Maunderings: End of Semester

Well, it's been a crazy semester, that's for sure. Having a collaborator in another class on a different schedule was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

At first is was all okay, he was writing papers, and by helping him get his ideas onto paper it was helping me formulate the ideas in my head. We came up with the concept, the nitty-gritty bits, and life was good, right? I got through my assignments with only a few hitches, he was getting his papers done, and things were progressing like normal.

And then reality kicked in.

Our original IP idea got shot down, because it didn't tie the game and the internet content together closely enough. Okay, time to fall back on another idea garnered from a session with an expert - tying a galaxy together with links. The planet content stayed about the same. But how do we determine what is what?

At first celestial objects were going to be stacked based on the amount of links. Then it was changed to organize it based on domain. But then how does that work? Well, let's make the planets have everything determined by their content. Easy enough. Except that in order to do most of the stuff we'd want to put into the program we'd have to pretty much write a whole new browser, perhaps.

And then there was the headache of the division of the project - what's Jasper's role and what was mine? When it was all concept, then it was both of us, but when project development kicked in then it got a bit blurry. Jasper's original intent was to have me doing interface design, yet I seemed to have more and more programming pushed on me. Do I stick to just the visuals and ignore these demands at the risk of my grade, or do I try to stumble through a programming language I don't know at all, and have no idea where to start from, and have to rely heavily on outside help?

Meanwhile, our project is getting great reviews from other people, and getting a fair amount of mention. People don't know exactly what our idea is, but they do like what they do know.

So in the end, after one last nerve-wracking presentation, I find out people don't really know at all what we want to do with this project. Some think it should be as open as possible, with lots of markers to see what other people have done, and others want to go against the whole exploration thing and make it into another version of a social networking site, where everyone can accumulate in popular areas and ignore the rest. As much as I would like to go against that as much as possible, is it really worth fighting the norm? Maybe we should put some sort of blogging function into the site so people can endlessly browse heavily trafficked areas and ignore the outer reaches where we're trying to encourage them to explore. I guess the whole "mapping the internet" pales in interest to a sort of storytelling universe, where things happen out of your control, but you can make up stories to justify it to your own liking.

Well, it's all things we'll have to consider over break, and decide whether or not it could be implemented.