It's the night before the final presentations and my team and I have been rehearsing our presentation for pretty much the whole day today. A few of the groups even organized for a dry run of what we'll be saying tomorrow and what our presentations are like. I personally have been going over my slides, figuring out ways to explain our game, why this game should matter to players, and what we want to accomplish if we go forward next semester, all while trying to fit it into 10

Last night I worked on creating a rough draft of our game play trailer for our final presentation. I used a screen capture/video editing software I got last year called Movavi. For this trailer I really wanted to capture the systems and what the player would be doing and try to cram that all into about 2 minutes. As you could imagine, it was a pretty tall order especially since one play through takes about 15-20 minutes. I started off by playing and capturing my experience al

This week I gave myself the task of researching UI styles from different games and websites. I looked up some articles about games that had successful UI and games that had unsuccessful UI. One article I found mentioned the UI schemes of the Bethesda game series Fallout and how it integrated its UI into the game itself via the "Pip-Boy", while making the comparison to another Bethesda game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which had a journal that had tabs-within-tabs method. I

Today I had my final Discipline Review with Professor Manley to determine what specifically he was looking for in terms of narrative for our game. I shared with him what I wrote yesterday and he felt like that was too epic for what kinds of systems we had built. He recommended having a much more intimate narrative and told me that we should focus on telling the player about the monster they would fight. He said that sending adventurers out on adventures to locate the monster

This past week we learned we did not make it into the Vertical Slice stage, however Professor Manley thinks that we are close. He has mentioned to us before how our game, The Grand Master , has all the systems in place but those systems are tools to bring a narrative to the player. He believes we aren't hitting that point yet. I took that to heart and spent most of today looking at some different pieces of media that match the kind of world we're trying to build. I looked at