It's been a packed week, a lot has happened. Yet not a lot has happened at the same time. We altered our character from a man with a mask to a cat. I'm not entirely sure how we came to decide that a cat was best as a group, but it was an idea I kind of liked regardless - it was my suggestion. Reason being that you can give tangible meaning to what it is to play with a cat. We can demonstrate the semiotics behind human-animal interaction. A cat knows what it means to play with a human and a human knows what it means to play with a cat.

However we were stuck all week on just how to execute this plan within our skill set.

Monday Our Introduction to Creative Technologies lecture focused on our tutor, and how he came to where he is, and also what past students have achieved with art installations. The rest of the day we messed around with a programme called Unity, where you can build interactive 3D environments, and in fact a few popular games have been built in Unity. This was one possibility, if we could manage to work out how to use it in a very short time. This was to be (as I knew it would) a common issue. How much time do you devote to a possible application before you decide that you can use it or not? Time is very limited and if you have to learn the application first, you better be sure you can learn it fast. But to know that you have to waste a certain amount of time trying to use it. The pressure to use your limited time effectively can be quite high. I was sensing quite quickly that Unity would not be the answer, although I heard optimistic calls from other group members so perhaps they could develop something. I certainly couldn't.

Tuesday we were to meet out tutor and discuss our ideas. This was all well and good except I thought our group was meeting with out tutor on Wednesday, so I wasn't really prepared with diagrams or.. anything. I found that mildly embarrassing, but we discussed our ideas and at least we were able to work out if we were on the right track. We were given the task of writing a manifest to determine our position so that night we went home and attempted to write our own versions and meet up and compare notes.

Wednesday we met up and discovered that no one had let anyone down, we all found it equally difficult to write this manifest plus we were all rather sidetracked by a large assignment due next Monday. That is, 39 Processing programmes that we have to write. We spend a few hours attempting to write something coherent and by the end of the day decided we needed to take action and start getting some tangible results as it was now one and a half weeks to presentation. We could deal with a manifest later.

The rest of the week we messed around with Unity and Max3DS, attempting to get some sort of result. One night in particular I tried attaching bones to a cat model that I had found on the internet. Such a simple task and I wasted hours with no result. And this is with following video tutorials. I could see this was a pointless path to go down. Even if we could have added bones to the cat model (making it controllable) then we'd have to actually control the cat in realistic movements and work out how to control those movements from outside of the environment they were rendered in. It would basically be a bunch of predefined sequences that someone would have to labour over. So I started floating the idea of doing the cat as a 2D animation in a program like Flash. Flash can be controlled by Max MSP (apparently) so we'd be able to use Max for motion tracking technologies and then have it directly control Flash which would play a series of animations on a timeline. Only issue was that someone would have to draw the animations of the cat. We had an illustrator in our group so hopefully he'd be able to take up that task.

The Weekend I hoped to have a basic cat drawn up that we could animate and learn how to control Flash, but this has to be juggled with our Processing assignment which was top priority as it was marked, it was difficult and it was due Monday afternoon. The reality was I spend my entire weekend working on processing exercises, some of them rather complex. I also had to read as much of one of the supplied texts on Processing as possible because I was away sick one of the weeks that we learnt processing. Sunday is when I got up to reading about object-oriented programming and I re-wrote pong as it turned out it was supposed to be supplied as an object-oriented program. Object oriented programming is a method or writing software in a modular way where parts of the program are objects with their own set of properties and functions that you define before you use them. For example, in pong, you'd define the paddle as an object with dimensions and how it responds to user input, and you'd define the ball as an object, again with dimensions and what it does when it hits another object like the wall or a paddle You can then have instances of the same object, so paddle 1 and paddle 2, and you could easily add more balls to the game if written correctly. Which is what I intended to do originally but time was running out. I stayed up all night Sunday to finish the assignment.