Interactive story
A text adventure game is something that I wanted to try to do a long time ago. And this time, I was inspired by a Japanese animation called “氷菓ひょうか”. This is one of my favorite animations so I try to imitate some stories in it. The storyline is that 5 students are going to make a film and due to the long journey, they need to find someplace to stay up for the night. They finally find an abandoned theater and decide to check whether it’s safe and suitable for staying. While in this process, one of the main characters was found killed in his room. And a ghost suddenly appeared, announcing that if they don’t find the killer, all of them will be killed. I am also a fan of Christie Agatha and the way to commit murder is based on her novel.
The developing process begins with the plot writing. I first reviewed the animation and then coming up with the plot. The original scene in the animation is not so ideal because this story is only a small part of the whole storyline. So I decided to invite my friends to take some photos and then using ps to help me to deal with the visual assets. And I have finished the photoing stage 2 weeks ago. I spent tons of time using ps because basically my story is the combination of different layers of the picture and some of them are clickable. I want the viewers to find clues themselves during the clicking process to get the correct answer. But there’s no need to worry about getting the answers wrong, the bad ending will tell you why your reasoning process is wrong and give you some hints about the right answer. I also try to use some tricks mentioned in “Understanding the comics”, which is the sense of closure. In order to that, I make some photos, which are only a part of the whole movement and let viewers’ brains automatically imagine what happened between these pictures.
The tool I mainly used in this project is JavaScript and PhotoShop. PhotoShop helps a lot in the first stage because this makes my scene more vividly and most text part can also be done by using PS. The tool I am struggling with most is the JavaScript. As this is my first time learning to code, though I have learned a lot from the tutorial video, I have difficulty putting them in practical use. In other words, sometimes I was confused about how to use it to serve for my project. The most useful way I find is to use “the console” on the chrome browser so that I can know where I coded wrongly. Also, the professor and my classmate William, who had taken this course last semester gave me some advice about the coding. Google is another very helpful tool. If you input your questions correctly, you can almost find all the answers to it.
I am very satisfied with my finalized project. And it is exactly the same as what I want to do in the beginning. But there are still some things which I think I can improve if I can do that again. The first is that mainly all the clickable things won’t affect the ending of the game and what only matters is the guess of the killer at the end. I think next time maybe I can design a story responding to viewers’ choice. And the second thing is that I think I can embed some videos into the whole project. Sometimes it’s not so easy for the reader to understand what I am going to do only by pictures and I think the video is a more direct way to do that. But again, I am going to say that I am proud of my work this time.
Here’s the link to the work.
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~jz4060/week6/interactive story/interactivestory.html