The story of why iGalaxy stopped just short of the finish line
April 2009
The fall of iGalaxy...temporarily
Ian Graves and Chad Godsey of iGalaxy.
Of the five final teams competing in the RJI iPhone Student Competition, four developed their apps. Three released them to the public. The fifth team, which proposed an app called iGalaxy, chose not to release theirs because of a number of growing concerns and issues within the team.
Chad Godsey, Drew Stewart, Mike Daly and Ian Graves worked on iGalaxy, a game incorporating GPS and advertising.
“iGalaxy is a social multi-massive role playing type game,” Stewart said.
“It uses (the) GPS capability of the iPhone to create a video game world on top of the real world,” he said. “So, the way you travel in real life is where you travel in the video game, and thus, to play the game you actually go out into the real world. You can visit new galaxies or new planets and you gain new items, new skills, or you can meet up with friends, or you can even get in a dog fight if you’d like.”
The idea for the application came long before the competition even began.
“It was kind of a pet app that we had in the back of our heads for a while,” Graves said. “We were just kind of looking for an avenue or a reason to develop it.”
Graves, Daly and Godsey took on the challenge of programming the app, while Stewart had a different job.
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“I’d say my role was really just kind of to incorporate advertising into it,” Stewart said. “Because all three of those guys are just amazing at making a fun, playable game, but with my experience as an advertising student, I was able to help work the advertising aspect into it and develop a way in which the application could eventually make a lot of money and sustain itself and the people who maintain it.”
Throughout the development process, multiple problems began to arise for the students as well as the faculty facilitating the competition. The biggest issue was over copyrights and who owned the game.
“The university has some very long established rules for what you do when a faculty member or a student or a staff person invents something, whether it’s software or some other kind of thing, contraption, device or whatever, and those rules spell out what the university’s take in this project is and what the student or faculty member’s take is in the project,” said Mike McKean, director of the RJI Futures Lab.
“Those rules, as you would initially interpret them, really were a disincentive for a student to want to build something new like this because they got relatively little in terms of the ownership and the benefits from having created something brand new.”
According to McKean, the university’s lawyers and business development experts helped come up with a looser interpretation of the rules. While this did give the students more value, it still did not give them ownership of the game. However, the students gained a bigger share of the profits if any arose in the future.
Once that problem was settled, another arose regarding support for the application.
“Somebody’s got to provide back-end support for (the app),” McKean said. “Who’s going to do that? If the university owns it, is the university going to provide that? Are the student teams expected to provide that? How do we do it?”
iGalaxy also began to run into some game-specific issues they had not been envisioned when starting development. One was the privacy of the user.
“Our biggest concern was security of GPS,” Godsey said. “Over the Internet anyone could know exactly where you are. That’s a little tricky to maneuver, so we had to worry about how to handle that.”
As privacy became an issue, new questions mounted in the team members’ minds.
“We hadn’t really thought through (privacy) enough at the beginning,” Graves said. “We realized this toward the end that if you don’t want people to see you, what if you do, what if you don’t, what if you want to have a block list? What if minors play the game? What if there’s malicious users? What if all this and this and this and this? It was too much really to handle in that short period of time, and I personally thought it was kind of a big ethical and liability issue.”
Drew Stewart, an Ag Journalism major, appears before a team of judges to pitch iGalaxy's iPhone application.
As other issues within the group increased, and the deadline to finish the app creeped closer, the team realized the app might not be ready on time. When one of the developers graduated mid-way through the project, communication within the group began to break down.
“When we started to communicate less, I believe that’s where the problems arose,” Stewart said. “When we stopped doing that, progress slowed to a halt, and I imagine we weren’t getting things done that we needed to get done.”
The deadline hit and the app was not completed, so the team made the decision to drop out of the competition.
“It became very apparent that we were not going to finish with anything that’s really something we would like to say is iGalaxy,” Godsey said.
While the group is no longer a part of the iPhone competition, the team members do plan to continue to work on the application with hopes to release it in the future. Ideas have been tossed around about making the game more episodic or story based.
Overall, Godsey, Graves and Stewart agree that the project has been a tremendous learning experience.
“We had different types of ideas coming into it, and we had to figure out how to fuse those ideas together and how to work together and how to make our schedules kind of come together for the project,” Godsey said.
Stewart found himself learning to be a more supportive team member
“I would say that if you have very talented people that you’re working alongside of in a project, make sure to do everything you can to give those people everything they need to do to get it done,” he said. “Make sure you provide the most nurturing environment for them to let their talents take over."
The iGalaxy team even helped the faculty learn something, too.
“They more than any team helped us to understand where some of the pain points were, where some of the real issues are going forward as we try to do more of this,” McKean said.
“So, in a sense, you can say it is a success, because they are willing to share all the things that went wrong or the issues and concerns that they had, and that not only helps us internally, but I think it’s useful for other media people or other students who might be trying to do a similar thing.”
Written by Lindsay Manigold, student, Missouri School of Journalism. Edited by Mary Lawrence