April 24 - May 1

Finished
This was THE final week before showcasing our game at the EAE game expo. My last touch to the game was adding in a cutscene at the beginning to explain the storyline. Leif drew the images and I animated them and put in text using After Effects. For quick but eye catching animations, I used still images but moved them across the screen to add movement. This emulates the animation style of the cutscenes of the game Vampire Smiles. I also used an "ink painting on paper canvas" look that was originally going to be used for the style of our entire game but changed over time. I'm pleased with how the cut scene turned out and the game finally feels complete to me.

Expo
I also went to the EAE game expo, which was a blast. I loved seeing our game displayed honorably in the front where people could play it. The other game from our class, Heroes of Hats, was displayed next to ours. Apparently we made it on the news again (I'm in a quick shot looking at one of the other games) and our class is now doubly famous! Whoot!

It was awesome seeing the poster for our game (which turned out amazing!) on the wall with all of the EAE games from the past. We are now part of the school's legacy!

I was disappointed that the level designs didn't become what I'd hoped for. Also, our game lacked polish towards the end. With a couple more weeks, I think we could have a achieved polished up our game and had it looking much better. Nonetheless, I was happy to have the game mostly completed in time for the EAE expo. Perhaps I can convince some of the programmers to keep working on the game after the semester... 

April 17 - 24

Assignment
This was the final sprint! I resized all of the buildings to the proper size and starting working on a cut scene video for the game. The cut scene will certainly go into finals week. 


Quality
Excellent. The buildings are now the right size to go into the game. Some of them had to change in design a little to accommodate the new size. Now I have seven originally designed buildings that we can finally use.

April 10 - 17

Assignment
The end of the semester is nearing and things are crazy on team Curse of Shadows.

We need something to signify the end of the level so I made half a dozen sprite sheets of pure awesome firework displays to put in the game. I used the same firework method from earlier on in the semester but put three of them together and changed the colors. I also made single firework sprite sheets in various colors to add to the game in case the programmers needed them.


Russel asked for a banner to advertise our game at the end of the trial mode and Leif and I worked on this as well. It turned out cute and professional looking. The banner's purpose is to convince the player that they MUST buy the game. What do you think, is it working?

Quality
Great. The fireworks made it into the game and work perfectly for their purpose. The banner looks professional when it appears at the end of the game trial.

Next week: finalize houses.

April 3 - 10

Assignment
I'm working on house designs and more shadow monsters. I've been asked to add more details to the houses so I'm reworking them. I developed some new palace style designs with a cool flame pattern. The new monsters are the tiger and dragon.

Quality
 Great. The buildings are improving every week. When I began designing the houses, the process was arduous and difficult. Now I have more experience using illustrator and my creative juices are flowing, resulting in better work in terms of both quality and quantity. I like the style of buildings a lot; they're adorable and fun.

Next week: finalize art

Mar 27 - April 10

Assignment
I've been continuing to work on the house designs and also creating shadow monster designs. My new monsters include the pray mantis and boar. If I have time to animate it, the pray mantis will attack with blades at the end of its arms. The boar is smaller and less threatening. I'm also adding more details to the houses to make them more interesting to look at.

Quality
Great. I'm working hard to keep the style consistent. Russel, the team lead, seems happy that my work keeps improving each week. I'm excited to see my new houses get in the game.

next week: (you guessed it) finalize art

Mar 20 - 27

Assignment:
This week my focus was remaking the houses with more detail. I looked up various concepts online and even looked in library books about ancient Japan for inspiration. It was difficult for me because I was continually frustrated with illustrator and started over several times, but I finally came up with an original style for the houses.

Quality
The process was slow and arduous, but I finally came up with a style that I love! I tried several color schemes and finally decided on this one. I want to hug and squeeze this house:

Next Week: finalize art

Mar 13 - 20

Assignment
This week was a continuation of creating art for the village level. I changed the design of the bridges to better accommodate the programmers, fixed the cherry blossom tree that Drew made so that it would fit the style of the game better, and made a new Zen Tower.

Quality
I was super impressed with how well the cherry blossom tree turned out! I kept Drew's design but made the coloring style vibrant and fun. I also added some details like wood lines and a heart shaped hole. The Zen Tower also looks fantastic.

Next week: finalizing art

Mar 6 -13

Assignment:
I dedicated an entire week to creating the art assets for the village level. The items I worked on were a cherry blossom, two bridges, a lamp, a building, and a wasp. The cherry blossoms will float down elegantly from the sky, offering their shadows as a platform for the player. I drew inspiration for the art in this level from Japanese gardens and had to include the iconic red bridge.

Extra:
Along with the art work, I completed several online tutorials in order to learn how to draw and implement toon-shade coloring in illustrator. This was fun and a great learning experience. I'm impressed that I managed to create such a good looking Bart Simpson!

Quality:
Being new at using illustrator and having never toon shaded before, I did pretty well for this assignment. I know the images aren't perfect but a girl has to start somewhere and I know that my quality of work will improve as I get more practice. The bridges are nice and the cherry blossom is quite cute. The wasp is awesome. It was first drawn using a unique design Leif and I came up with and then I traced it using illustrator and used various ink brushes to get the painted shadow look. The wasp is my favorite artwork in the game to date.

Next week: continue level art

Feb 28 - Mar 6

Assignment
What a busy week! We had a game testing session and invited tons of girl and boy scouts to play, replay, and basically rip apart our game. I typed up and printed out surveys for people to fill out and passed them out at the testing session.

Observing kids playing our game was exciting. The best part was hearing one little girl rattle on to me about the creative but needlessly complicated game that she was going to make someday with mermaids and princesses and such. Knowing that there are few women in the game industry, it was very cool for me to see the inspiration our game was having on these girl scouts. I couldn't help swelling with pride.

Next, I wrote up my observations from the game testing session in a long, detailed email and sent it out to my teammates. I admit that the number of bugs was overwhelming. It made my head reel and my spirits fall.

Adding to the game testing excitement, our class was featured on the news! A camera crew came in and interviewed a few students, asking about the EAE program and the games our class is making. Alice was the only artist who was interviewed but Leif and I were satisfied with simply being featured in the background while we pretended to work on our computers. I'm just glad that I didn't get caught picking my nose on camera or anything like that :P. Being featured on the news was exhilarating and it helped to mend the punches my self esteem had taken from the bugs at the testing session. It was also great publicity for our game. We're so fortunate that Bob and Roger work so hard to get our class media attention!.

Finally, I found some funny anime girl screams to use for our character when she dies in the game. I even received permission from the voice actor to use them for free without giving credit. The programmers haven't put it in the game yet but hopefully they will soon because I love the new sounds.

See the news story here: http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=19427890&title=us-video-game-design-program-ranks-3rd-in-nation&s_cid=queue-5

Feb 21 -28

Assignment
This week the focus was on creating the palace level art. I created stand in walls and floors and worked on the shadow switch animation for Suni.

Quality
The palace level art was passable and will work as a stand in. Sarah (the design lead) wasn't satisfied and has asked that I add more detail. The animation for suni's shadow switch looks flashy and allowed me to experiment with the workings of After Effects. However, I think Leif is going to try something else because it isn't what he had in mind. I felt discouraged because it felt like I didn't make much progress this week, but Leif reminded me that every step counts. Art doesn't always come out perfect the first time, but each time I try I can do it better than before.

Next Week: Prepare for game testing

Feb 14 - 21

Assignment
This week I worked on designing a new level: the village. The level incorporates the puzzle idea that I came up with earlier in the semester in which the character jumps on the shadows of falling cherry blossoms in order to get across stretches of water. My design also includes sneaking past some guards, dodging evil shadow wasps, and grabbing secret items.

Extra
Also, our team has been struggling with choosing a new title for our game. After pitching our best ideas, we decided to let the people decide.Several of us, myself included, created facebook polls and asked our friends to vote. We compiled the data and had a clear winner: Curse of Shadows.

Quality

The quality of my level design was pretty good. It included some fun elements and I labeled so it could be clearly understood. My extra effort to create a facebook poll turned out to be fun and useful. I enjoyed getting feedback from my friends and it gave our game a little push publicity wise.

Feb 7 - 14

My Assignment
This week our team team came together to create artwork for the city level. As the art lead I assigned Drew to work on the background and Alice and myself to work on various objects. I assigned Leif to design the level and he did an excellent job incorporating fun puzzles such as a walking old man with a lantern and fireflies. My items included a floating lantern, fireflies sprite sheet, and stand in buildings with window sills for platforms.

Quality
I was surprised how much work we were able to complete this week as a team and as individuals. I created the fireflies in after affects using a glow effect and animated them so they dart around in a natural looking pattern. It looks pretty awesome! I put them into a sprite sheet. The floating lantern looked nice as well. The buildings aren't going to win any beauty contests but they got the job done and I'm glad I managed to get all seven done. For now the buildings will stand as placeholders until I can improve them later. 

Extra
As an extra, I made a firework sprite sheet for a yellow firework. This is an extra touch to play in the background of the level to add some dynamism to it.




Next Week:
Palace level design

Jan. 31 - Feb 7

Assignment
This week our goal as artists was to complete the art for the opening farmland level. My main duty was to conduct the other artists and work with our new design team lead, Sarah, in order to ensure that everything for the level was completed. Alice went above and beyond for this sprint and finished all of her assigned objects as well as half of Drew's. She is a very dependable team member!

I also assisted Leif with the jumping animation for our playable character, Suni the theif, and learned the process that he uses for animating. Though the animation turned out well, we learned from this experience that it would be easier for Leif to do all of Suni's animations from here on out as his workflow is quite complicated.

Finally, I worked on collecting sound effects for our sound archive. I found these online from a free sound website. These included walking, jumping, landing, dying, pushing and pulling, gongs, and bell sounds for the game.

Quality
As a team lead, I feel that I did an excellent job ensuring that all of the objects were completed for the levels by the assigned artists. The animation that I helped Leif create turned out well and had a great effect of Suni's scarf blowing in the wind. The sound archive is basically finished and I carefully wrote down the information for everyone who asked for credit (the sounds are all free but some people ask for credit).

Next week
Make City Level

Jan 24 - 31

My Assignment
This week we had a meeting with all of the leads to decide what assets we need in the game and deadlines for the entire rest of the semester. We made a document using google docs that listed all of the animations, sound effects, objects, backgrounds, and special effects we would need.

 Russel also assigned everyone on the team to come up with a full level design or puzzle ideas to get us in the mode of thinking about the game and to ensure that everyone knows how the gameplay works. I created two puzzle ideas involving the shadow mode in our game. One used a waterwheel that would spin and cause the player to fall down unless she was in shadow mode. The other involved cherry blossoms that would fall from the sky. Being too small to jump on, the player would have to jump on the enlarged shadows of the cherry blossoms in shadow mode to get across sections of water. Everyone seemed to like my ideas and someone has already been assigned to work on the cherry blossom code.

Quality
It's tough to rate the quality of my work this week when we didn't create any actual art assets, but I attended my meeting and completed the assignment I was given. I feel that the meeting in which we set deadlines and listed everything we will need for the game was extremely important as it will help us to keep organized for the rest of the semester.


Next Week:
Farmland level

Jan 17-24

My Assignment
The first week of the semester was insane. I went to Denmark for a week to attend my fiance's brother's wedding. Having only limited computer access, I wasn't able to get very much done on the game. The wedding was wonderful though and we were able to experience some fun Danish traditions. For instance, whenever the bride leaves the room all of the women rush up to kiss the groom on the cheek before she gets back. There is also a strange tradition where they cut the toes off of the grooms sock. I think that the bride used to be required to sew the sock back up as a symbol that she would use her homemaking skills to take care of her husband.

Quality
I admit that this was not a good week for me due to the unusual circumstance of leaving the country, but from here on out I'll work harder. I attempted to do a pushing animation but the quality was not good. I realized that we may have to draw the hands in a second position in order to make the animation look better.

Next Week:
Group meeting, decide on art assets we need.