Who Did It?-An Interactive Murder Mystery
Description
Our project is a comedian murder mystery that reveals a fact that actually happens on campus, which is that there are stuff everywhere that nobody can find place to study. To unveil the story, we narrate from the end when the murder happened, and then let user choose from the two suspects to see their interviews and then decide which suspect do they think actually committed the crime. In addition, throughout the story line, we also add in some interactivity to let user have a sense of investigating by themselves.
Process
Basically how we divided the job is based on what we are good at. Xavi and Grace are the actors since they are good at acting (from my perspective). Hannah and I did the filming and manipulation. Since I used to use Premiere a lot, I played the role of adjusting the video, like arranging order, color correction and stuff. Hannah basically did all the coding with some of my help. Our initial plan is that me and Hannah take charge of the coding. Hannah has already done with most of it and she sent it to me so that I can make some justifications. I failed to do so because how we code are very different and I could not understand her way of coding. This lead to my not able to adjust the code. Since I still need time for editing video, I just left that.
At first we are having trouble in terms of the interactivity, since what we can do is to let user choose from two suspects, and then at the end, decide who they think is the murderer, which is actually lack of interactivity. Then while shooting, we came up with the idea that we can also user choose what to investigate.
One of them is the security video. We made it a pop up. We also encountered problem when doing that, since we could not find out the reason why we cannot adjust the size of the web page. After consulting, it turned out that it is just the problem of syntax. In addition, what we could not find ways to accomplish is to make the pop up jumps up automatically and disappear after it ends, while at the same time control the main video to pause while popping up, and play after it disappears. This is actually a pity for me for this project. I think it will be really cool if we could add in that.
post-morTem
Overall I think we did a great job on this project, even though that is still not what we initially planed to do. What I think we can improve is to build a more concrete story line, which we fail to due to the time restriction. I think if we have time to develop more on this, it will be a really cool interactive story!
What I learned after this project is that we should always pay attention to every single word that we type in while coding. Sometimes different coding habit may lead to not able to put things together, which occurs to our team just as I said above. Also the syntax is really important for coding even if it is just an error of punctuation. And punctuation is actually the hardest thing to find for me when debugging. I feel like next time I’m coding, I should code a lot more carefully and check frequently that there is not syntax mistake.
I feel like this project actually teach me the essence of cooperation, which is to do things together with everyone doing things they are familiar with. It would probably decrease our efficiency if I was doing the acting. So I really appreciate them. I don’t think it is rude to appoint job like this. How we can allocate jobs the best is to base on everyone’s “expertise”.