The link to our comic can be found here.
The Process
Our initial idea for this project was for a character, living in a black and white world, to discover a door within his house that leads to a colorful alternate dimension (or several). We realized later that several dimensions is a bit ambitious, and given the limited time we had, we decided on just one. As someone who is very environmentally conscious, I wanted to have the storyline within the dimension be something along the lines of a conservation theme. So, once the character enters the ocean, he has to pick up trash / plastic that is polluting the water and affecting the sea life. Evan and I worked together on both the visuals and the comic itself. Evan is extremely talented at Photoshop, so I was able to learn a lot from him in that respect. We are both first-time coders so the comic proved to be a huge challenge. Although not as advanced as we would have hoped, for beginners I would say our comic is something to be proud of.
The Challenges
I spent so many hours trying to figure out how to incorporate Javascript functions into our code, but was unsuccessful more times that I can count. I also had a hard time figuring out how to use the onclick() function to clean up the plastic in the ocean, but again, was unsuccessful. Styling the buttons again proved to be a challenge that in the end, I was unable to overcome. We managed to incorporate audio (ocean sounds) when the character enters the ocean, which I was quite proud that we were able to pull off. All in all, although it may not look like it took a lot of time, Evan and I have invested countless hours into making this comic. I want to reiterate that it is not quite as advanced as our peers, but given our backgrounds of no prior experience, despite the challenges, we created a comic, and a pretty cool one at that. Here is one of many (over forty) pages of code:
Conclusion
All in all, this project was definitely a learning experience. It was scary to create something like this from scratch, especially since I had so much trouble with the code. I am happy with the result, and although we may have had to make a few changes in the end, the product has achieved the goal we initially wanted it to. It is nowhere near perfect, but I have learned that in this class especially, it is impossible to expect perfection.