I made an App for Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire. This was an interesting project with quite a lot of challenges!
The client wanted an app that featured GPS tours for their visitors. I was approached about it and admitted I had a lack of experience with making apps so did some research and approached a number of companies for a quote. Many of these companies already had the software to achieve this with little work involved but unfortunately they all wanted exorbitant amounts of cash between 8-20K, whereas the lake were hoping to get it done for only 2.5.
…the goal was to make it as simple and easy to use as possible, packed with many features.
One idea I had was to approach Clickteam – I had used their software many moons ago to make 2D games and was aware that the most recent iteration of Fusion was quite a bit more sophisticated with ‘more power under the hood’ and the ability to make apps.
I commissioned them to work on the GPS coding whilst I focused on planning and designing the app. The goal was to make it as simple and easy to use as possible, packed with many features.
- – GPS Guided Tours for 8 Activities
- – 3 Mini Games
- – Ability to show prices and buy tickets
- – Weather Stations and Webcams.
- – An ‘e-book’ presentation about the lake and its history.
I suppose that similar to the old BBC’s objectives I wanted it to “Inform, Educate and Entertain!”. Getting the GPS to work properly was difficult, it involved a lot of trips to the lake to take Long/Lat measurements and the making high resolution maps. I ended up with a lot of complicated photoshop files that needed to be highly organised for each activity. For example, “boating” would have different beacons than “walking” as it would need to be accessed from the water. I created a simplified map on top of the aerial map to achieve functionality similar to google maps: allowing users to switch between a satellite and stylised/simplified map.
Another challenge was in creating a ‘manual’ mode, where the user didn’t have to be at the lake using the GPS. With this mode they could just navigate around the map by scrolling and tap the various beacons. It was very difficult to implement in a way that the user could switch between the 2 modes but we got there in the end!
I could go on for ages about this but I also made 3 games. It had been many years since I made games and I was quite rusty so kept them as simple as possible. There is a quiz, a fishing game and a canoe race. The Fishing game is probably the best and I was quite happy with that!
The fun part was taking pics of my friend Al against a green screen so we could capture all the various poses of the fisherman! We attached the line to a load of weights so the rod bent making it appear that he’d caught a whopper!! For the lake graphics I combined 3D renderings of the water and boats with a 2D photo of the lake, and scrolling sky.