Mark Wubben works in Copenhagen, for a web 2.0 start-up company. Every year though, he comes back to Amsterdam to deliver a project at Hacker Camp.
Last year he and Eelco worked on the V-Bird project; a purple and orange bird-alike throwy with a lot of hardware in it. Unfortunately the bird only flew for 15 minutes, before it crashed and only lived on in our memories and the Mediamatic website.
The fun of throwing stuff proved to be persistent as Mark set out to create a V-Bird 2 project (something with throwing stuff) for this year. From last year he learned that throwing hardware is probably not a fertile undertaking. But the throwing of tags however, could be big fun! A RFID Frisbee provided the obvious core of the project.
The initial gameplay was a little bit more complicated then the final implementation. Willem put his finger on the core of the gameplay, which is comes down to two teams fighting for a time stamp. 'The easier the gameplay, the more fun' became the mantra of ikSpin. Mark trying to pull of a completely fresh face after a week of hacking - At Picnic 2009
Eelco - Trying to pull of a completely fresh face after a week of hacking
Mark explains that every Hacker Camp he learns how important it is to dump down a project. Simplify until you can't simplify more and then simplify even further. This year he also learned that even the simplest of projects can have disastrous consequences, as there was a serious incident when one of the players got injured when she fell on the ground. Even the dumbest projects can still go wrong and sometimes these troubles cannot be overcome, since they just lie outside of your capabilities.
