For the capstone project, we will introduce you to a fictitious game development company called Eglence Inc. One of the products, as you know by now, of Eglance Inc. is a highly popular mobile game called Catch the Pink Flamingo. The objective of the game is to catch as many pink flamingos as possible by following the missions provided by real time prompts in the game and covering the map provided for each level. The levels get more complicated in mission speed and map complexity as the users move from level to level. It's a multiuser game where the players have to catch pink flamingos that randomly pop up on a gridded road map just like you see in this example. The missions change in real time. For the player or a team to move to the next complexity level, they need to have at least one point in every map grid cell. In other words, cover the whole world map. An example mission would be, catch the pink flamingos on land with stars on their belly. In which the player should only click on the flamingos that match the mission criteria. In this case, flamingos with stars being on land. If the player tags any other flamingo on the map, he, she, or his/her team gets a negative point, that's minus one, on that map location. After the initial sign-up, a player, or user, is asked to play the level one individually without joining any team. This is where the user gets trained as a player and starts building a game history. Level 1 is an easy entry to the game composed of only 64, that's 8x8, grid cells, and longer, more obvious, and fun missions. Upon completion of level one the player gets asked if he, she wants to join any team or form a team and will continue the rest of the time as a team player. Even if that means the user is a one person team of his or her own. At the beginning of each level, the game creates a brand new map with more cells than the level before. The complexity of the missions also increases. The missions change more frequently as the levels increase. The game is played by millions of people online throughout the world. The game's websites sends free cool stuff to registered users. Registration requires user to enter demographic information such as gender, year of birth, city, highest education, etc. However, there's a chance that the user enter inaccurate information about themselves. Each user will be ranked individually by the speed and accuracy of their click to completion. The rankings get tracked in real time and can be viewed both via the mobile app and the website for the game. In addition to score, speed, and accuracy-based ranking, the other players can see what parts of the map the user has the most points for. The players are also categorized based on their history as rising star, veteran, coach, social butterfly, and hot flamingo. These refer to the quality of players in addition to the game statistics. One of the goals of the game is to form a network of players to collectively cover the world map with pink flamingo sightings and compete other groups. Users can pick their groups based on player rankings and other stats. The teams are ranked publicly. There is a maximum of 30 members in a team and a minimum member of one. The players, ask to join a team, and get voted in when 80% of the team members allow. A team may choose to recruit, if they think a player can contribute or out vote the player, if a player is not contributing. The players are also allowed to change their teams and bring all their points along. The competition is built on point based economy where it is encouraged by the game providers. When all players leave a team the team automatically gets removed from public and archived by Eglance, Inc. The players of this game are enthusiastically active on social media and have strong associations with the game. The players keep in touch via chat boards assigned to the teams and also via social media like Twitter. A popular Twitter hashtag for this game is #CatchThePinkFlamingo, which gets more than 200,000 mentions worldwide per day. There are strong communities of users who meet via social media and get together to play the game. To help improve the game, Eglance Inc. collects real time usage activity data from each player and feeds them to its data servers. Users are allowed in-game purchases including binoculars to spot the mission specific flamingos. Special flamingos that count from more than one great plant. Ice blocks to freeze a mission for 20 seconds when needed. And trading cards to transfer the extra points from some grid cells to the ones without any data points. The game never ends, meaning there will always be a more complicated next level. A challenge for Eglance, Inc. is to keep the game interesting and engaging for players who have been around for a long time. They make use of big data analytics to make sure the veteran players are still around. We will be using this case study of Eglence, Inc. and the the Catch The Pink Flamingo game for our capstone project. I sincerely hope you have fun with it as much as we did.
