GregSchwartz.net

At iPhoneDevCamp2 I worked with Nicole Lazzaro and Estelle Weyl to create TattleTalz. (iPhoneDevCamp2 is an unconference devoted to building native, and web-, applications for the iPhone and iPod touch.)

It’s basically an online version of the party game Two Truths and a Lie: there are three statements, two of which are true, one of which is not. You then guess which of the three is a lie.

It integrates with Facebook, which it uses to find questions your friends have submitted. The purpose of the game is to let you strengthen your friend network (since many “friends” on Facebook are people you don’t actually know well) by learning things about those “friends”. It’s still running, so you can go play (obviously, works best on the iPhone).

We worked on the rough concept together, then started building. We used tweets within a relevant hashtag as a basis for the content, so I designed a database, created it, then wrote a Twitter search-scraper and filled the database.

We also did some play testing in parallel, using paper prototypes. These were very useful, and pointed out some concepts we needed to clear up, and ways to make the interface more understandable.

Beyond the conceptual work we all did, Nicole and I did the play testing, the experience design, and the UI design. Estelle did the CSS, graphics. I did most of the code (Twitter scraping: Ruby on Rails, gameplay: PHP), and Estelle and I both worked on specific iPhone optimizations to the code.

At the end of the conference, TattleTalz won the Best Game award!