• Homepage
• 500 word piece
• Article Observations
• Narrative
• Making it Interactive & Plan
• Storyboard & Tests
• Design & colour
• User Interface & Sources
• User Guide
• Essay

Time Plan

02/10/08	Begin thinking of ideas for the narative.
09/10/08	Finalise idea for the narrative, begin planning how to use it to make an interactive project.
16/10/08	Begin collecting media elements to be used in the project & begin to draw characters.
23/10/08	Trial out ideas in flash to see if they are appropriate and effective, ensure the website is up to date and ready for the pitch.
30/10/08	Begin planning the storyboard of my project & pitch my idea.
06/11/08	Begin drawing all media elements together and creating the project
13/11/08 +	Continue creating the project
27/12/08	Begin writing essay
08/01/09	Test & finalse the project and the website
09/01/09	Hand project in

 

How I plan to make it interactive

I plan to turn my narrative into an interactive game where the user plays a crucial part of the story. As mentioned in the narrative, the character 'Rob' has to travel to other planets in the solar system, and the user will play the part of 'Rob', there will be a screen where the user can select which planet to visit, and will then have to solve some sort of puzzle on that planet before they can retrieve the piece of the crystal. Each piece of the crystal will reveal another part of the story about the war. Once all of the pieces have been collected the user will have to return to Earth where they will then need to assemble the pieces in the correct order to get the full story & complete the game.

Each planet will have a different type of puzzle, I like the clickable puzzle style of gaming, of Samorost, and I hope to do something similar with at least one of the planets. The planets will all be slightly different and have differnent rules on them, for example some will have more gravity than others,

There would be a very brief Flash introduction to explain that an ancient artefact had been found & show Rob touching it & the hologram appearing. On finding each piece another part of the story would be revealed, and once all of them have been found, & the crystal re-assembled, there will be another Flash animation showing the full story & show the ending with the user finally defeating the Nebualbots.

I plan to create the game in Flash, as I am much more confident with it than Director.

The game will need to remember which planets the user has already visitied so that if they do retuen there by mistake, the things they did previously will be remembered, & the puzzle piece from that planet would be missing and I would do this using global varaibles in the actionscript.

Clicking items on the planets will change these global variables, so that if the user goes to a different frame, the next time they go back to that frame, it will have 'remembered' what the user did.

Most of the puzzles will allow the user to get very close to the item, & even see it, but there will be something preventing the them from actually getting to it, and they will need to switch something or collect another item before they can get to the item. This again can be done with the global variables, e.g. switch a switch, varaiable changes from 0 to 1, then on the screen with the puzzle item, if the variable = 1, allow the user to get to the item.