The project was based around design, ease of use, and trying to get rid of the stigma that e-learning has to be the same old boring thing.

My role was to create the entire application from scratch, using only still photo mock-ups. This involved chopping out the assets, integrating them into Flash or HTML, adding appropriate animations, and tweaking the design as functionality and usability were introduced… and that’s just to get the artwork into the project.

• I built the application with a PHP and MySQL backend to handle all of the server side functionality.
• There is a CRON job that calculates client statistics every few hours so we have an idea of how the system is being operated.
• There is a PHP class for dynamically developing PDF files for course certificates which I integrated into the system.
• System alerts are delivered using jQuery in a Growl-like fashion.
• Part of the admins side is a Flex-based application for creating quiz pools, including picture uploads, that can be randomly drawn from during quizzes on the user side.

The project was a great learning experience and helped solidify larger project ideals, such as how to handle continued feature and support requests, how to take a project from design to web, and how to best manage the available resources for the project.

There are three separate applications to the software:

• an administration program for setting up the game’s variables
• a point-of-sale application for issuing tickets, checking balances, and logging POS operators
• the player’s game which would run on separate touch-screen kiosks

The software was a lot of fun to write, and was very educational in putting together a larger project, handling features and changes once deployments had been made, and in keeping track of all source files to make sure everything was up to date on installations and upgrades.

The system had a PHP/MySQL backend that talked to the server through AMFPHP. Variables were loaded up from an external XML file at startup to specify the server’s IP address, whether to show the mouse cursor, etc. Over time I actually made a few versions of the game that gave a new view to the user, but still operated on the same backend structure so that both games could be operational at the same time in the same facility.

Other challenges for the project were interacting with a thermal receipt printer and sending reporting information from the server to the POS unit using CRON and a custom C# application for talking to an HTML printing program.

To test out the demo game enter the code: 12341234

Since I haven’t been keeping the site up to date as much as I should have I now redirect traffic to jonknapp.com, but you can view an archived copy of the site if you’d like.