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.