Project 2: A foolproof Gambit (I hope!)

With my interactive Narrative almost finished, I decided to work on the second project today: creating an interactive demo of my game concept from the previous unit. Many people are choosing to continue and refine their interactive narratives instead of this, but I’ve chosen to create a short demo because my concept was both something I am passionate about, in addition the After effects / iWeb tutorials that I have had hint at ways I could definitely create something that would work.

Now for this project I would have roughly 4 weeks to complete it. The first week I have set myself a number of tasks to complete that will mean that I will have the correct tools and structure to push on for the final weeks:

- Creating a Scenario

-Creating character sprites (fortunately from BA4 I have the protagonist sprites already available – in addition to a full turnabout which will make building the ‘in game’ sprites easy for that character. Although this said, I would – if I have time- like to make improvements)

- Generating 1 or two puzzles for the player to complete in the scenario to progress

- Creating the Environment (which will be built around A: The Scenario and B: The Puzzles)

-Scripting any and all dialogue

- Blocking out progression of Scenario (i.e.: when dialogue happens, items in room, how the narrative might be set out in iWeb)

Possible problems I have identified ahead are:

The animating process: Due to the nature of the basic sprites and after effects, I have a feeling that through moving layers of a Photoshop file I could quite quickly and easily animate sections of gameplay – HOWEVER if this is a time consuming process I would have to consider changing all the animation to ‘stills’ to drastically decrease the amount of extra work I have to do. I would not like to have to do this but the most important thing will be completing this project. It is because of these worries I have put aside 3 weeks for the production and post-production stages

Time-keeping: I have been ambitious in trying to take on this project, so I need to make sure that I don’t give myself too much work to do in the time period and keep a firm balance between using all the time allotted to the maximum but also not pushing that too far. Because of this I have several ‘options’ available to me to cut down on production time at the expense of certain elements.

Puzzles: My plan was to have two puzzles maximum. Should I push the limits too far, I’ll reduce this to only 1 puzzle that will only require the player to work it out and not pick up anything.

Animations: I would like to ideally animate some – if not all of the possible areas I can. Obviously though, if this is too time consuming I will systematically cut some of the animations (turning them into stills of key frames).

This demo will have a few minor alterations to the original design document. It won’t be split screen to represent the DS, nor will it be entirely interactive to the degree I would like (there will be 1 or at a push 2 interactions the player can make with elements in the background – eliminating the action wheel). Due to the constraints of an iWeb set up for interactive narratives, the inventory will also be gone. While the demo will have many constraints given the iWeb basis – it should demonstrate the gameplay flow, in addition to the trust system.