Rai made a few changes to the earlier versions of the Mephisto Labs logo I'd seen, and we now have a finalised group logo.

Did I mention that it looks freaking awesome? There's a black on white version too (chucked it in the header of the blog). So glad to actually have a talented visual designer in my studio group this time around.

After a bit of discussion (mostly between Jason and Rai), we now have a group name: Mephisto Labs

Rai's already had some ideas for logos and stuff, which look promising. Good stuff.

As is generally the case with Studio, one of the first hurdles is getting a group together. A fair amount of time was spent in the first class sitting around talking to others, trying to suss out who was interested in working on a similar kind of project. I had a few other prejudices with regards to potential group members also - I would rather have worked with people I already knew and got on with, and there were a number of people I did know that I didn't want to work with - largely as a consequence of previous experiences working with them.

In the end, I managed to find a group, which I'm quite happy with and enthusiastic about:

Jason Bakker

I've worked with Jason a number of times now, for the second half of 1st year studio, and for 2nd year studio, as well as various other group assignments. We get on pretty well, and tend to think along similar lines. He's main interests are in the area of writing and stuff, but he also seems keen to take on the group leadership and management responsibilities. He also has a good grasp of programming concepts and stuff.

Rachel (Rai) Wu.

I've not really worked with Rachel on anything major, despite having known her for quite some time. Still, she can be pretty focused, and has churned out some incredible stuff previously. She's also quite skilled when it comes to the visual side of things (which is very much A Good Thing) and seems to be quite keen on the visual design and so forth.

Overall, I think we've got a good mix of skills and the like. Incidently, they also happen to be the two of my classmates whom I've known the longest.

I'm going to try and make good use of LiveJournal's tag system in this journal, by using them to indicate what each post is about. I've tried to make them relatively self-explanatory, but here's a list of the tags used and what they symbolise (just in case):

• fit3039 - overall tag for the subject. Kinda unnecessary, unless I choose to reuse this journal for Studio 2
• thoughts - various thinking I've done on aspects of the project
• progress - a record of the progress we've made as a group
• classwork - just marks the work that we've done in the timetabled studio classes; this will be when we get the most time to discuss/work on the project as a group, in person
• w01 - the events of week 1 [March 1 - 7]
• w02 - the events of week 2 [March 8 - 14]

'K, I'm using this LJ as a way of organising my process journal for studio this year. This will contain mostly a record of what we're doing and the problems/successes we have, as well as any useful links I may stumble across whilst researching.

So, going into another year of studio, what am I hoping to achieve and gain from the experience? Firstly, I'd like to further my programming knowledge. Programming is something that interests me, and this I feel I am quite good at. That said, I had no experience with it prior to starting this course, and so whilst I have a good grasp of many of the fundamentals of programming, I still have a lot to learn about the more advanced and specialised things you can do. Given that, most likely, programming is the area that I'll pursue after graduating, I'd like to try and push my abilities in this, and learn as much as I possibly can.

However, ultimately my goal is to get more into the area of game development and design, and so I'd like to be able to do something along these lines. In particular, I'm quite interested in developing game mechanics and stuff.

Another important goal is to be able to create a piece of work that I can put into a portfolio, and that will do a good job of showcasing what I can do. Given that I'm now in third year, this is perhaps somewhat obvious, but it's something I'd like to keep in mind as I go through the subject.

Ideally, I guess I'd like to work on a project developing some sort of game. For a while now, I've been interested in trying to develop a puzzle type game, so if I could find a group willing to do something along those lines, it would be idea. Still, we'll have to wait and see how things turn out.