You can find the link to our comic here.
Project Idea: Lost in Translation
For our comic project, we decided to have an interactive story where the user navigates as the main character through a new, unfamiliar environment. The story is a metaphor for feeling misunderstood, and this misunderstanding plays out in the main character’s interactions with others where other people do not understand the main character. The concept is that although it may be difficult, the more the character interacts with people and the world around him, the more understanding is gained. Throughout the comic, the user will make decisions about whether or not to interact with others. Depending on the decisions, there will be a couple of different outcomes. The more the user interacts with others, the more colorful and realistic the world becomes, while the less they interact, the more black and white and comic-y the world stays.
Because of the visual choice to show a gradual shift from a colorless-comic-y world to a colorful realistic world, or slight shifts, or none at all, the comic has multiple outcomes. If the user gets to an undesirable outcome, they will be prompted back to the beginning of the comic and have the option of restarting.
Challenges:
The first challenge was making explicit the metaphor of our comic was. We were unsure if users would understand the theme and message of our comic. The fix was to make an “interactive” about page/explanation page that would introduce, hopefully subtly, a worldview that the comic was based on. The other fix was linking back the outcomes with undesirable comic-y and colorless outcome back to the about page to prompt the user to restart.
There were also the challenges of implementing our ideas. While we made an interactive chat, it was hard to predict what the user was saying. We made an array that had set responses to jumbled text, but not to clear text. So, we limited the number of inputs that the user could possibly be able to do.
Conclusions:
The ideation process for coming up with an interactive comic was certainly difficult. In fact, it resulted in us changing the concept for our project after our initial proposal. Once we had a clear vision though, we were able to come up with a coherent project. While it was frustrating when we couldn’t come up with solutions, even trying to debug didn’t help as much as we wanted, finding fixes and seeing our project materialize was a very fulfilling feeling. Through our teamwork, I think that we came up with a project that we can be proud of.
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