Category: Leon Eckert

Posted on

Week 3: Interactive Comic Proposal – Val & Nan

For our project, we want to interpret the stories of three fables: “Sima Guang Breaks the Vat,” “The Tortoise and the Hare,” and “A Little Monkey Comes Down from the Mountain,” in the format of an interactive comic. These stories would each have their own independent comic on our website, but they would be connected through the theme of moral lessons shared at the end of each story.  We intend to simulate each of these fables from a first-person perspective, which would place the user in the position of the main character and test how they would react to the situation. We hope to accomplish this by including panels that follow the movements of your cursor to shift the main character’s  line of sight and to interact with objects or text that appear in the comic. We took inspiration for this idea from point-and-click video games that rely on the user to explore and click on different parts of the screen to progress the story. With this interactive comic, we would like to create scenes that take advantage of perspective and space to deepen immersion into the stories.

Sima Guang Breaks the Vat

  • Scene 1: Your friend is trapped in a vat full of water, what should you do?
    • Option 1: Save him (takes you to Scene 2)
    • Option 2: Walk away from the situation (cuts to next scene, you are trapped in another vat of water and no one cares enough to save you).
    • Option 3: If you hesitate for too long, your friend  💀
  • Scene 2: How to save him?
    • Click on your surroundings to find an object to break open the vat. Let the player click on everything to find the solution.
    • The other kids surrounding cry, possibly as a distraction
  • Scene 3: A page that illustrates the takeaways from the story

The Tortoise and The Hare

Interactivity: Allow the user to chose which animal they would like to race as. The user must make choices throughout the comic (ie. choose to sleep or to continue on the journey).

Moral: Don’t be overconfident

A Little Monkey Comes Down from the Mountain

One day, a little monkey came down the hill. He walked to a cornfield, glad to see many big corns. He picked one corn and walked forward carrying it. With the corn on his shoulder, he walked to a peach tree, glad to see big and red peaches all over the tree, he threw the corn to pick the peaches. With some peaches in hands, he walked to a watermelon field, glad to see big and round watermelons on the ground, he threw the peaches to pick the watermelon. With a big watermelon in his arms, he walked back. While walking he saw a cute little rabbit jumping. He threw the watermelon to catch the rabbit happily. The rabbit disappeared running into a forest. The little monkey had to go home with empty hands.

Interactivity: Navigating the monkey’s journey by collecting corn, peaches, watermelon, and finally the rabbit. 

Moral: Don’t desire too much at once or you will have nothing in the end

  •  
Posted on

Week 3 – Interactive Comic Proposal Julia & Jannie

For our interactive comic project, we will follow the journey of a dog through the Shanghai Metro as he makes his way back home to his family. On the way he encounters some interesting objects and easily loses his way, so the reader will have different paths to choose from in order to get him home, like a choose your own adventure comic. However, our main character will always find his way home; different paths might just take longer.

There will be little widgets to play around with in the comic that the user can click, but overall will have no bearing on the storyline—they will simply be aesthetic choices to make it more interactive and fun.

The comic will be hand-drawn in a very minimalistic, cute style, and the comic itself will be very lighthearted and humorous. The drawings will be made using Photoshop. The style will be similar to that of artist Alison Zai.

Posted on

Week 3 Comic Idea Jialu, Steve, Justin

Our idea will be an interactive “chose your story” comic. The user will play as the main character  and follow along with the plot. At critical sections, the user will make decisions for their character. Depending on their choices, the plot line can diverge and eventually lead to different endings. Thus, with each different play through of our comic, the user will be able to encounter  different plot lines and discover hidden . By doing so, we will be able to enhance the user experience and bring them new content each time they go through our comic.

As of right now, the theme is science fiction. We plan on making the different plot lines as the weeks progress. While the core of the comic is based on user decisions to further the plot, we would like to add more interactivity to the story by implementing small games that the user has to play. We hope to use javascript or any javascript library to develop those mini games.

Posted on

Week 3: Interactive Comic Idea – Madi Eberhardt & Jamie (Ziying Wang)

Theme:

an interactive suspenseful comic

Plot: 

We plan to create an interactive adventure comic in which the player must lead the main character (a little kid backpacking through the dark with his flashlight) through the suspenseful darkness in order to find the light and way out. When they approach the light, the graphics will become brighter. If they continue to approach the dark and stray from the light, then the graphics will get darker and scarier.

This comic will split into different paths in which the readers will make a choice on picking. Certain elements will lead to animations in which the mouse can be used. There will also be different background music for different sections within the comic.

Posted on

Week 3: Updated Portfolio – Val Abbene

My updated website:

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~vra230/week-3/website-1b/index.html

For my portfolio revision, I added upon the code that I had created for our first website project. I had already selected the colors and photos that I wanted to display on my page, so for this project I focused on formatting what was already there by using the CSS tools that we learned in class. The most challenging part of this project was formatting my “favorite things” page, which I wanted separate into two columns using the float and <div> tools. In this part of my website, I wanted to use images and minimal text to visually share my interests and favorite things. At first, I found it difficult for the code to respond in the way that I wanted it to and I struggled to remove some tricky grey borders that I was using as guides, but I eventually achieved the composition that I envisioned. A lot of my color code and font codes were done in-line due in index.html due to my experimentation before in my first draft. I found it difficult to completely remove these in-line codes so I left them in there, but next project I want to have a cleaner main index.html file with all of the extra details in the css file. I also found that it was very easy to get absorbed into the coding process and solve problems as they cropped up. Overall, I found this project very enjoyable and felt creatively challenged.