This week, I plan to take a break from talking about the progress of Pendulum Ascension and instead discuss a subject that's been on my mind lately. Over the course of the semester I have worked on a few projects, as well as played several games and it has me thinking of the matter of winning and losing, with specific focus on the facet of losing. A large portion of games involve some aspect of victory conditions and on most occasions punish the player for failing to meet these. Generally, punishments tend to upset the player especially if they feel unjust and if failure occurs often enough, they may end up "rage quitting" and have a hard time enjoying the game. I want to make it clear that I am not saying that losing is a bad thing to have in a game, or that there should not be any form of punishment for failure. I believe that they have an important role to play with a game, for without them, a game can lose all meaning and lack enough challenge. An example of this is seen in the Lego games or Fable 2, when the player dies, they just get back up and continue onward. Sure in Fable 2 you lose unspent experience and gain a scar on your character, but these tend to be trivial matters in the long run as scars are just cosmetic and experience can easily be regained, or eventually becomes obsolete. Fights become a matter of perseverance as you will always stand back up in battle to continue to hurt the enemies until they are dead. In the end there is no real loss. That being said however, does not mean that failure in a game cannot be an enjoyable part of the game. Turning failure into a different experience, rather than just harsh punishment can result in a pleasurable outcome for the player. Heavy Rain took an interesting approach to this in that if a player fails an important task, their character will die and remain so for the rest of the game, however; the player given control of new another character and the game picks up immediately after, where the death becomes part of the story. During the development of a card game called Meme Complex, I developed an idea for a card in which if the opponent could make you laugh, they increase their score, and otherwise they decrease it. The idea was that if the player won, that player would be enjoying the game and if the opponent succeeded, likely winning the match, since the player is laughing, that player is still enjoying the game. To be continued

Last week, I mentioned that our team made very little progress due to various events and an argument between the leaders of the team. This week, despite following a three day weekend, more than made up for the lack of accomplishment of the previous week. The issue between the leaders worked itself out as we cooled our heads and realized several things. The first is that we were obsessing too much over specific details and needed to let go, which was the major cause of the disagreement. The second was that we were drifting away from the core gameplay and that we needed to get the team back on track. With the focus of getting back to the core gameplay, our Monday meeting stated off by discussing the original concept of collecting morbid artifacts, placing them on the mannequin, and peering back into the past to solve murders. We had been struggling to incorporate the peering back in time mechanic into our game as we didn't know how to integrate it with our puzzles and it had only shown us the murder after we had solved it. Even the part of solving the murder lacked meaning as we just collected items and place them upon the mannequin. We came to the conclusion that just seeing a piece of the past limited the use of the mechanic too much and decided to revisit a very early idea of allowing the player to also interact with the past. What we decided upon is to create two different states of the mansion, a past which would likely show the mansion in its prime, and the present were time has decayed the mansion. This allows us to create more interesting puzzle in our game, and gave another purpose for the mannequin. The watch would have a limited amount of power to allow the player to interact with the past, and would steadily drain to the point where the watch must be used by the mannequin in order to recharge. Aside from some major mechanic progression, we also completed several art assets for the game. We now have the mannequin as well as several sprites of both our protagonist Martin, and our villain Usher. We converted all of our artwork drawn in a traditional art form into a digital image ready for temporary filler until the coloring is finished. I personally have worked on several assets important to several of our puzzles including a vase whose elaborate shape gave me trouble with the perspective until a professor suggested that I use a 3d modeling program to place a similarly shaped object in at the perspective I needed.