Ok, so there is alot going on and some changes on the technology side of things. First of all, the touch interface is completed from a technological standpoint; not so much aesthetically. As soon as we determine whether it will be screen printed or etched we can move ahead with that and the flash interface can be designed to match it. After testing the glyph tracking and getting more info on it’s limitations I have come to the conclusion that we would be better off without the real time rendering aspect of live glyph tracking. Instead of tracking the locations of the cards nonstop, the system will track which cards are in play and in what position they appear on the board. From there flash will simply play pre-rendered movie files for the character’s movements. The programming needed to get a real time game engine to work with the glyph tracking would outside of our timeline scope. Unfortunately the polygon limitations of using flash and paper vision would severely limit our visuals. I am quite happy with this alternative as it will allow more time for the development of the actual interface of the game. Let me know if you have any concerns with this, or any suggestions on possibly an alternative solution.

The Biblionauts have been busy this week. All of our character concept art is now complete, to see the samples please look at Lauren’s post or Ben’s post. Our PPJ is up and running and our Gantt chart is nearing completion. Moving forward we are working on concept art for the library, developing the website and tweaking the PPJ and modeling a basic humanoid we can adapt for several of our characters. We are also taking a harder look into technology and stress testing our options to find the optimal choice. We are also looking into simplifying our physical playing area using the glyph tracking technology we have planned for our cards. We are happy with the progression of things so far and are looking forward to a fun and challenging project.

I have been working on a couple of things this week. To start off I did some sketches of King Arthur’s armor for Ben, they were small scale and maybe only took about two hours for all of them. I have also been working on the Gantt chart for the group. Things were rocky at first, then I discovered I could in fact set the chart to ignore weekends. As of now I have spent about six hours on the first draft of the chart, at this stage data has been organized and entered from three group members. Over the next few days I will be spending more time adding in the other group members and tweaking the schedule. Monday we plan on going over some of the finer time line details and tweaking dates as needed. On a side note I have also secured a facility to produce the glass or Plexiglas top for our playing surfaces. Later in the term once the design is finalized I will be screen printing the design onto whatever material we choose. I have also spent some time looking into our planned use of technology. I think I have found a way to simplify the systems we are using, I need to meet with Jason and confer before we can pursue the idea.

Over the break and up through this week I’ve been working on creating some concept art for three of our characters. Between December 13th and January 2nd, I completed the art for Tiny Tim and Robin Hood each took around 7-10 hours over a period of 2 days. The artwork for the Tripod of War of the Worlds had been completed before the break.

This past week, I just worked on adding color to and shading the image of Cthulhu (the sketch had also been completed over break), that took between 10 and 11 hours over the course of the week.

Robin Hood

Tripod

Concept art for Tiny Tim

Cthulhu

Here we go.

I’m art guy. Over break, I played to the title and began work on the artistic designs for Tin Man and Billy Pilgrim, two of the characters for LexiConquest. Both clocked in at around, say, 8 hours, give or take two hours or so. The designs are fairly ambitious (from a modeling standpoint anyway) but certainly nothing I can’t handle. I have one more drawing to do, King Arthur, which will be Mike’s responsibility to model. I’ll have that finished this week.

Billy Pilgrim, "Slaughterhouse 5"

Tin Man, "The Wizard of Oz"

I also managed to put together my portion of the Gantt Chart, which is intimidating of course but it’s good perspective as to what’s ahead of me. This term is going to be busy with modeling and rigging and all that wonderful good stuff, but it’ll be a blast. I’m fairly confident (famous last words, of course), but what we have aligned for term 1 is more than feasible. Term 2 is a bit fuzzier, but I anticipate some clarity in the coming weeks.

UPDATE! King Arthur is done!

My first experience with themeing the Wordpress! Over the break I developed this theme for our PPJ website, and I got to say it’s a lot easier than what I thought. Anyway it’s up and running and it’s waiting for your posts and submissions. I’ll add cool features in near future, stay tuned…

Hessam