Dare Blogs: Pictrail’s social game based around taking selfies

What’s your game?
Our game Selfienation is a social-based game that offers selfie challenges which are split into a variety of categories and difficulties. Players’ completed selfie challenges will be posted on the game news feed where they can also see their friends’ completed challenges and rate them.

The game offers the chance for players to compete to gain the best selfie and also be placed on a leaderboard for having the most challenges complete. Selfienation offers players a chance to view their own and friends’ profiles as well as galleries.

We have noticed that the industry has been looking for ways to tackle educational games and so we have used a popular trend to try and incorporate an educational element as each challenge allows the players to learn something about that challenge. Our game has integration with Facebook and players can share their completed challenges to the home page.

What has the Dare experience been like?
So far the event has been enjoyable, interesting and surprising. In order to get to where we are, we had to open up new horizons of development. It has been challenging but rewarding as we got to try something new.

What have you learned from Dare?
From a team standpoint, cooperation and issue/time-management is key to success. We have learned that with enough time any problem can be figured out and solved. We have all further developed our skills and got first-hand experience working closely over the summer with one another and learning to overcome problems together.

Are you looking forward to ProtoPlay?
Yeah, it’s probably one of the best parts of Dare as we get a chance to enhance our marketing skills and finally show people our work! We also look forward to seeing what everyone else has been working hard on.

Since we’re creating a selfie game, we plan to do challenges that are for Dare alone that people can complete! We cannot wait to see what people can do. We would like to see the public’s level of interest in this project, mainly. We would like to see how they rate us and the project as well.

What are your ambitions after Dare?
Oh wow, so much! Dare has given us an opportunity to do the fundamentals of the game and the basics. We hope to do so much more with it that we think people will love. We hope to implement a system where players can duel one another with their selfies. This is where one player dares another player to compete with them in a selfie duel.

We also hope to put the game on iOS and Windows so that all the players can join in! We also want to further develop player rewards and also just further polish everything. We would love to add a GPS notification where you get notified of challenges in your area.

Follow Pictrail on Facebook to learn more about their game.

Dare ProtoPlay and Indie Fest is on 13th-16th August in Dundee’s Caird Hall and City Square, with all 16 Dare student games on show, indie games, talks, workshops and more. http://www.dareprotoplay.com

Team members:

• Cheri Skivington, Team Leader and Game Designer, Glasgow Caledonian University
• Ricardo Barros, Programmer, Glasgow Caledonian University
• Daniel Prihodko, Programmer, Glasgow Caledonian University
• Zoltan Tompa, Programmer, Glasgow Caledonian University
• Irina Kovalova, Artist, Glasgow Caledonian University
• Hajnalka Szanto, Artist, Glasgow Caledonian University
• Reka Lux, Artist, Glasgow Caledonian University