Josh has been communicating with me with any updates to the design he has made so I can provide feedback and he can quickly go and make changes so between us we have been working through that. Something that we have realised throughout this process is that we could make a website that is really cool and gimmicky that shows off our design skills and Liam's ability to build a really cool website, or we could design a site that suits our project and serves its purpose well, while still looking good. We certainly have agreed to go for the latter.

We are using this humourous approach to entice people to come to our website and give it a go for themselves, but in order to get the message across ("you should be donating blood"), we need to present it in a manner that is less joking. So firstly we have a project description that explains the context and the concept of our project in a paragraph so that once people have their situation and excuse they read it to really find out what the whole thing is about. To aid this however, we need to make sure there are no distractions from this, which is why we have opted to keep the site as simple as possible otherwise people will get distracted and not grasp the meaning behind the campaign.

My main focus this week though was the word lists and situations and it is proving a lot harder than I thought. It turns out not every present tense verb works in any sentence the same as any past tense verb, so this has been a challenge for me and also making the situation starters unilateral so that any of the words would fit. The problem here is that different people, places and objects require different precursors (e.g. your cousin, the Mad Butcher) but if you take all of these out of the sentences then it becomes very empty and makes it hard to imagine a sentence coming out of it. I also noticed that the sentences were all basically the same except the person at the start of the sentence would change (i.e. your boss caught you..., Dad saw you...). So some creativity is going in to that. I can't even include my solution to this in this blog because I'm still working through it but hopefully in the next one it'll all be there. Another key part of this week has been looking into what makes normal things funny, and it turns out that you just have to get super specific with it. After testing some of the phrases with our words in them on people, I found the ones where the objects/places/people are specific got the best response coupled with the localised ones to Auckland so they are more relatable. So something like "a train" becomes, "the 4:57pm western line service to Swanson". A lot of these will require tweaking and sure some people won't get some of them but that is just the nature of humour.

To keep track of everything we need to do and make sure we don't miss anything, we have created a Kanban board on Trello which is split into the different aspects of the project so that we know when a whole section is complete and then we can make sure everything is done. Another piece of admin we did as well was assign particular deadlines to some of the tasks in order to keep the project flowing consistently. All of this is available on the Trello but the first major deadline we have is the UI/UX design of the website which has to be finished by the middle of the Easter break. This is so we don't get stuck on it and keep tweaking it to its death, and so that the design isn't changing while we are programming it.