We started the week by having a meeting with our lecturer regarding the retrieval mechanic in our game. Despite it taking a long time to implement it is now working and we're confident that the minor bugs can be fixed easily, as well as trading in our finalised UI and assets instead of the placeholders we currently have.

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Our Tuesday session meant we could chat to Emma Reay about our ideas and prototypes. She re-affirmed a lot of our idea in regards to the mechanics we are using and encouraged us to focus on getting a vertical slice of the game finished, so that we could fully portray the intent of the game without missing out any key elements if the timings get tight. Despite our constant communication and scoping of the project within the team, there are so many elements to balance and plenty of unexpected obstacles to address that our pipeline is always changing (although it has been a great help since we fleshed it out more). 

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Our current objective is to complete one of the ladies' quests in the game by the end of next week, as then we will have a skeletal structure to trade in our assets and we can effectively copy and paste this process for the other performers. 

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This week I am working on making mood boards for all of the assets in the game. As much as the photogrammetry process may not be entirely effective, I'm working on the basis that it will be, so that when we get into the studio we are able to do as much work as possible in the hopes that we can get it fully working. In the case that it doesn't work we do have other modelling options and we can re-assess this at the time.

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Later in the week I spoke to our lecturer regarding concerns for the project and our current plan of action. Unfortunately the coding is taking a little longer than we anticipated but we have to take breaks in the process to create the best work so we are approaching the project slowly and steadily - we have made consistent progress over the past few weeks so it would be great to keep the project at this pace.

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Our Friday technical session went well, meaning we could fix numerous bugs that came up in the playtesting last week such as the space button causing the menu to pause and making sure the UI was in the right place. I have helped to facilitate the use of the UI and assets as well as continuing to plan and scope the process given our progress so far. I also experimented with character creation as we were hoping to have modelled characters available for stop motion within the game. This will be difficult due to our lack of materials (making clean, jointed models is incredibly difficult and we don't have access to the right resources) so after a while spent trying to sculpt with wire and placeholder modelling material I have ordered some wooden art figurines to hopefully paint and adapt to suit our characters. These are already jointed and will be an effective, cheaper solution to making them ourselves. 

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I also fixed up some of the UI this week to make it clearer. Some of the feedback when playtesting was that the extra designs in the journal confused the player as people thought they were supposed to be looking for those items when they were just design features. I have stripped back these designs and have also been talking to our music composer, Edmund Ashmore. After long discussions regarding the eerie circus atmosphere that we wanted, he has produced some awesome sample tracks which we will be taking forward into the final game (all music by Edmund Ashmore @eashmoremusic on Instagram).  

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