Last week I mentioned that the goal for our next team meeting we would finalize our overarching narrative to void branching out into too many directions. When the meeting came around, we reviewed the four different narrative paths to refresh the ideas in our minds and ensure that everyone knew them. Each of us voted on the choices we favored and explained our reasoning to the group in hopes of persuading the team. I favored option one, followed by number three as those two gave us the opportunity to make the collector appear as an evil, villain only to be revealed at the end to be neutral or a victim as well. In the end, however we decided on option four in which the collector attempts to take possession of the protagonist's body. On the note of the group meeting, we ran into several problems concerning attendance, one of which sparked serious tension among the team. On Friday, we had one member send a message informing us that he would most likely miss the Sunday appointment. When Tyler inquired as to the reason, he responded with a less than satisfactory reason about playing Borderlands 2, which quickly turned into a heated debate. The excuse he gave was a poor decision on his part as it turns out there was more to it and a more legitimate reason to miss out on Sunday. Thankfully Lacy intervened and helped calmed everyone down before things got out of hand. We decided to be lenient once we knew the whole story and this member has done an excellent job up to this point and he agreed to Skype in during the time block. Along with this problem, another member messaged us right before the meeting saying that he also wouldn't be able to make the reason but would Skype in as well. The Skype calls didn't go as well as actually attendance and thus we came to two conclusions. First, Skyping in slows the team down too much, and secondly, when you know you will me missing a meeting, it's extremely important to inform the team as soon as you know. As for the rest of the week, I began production of the tutorial level with several members of the team. The development began with planning the layout in a white box of the level as well as determining how the narrative would play out. After completion of this white box, we handed it off to the level design team to implement it into Flashpunk. In return they asked us to begin creation of filler art as they worked in the game engine. I've began creating some art, however; at this point we haven't completely decided on an art direction or style to aim for making asset creation difficult. The next major goal I have for the team is to decide on this so our efforts do not go to waste.

Pendulum Ascension continues to progress well as we near the end of the first couple weeks of the semester. The team developed a number of great ideas in narrative as well as mechanics during the brainstorming sessions and now has a general plan for the course of the game. Our programmers, Jeremiah and Phil have researched into 2d game engines for our project and decided on the Flashpunk system as our development tool. As of today, the team successfully installed tortoise svn on their computers following up with modifying and committing changes to a text file for practice. Delving deeper into the narrative side of things, we fleshed out details of our story beginning with the name of our protagonist, Marti T. Levin. Two factors went into the decision of this name, the first being that it is based off an anagram of "time travel" and secondly, it is a reference to Marty Mcfly Back to the Future. Inspired by the music box level from Castlevania as part of a discussion with Greg, we decided to make the setting of our game inside a clockwork mansion/museum which provided us with a gothic/Victorian steam punk art style. The idea of a clockwork museum also greatly increases the narrative possibilities of our puzzles. Speaking of puzzles, we decided upon creating two types, mechanical, which requires interacting with the environment and the use of abilities, and cerebral puzzles that entails clever problem solving. As mentioned earlier our programmers decided on Flashpunk as our game engine and have been hard at work creating essential functions for our game. I had recently talked to Phil this afternoon about some questions I had for implementing the level design and was pleasantly surprised what features they had working. Jeremiah already has an inventory system working within the engine and implemented placeholder assets for testing. Phil's work involved developing a pause feature and working out the bugs/ problems such as losing changed states of the game as we entered pause. This same problem also spells some trouble for level design as at this point we are unable to load a different level without losing changes made in game to the previous area. Over the past week I've noticed one problem I hope to have resolve by the end of our next team meeting. We have brainstormed many great ideas for the narrative portion of our game, however; at this point we seem to be branching out into numerous story ideas that do not fit with previous ideas, and seem to drift further and further away from important elements we wished to include. At the next meeting I plan to have the team settle on a specific narrative and lock it down so we can focus on creating for it.

As a new school year begins, so too does a new game project and this time I am a team leader. The game, called Pendulum Ascension puts you in the role of appraiser trapped within a morbid collector’s clockwork museum, where you must gather antique artifacts from a plethora of cursed collections in order to solve past murders by arranging these artifacts in specific combinations and peer into a previous pocket of time. The first week involved introductions of all the members of the team, familiarizing them with tools we will be using, and other tasks to get the team ready to start producing a game. From there we began flushing out ideas for the game and produce the high concept document. Each meeting we have we generated great ideas and have already planned out several mechanics, level design and narrative elements and will soon begin implementing them into our game. The only issue I have seen so far is that league of legends has shown to be our Achilles heel as it greatly distracts the team, but has yet to prevent us from accomplishing work.

Over this summer, I had the privilege to work on the Virtual Sanford Underground Research Facility (vSURF) project. The vSURF Project is a collaborative effort to enrich the learning of science and research through computer technologies including immersive simulations and games. My job required me to improve the aesthetic quality of one such simulation designed as a virtual tour of the deep underground science and engineering laboratory (DUSEL) under construction within the Homestake Mine, in Lead, SD. I enjoyed the modeling, texturing, and implementation of the models, and expanded my knowledge on tools and techniques used in this kind of work. I further expanded my skills through reading and following the tutorials in a book called Creating 3D Games with Unity & Maya. The book is great for game design and often has sections for hints and tips, as well as why sections to explain the reasons behind steps of the tutorial. I spent the rest of the summer on my own project following the character modeling section of the book.