Bibliography and Journal

We decided to enter the imagine cup, so we collaborated with Derek to produce a document that was good enough to submit to the imagine cup. This would in turn feed into our final CA for Team Project 1 and would help us get the document out of the way with earlier so we could focus on other things. I was asked to do the story and theme of the game for the document, which we found out is not essential for the imagine cup. In my opinion the imagine cup was a waste of time, because the things they required were mainly marketing strategies and that we didn’t really have the knowledge to fulfil the criteria. Also that the imagine cup requirements were nowhere near related to our final CA and that it was just unnecessarily wasting our time.

I researched caves, dogs, new layouts of maps, an island river with a waterfall, and a forest area.

I also researched emotion bars, harmony bars and diary/picture sprites, also a user interface.

I made sketches for all these parts and forwarded these sketches to the team to get their opinions on what they looked like, the sketches were received well so I went further into the details in the images and expanded more on the layout of the cave

This week we were concentrating on the design of the game and mechanics.

We changed our game idea again and replaces the deer in the game with a dog, the player will now be looking for his puppy instead of a deer and will be looking for bonus objects which are pictures of his family etc., which he’ll have to find to be able to find his dog. The old man is still in it and my previous sketches of the old man’s cabin can still be used. I had to sketch a new area, a cave, which we will add to involve the importance of sunlight. I also sketched a lake area with an island where another picture will be located and also awoodland area, as well as make a sketch of the dog.

This week, we were scheduled for interviews, My readers were Enda and Peter.

During the interview they highlighted the weaknesses of my research approach and gave me a few pointers on how to continue my research, they gave me the idea of a pretty ingenious user testing case, where the user is presented with unrelated music rather than no music whatsoever which is what I had previously.

The workload has been pretty heavy so not much work was done, I had a few sound assignments and 3d modelling assignments, This also coincided with the groups change of mind on our game idea, we changed to include all the levels in one instead of 5 different parts,

It was my job to do the design for the forest and the old man’s house, which took quite a few hours to come up with a few good ideasand also a few failed attempts that I didn’t quite like enough to show to the group.

We were very busy with many other assignments including a few sound assignments and a few character animation assignments as well as a few from Bride for narrative and games and society, Therefore, we decided to give ourselves 8 hours of research for our individual assignments and leave it at that, due to being quite busy

 I did a few hours research, ending in me typing out a document with the current research that I have found, so as to easily import it into my mahara page, while also reading my references and finding out a bit more on the topic

We found out on Monday that Bryan was leaving which came as a shock, but we managed to get our work done for the presentation on Wednesday, the presentation will be taken in turns and everyone will have their chance to speak.

Each person will be dealing with the topics they are mainly associated with, me myself am handling the level design and sound effects slides and will finish up the presentation.

The presentation didn’t really go the way we had hoped, many of us had been tongue tied and I had blurted out that we were going to "kill" the deer which doesn’t actually happen in the game, Barty said that this could damage the players,which I agree that is why we took that part out and that once you catch the deer the level ends.

Altogether I don’t think the lecturers got the game idea itself, they seems confused as to what our game was trying to achieve,

In the next presentation, we have to make this a lot clearer and maybe rethink a few parts to take away some of the confusion.

We continued our planning of the game with regular meetings.

We have fully established what our game is going to be about, and now we are preparing ourselves for CA1, the presentation, We are assigning out tasks to deal with, for example a mood board and things like that, I am in change of finding a few sounds to set the mood of the game, these will be a few example sounds of the ones we will generate for the game itself, I have found a few that I like.

After our team meeting, we have established that a few of the sounds i have found will be demoed during the presentation, and we have made the mood board inside that team meeting too, this will be displayed on a table to the side of our presentation

PRODUCT

We established what our game would be based about, we decided to tackle depression, but not try to cure, but teach people the ways that are clinically proven to help when depression actually strikes, like sleep, exercise, healthy diet, we decided to make the game into a dream sequence, where each night the players dreams would be indicating one of these ways to help the player understand that these things can help you out, 

PROCESS

We lost a few members and gained more, but we established a team name, game concept and are at the minute readying ourselves in both the games concept presentation and our individual assignment, researching the area we want.

I have decided to do the impact music has on the mood of a player in game, and have found a journal that discusses this topic

PROBLEMS

We made our groups in week 1, we had 5 but we were awaiting on results and this turned out to be bad for our group plans and we were given 6 to a group instead.

We have finally come up with a games concept, we are trying to teach peoplehe steps that are proven to battle depression, by using a dream sequence for each individual task, each will have a dream and that dream will help them in the long run aslong as they get the message 

This week  not much happened as we were still awaiting results, I was myself still awaiting results.

We formed into out groups and we established 3 groups, in mine were Barry, Aaron, Andrew, and Bryan.

This week  not much happened as we were still awaiting results, i was myslef still awaitn results, however, we formed into out groups and we established 3 groups, in mine were Barry, Aaron, Andrew, and Bryan.