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?