Before we began making the actual video game, we created a full-fledged story to base our game around: "A retired sword duelist named Dante gets a mysterious invitation to compete in an underground dueling ring. Dante, burdened by his past and his oath to never pick up a sword again after accidentally killing his brother in a spar, ignores the invitation. Later that night, he is kidnapped and knocked unconscious. When he wakes, he finds the tip of a sword pointing at his face. Dante then looks around and sees that he is somewhere underground and is surrounded by a large audience jeering at him. He looks back up and finds himself face to face with a young, cocky duelist out for blood. Left with no choice, Dante must duel the young duelist for the sake of his own survival. After beating the duelist, Dante climbs up the rank and faces more opponents, each much more stronger and skilled than the other. Yet, the years of experience have never left him, and he slashes them down one by one with ease. Dante faces his final opponent, who hides in the shadows before walking into the light. The final opponent reveals himself to be Dante's brother Daniel. Daniel is no longer recognizable to Dante, but he knew it was his brother standing before him. He pleads to Daniel that they not fight, but Daniel, enraged and filled with vengeance, attacks Dante. In the end, Daniel loses the duel, and weakened by his injuries, he falls to his knees and begs his brother to kill him once and for all. Finally, Dante must make the difficult decision on whether to kill or spare his brother. Killing him would mean that Dante would have truly lost everything he held dear, but sparing him would mean that Daniel would never find his peace and would resent Dante for the rest of his life."

Unlike the lightning round, the original game round gave us two weeks to create the entire game from start to finish, meaning that the team had more than enough time to create everything we wanted for the game. As an artist, I was in charge of making the opponent animations, cutscene animations, some art assets, and surprisingly some audio editing as well. Our first opponent was supposed to be this cocky, full-of-himself type of character, so I designed him to have his arm muscles completely exposed to express his vanity, and his dueling stance to be very loose and amateur to express how he doesn't take his competition seriously. 

After finalizing the first opponent's design and animations, I moved onto making the game's cutscenes. I started with creating the opening cutscene, when Dante opens up his eyes and confronts the "cocky" opponent.

Next, I animated the two most important moments in the game: Dante and Daniel's fate.

We completed the game the day before we would present in front of over a hundred people, including parents, students, and National High School Game Academy staff at Carnegie Mellon University's McConomy Auditorium. By the time it was our turn to present on stage, we proudly presented our video game masterpiece...