Mike Brinker

J2ME Scavenger Hunt

During the Game Developers Conference, I was intrigued by a mobile phone game that was presented by DC Collier. The game was sort of an update to the tamagotchi digital pet. The catch was that instead of pushing a few buttons to feed your pet, you had to actually take pictures based on descriptions of food that the pet wanted. Example, I am hungry, I want a fish. So the user took a picture of somthing blue, and depending on the color, turned the image into a fish for the digital pet. If not, the pet was fed somthing else that it may or may not have wanted.

We were fortunate enough to have DC Collier come speak to us and show us the exact same game again, and of course for the life of me I can't remember what the Japanese name was. I started thinking after his talk, "What if it's possible to put shape recognition in there too and make a detective type game out of it?" Thus was born the idea of Scavenger Hunt. I am currently working on design documents and learning J2ME to program it. Todd Furmanski, a fellow student, is going to help me pull it off. I will post more later. On a similar note, an old CS buddy of mine from Truman created an Image Mosaic Tiling program in Java. It is quite cool. For more info on JImage Mosaic, please go here http://jimage-mosaic.sourceforge.net/ and if you want to know more about me and what I do, please go here http://www.jimdrewes.com/~kenyon

Ah yes, and the name of the game I speak of is called, "Virtual Pet." And it's by Panasonic available in Japan. Thats what Colliers PowerPoint slides say anyways. Ah well, I will have to do some more digging.