Our progress for the collaborative final project is going by more quickly and more smoothly than expected. In our last class session, our topic got an unofficial green light so we have been continuing to improve upon our proposal which was also an assignment this week. We also completed our annotated bibliography for this week.

During last week’s class session, we all sat down and looked at the comments posted on our proposal (first draft). We took note of what was mentioned, and several days later we added the missing information to our newer draft. We did this by using an online chatroom and discussing the things we should add and improve in our proposal. Once we added more specific information to our proposal, Jason sent out a copy of the revised proposal to everyone, and we all proceeded to discuss it further before finally uploading it to Dropbox.

We also completed the annotated bibliography last week. First we decided on the topics each of us should research. Since Ray already found a useful source the previous week, we decided that he should use that and find another source on the same topic, which is architectural design that will influence our game. Jason volunteered to gather sources on the horror genre in the video game industry, since he is very familiar with that field. We all agreed that Vincent should look up game manuals for similar games, since we’d be making a game manual for our own game. Each of us gathered two sources, and wrote our annotations for them. We put them together and Jason reformatted it to fit MLA standards. After our annotated bibliography was put together as a single document, we read over it again and composed some minor revisions, before uploading it to Dropbox.
Throughout all of this, Jason has been working on the game itself. He actually started before we handed in our original proposal, since time is of the essence. He has finished making the first two levels of the game, and sometime this week (most likely Wednesday) he will let the other group members playtest the game.

So between our last class session and this week’s, we’ve had three meetings, which were done through online chatrooms (essentially synchronous communication). We plan to have a face to face meeting this week as well, so that everyone could see how the game is progressing (although Jason has uploaded videos of it). This sums up what we’ve done so far, and we’re now waiting for the next class session to see what we’ll do next.