I haven't blogged in a considerable while, since the last few weeks have been spent working on our design document, pitch and plan in an attempt to perfect it.

In response to our feedback, I agree with a lot of the points made about how we can improve our report writing, but I do feel we were lead astray when being told how to write it before we handed it in, having been told numerous times to "not have a plan yet", and to keep things vague because we aren't supposed to know what we're doing. This in turn lost us marks because we were too vague and lacked explicit detail. I have to admit I found this incredibly irritating, but we have our marks now so we will just have to take it as a lesson learned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_rDnIKyX0g

(Major Spoiler under Aurons section, avoid it if you do not want them)

After discussing with Phil how much of an impact voice acting, body language and lip sync had on a players feelings towards a character (most likely to do with the "Uncanny Valley"), I decided to find a video comparing the Japanese and English versions of Final Fantasy X.

Trying to put aside personal favoritism as a fan of the series, I feel that both sides voice actors put in a good performance, so the main difference is found in the body language and the lip syncing.

Being a game of Japanese origin, the Japanese audio will be lip synced where as the English will not. Though on its own this does not seem to cause as much of a problem, when the two are compared the difference can be quite jarring, so while in comparison the effects of lip syncing have some effect, I personally am unaffected by the English on its own.

The body language is something else entirely. Since I watch a lot of Anime, and other Japanese shows, the body language is perfectly understandable to me, but to a regular player with no experience of Japanese mannerisms the eccentricities in the actions of the characters could be considered overzealous, or downright weird, so it shows that body language can also have an effect.

This video is a useful example when trying to prove what differences the aforementioned 3 attributes can do in regards to player connections.

As the others have mentioned, we started by getting our groups communication and organisation working. The assigning of tasks to different members was useful, giving each of us an equal share of the regular work, where others such as Rich excelled at something they're good at, such as the site.

I've started looking for reliable statistics from reputable sources pertaining to how large a market share RPGs have in game sales; The reason for this being that we will have to pitch our project plan as if we were asking for monetary support. I figured it would be best to get started early on evidence we can use to back up our claim that research is needed in this area.

I also offered to write the team blog this week, as everyone else in the group had taken on individual tasks for the group. This week has gone well, better than I expected for a first week.