Monday, May 21, 2012

Interactive Fiction project

email address: gku@sfsu.edu

Hey BECA 670 classmates, thanks for checking out my interactive fiction project.

This project was initially supposed to be a Choose Your Own Adventure-type game with small mini-games that required puzzle solving and reflexes to complete, but due to technical problems (I suck at Flash!), I made it more into a "game script," something that merely presents the dialogue and story events of an imagined game. That being said, there are still a limited number of dialogue choices the reader can make which lead to different story outcomes. There are also visual and audio aids, so be sure to turn on your speakers if you want to hear some sound effects and music :-)

As I wrote the project, I imagined it fitting with a first-person view type game, something like Valve Software's Half-Life games. In that game, the player views the game's world and interacts with it through the first-person viewpoint of a character within the game. NPCs, or non-player characters, look at, interact with and talk to the player. The character dialogue I wrote for this project is about the dialogue that would be exchanged between the player character ("Jerry") and NPCs.

Also... I had hoped to have some way for the reader to put their own name into the script as the player character's name. That way, instead of being named Jerry (that's me), you'd have a name of your choosing in the script. But again, due to not having enough Flash skills, I didn't know how to do this :(

As of December 9th, this project is not completed. Hopefully, I can finish it up by the 13th.

Update -- Dec 13th: The project's story is finished! It's not polished up though. Need to update the table of contents and some other stuff. If the story feels too compressed, I felt I had to speed it up/compress it down in order to conclude the story for the final project chunk.

Also, if this was a real game I'd probably want to fill it up with some little missions that occupy the player's time, like having to acquire certain parts or supplies for the RX robot. Plus the player character would be given an opportunity to talk to his love interest "Lisa" or his friend "Zaft" before going into the final battle. Gotta tie up loose ends, ya know?

10 comments:

Lauraelena said...

WHOA!Very cool and way over my head in terms of technical stuff...I commend you for that! I had a hard time at first getting the story to start off...I ended up just having to click all around the page to get something to start. I think that some more interaction along the way would have kept me more involved as well, and I was sometimes a bit confused with how the pictures correlated with the story at the time.

Overall though it is a fantastic idea. My interactive fiction didn't work out so well, as I'm not the best storyteller! I can't wait to see this evolve and check it out in a few days for changes!

DAVEMAN said...

This is a very ambitious project, perhaps a bit too ambitious for the timeline of this course...you'd need to start writing in September! The story lines are good, and have a lot of potential to engage participants. I'd like to check back in a month, and see how interactive it is...It obvious that you love gaming, so keep at it.

Tabasco said...

Damn dude. Robot Attack is off the hook. Great work on the technical aspect of the site. The graphics and SFX were really good. My only problem was that after awhile I needed some choices to make. Maybe I did it wrong but I felt that the only choice to make was at the table of contents, and after that I was just reading a script. It needs to be more engaging and interactive to keep the reader going. That being said, I think you're doing an unbelievable job with this. 2 kudos.

Nicole Leigh said...

This look amazing! I would have no idea how to do that. I thought it was engaging and well-made. Maybe a little bit more choices and interactivity besides clicking ahead but overall, it's great.

Samantha Axelrod said...

You're interactive story is really cool, Jerry. The only thing I would say is that I kept hoping the picture would change during each section. Good job!

Somolian Banquet Coordinator said...

Wow! You obviously have HTML know how and it shows. I am very impressed with the aesthetic value of your project. The music is compelling, the visuals (though I'd like to see more) are conducive to the plot and, there are smooth transitions between chapters/plot twists.

As others have already said... I would continue to find ways to make this more interactive, perhaps getting more picture changes.

Incredibly ambitious...well written. It makes me feel like I am the main character from the movie Transformers. Well done, sir...

NattieAnn said...

That was very interesting. The instructions are all plain and easy to follow and the choices are simple as well. I like the graphics a lot as well. Must have taken a lot of work. I like it a lot.

49ers Faithful Fan said...

Very impressive. You obviously know what you are doing. It's very creative, but kind of got confused in the beginning. I wasn't sure how to go back to the beginning.

Keep up the great work.

Zoe said...

This is so great! I really love what you've done with your project...I have no idea how you put it together but I am impressed! My only suggestion would be to have more choices, but that would obviously evolve over time. I found it really easy to navigate around and had fun interacting with it. I think that more visuals could be useful, but thats about it. Good job!

Ryannn said...

This definitely already looks like a game that's just missing the gameplay elements. You obviously understand game narrative and story, and so far you've done a great job. The presentation is great, the still photos go a long way. A standout for me was the use of sound effects, which were very well done. It's good to see another BECA person interested in gaming.