Our project borrows ideas from previous projects such as Beg-borrow-steal, Go Viral, and Generative Play. It is a “choose your own adventure” kind of game, whose storyline is implemented with comic strips. The theme of the story is procrastination. Because of their dramatic and appealing nature, comic strips would make the audience resonate with the characters and thus reflect on their own experience.
The link of the presentation of the project is attached below:
Our final version of the project is a choose-your-own-adventure style game implemented with Google slides,
Majority of the slides include a comic picture with a line of explanation of the scene at the bottom to guide the players. Many pictures are duplicated with the conversation bubbles changed to the appropriate lines. At each of the 4 transition points, where the players have to make a decision giving the situation the main character, Donald Duck, is in, there is a collage of the past few pictures since the last branching point to summarize the progression of the story from then. The players are given some options as to how Donald should handle a current situation and prompted to make a deliberate decision with the collage on the side to remind them of some important factors that go into this decision making process for Donald.
We generated 12 possible paths, where 1 leads to a best ending: Donald manages to finish academic tasks, stay connected with his girlfriend, Daisy, and maintain physically well; 3 to good endings: Donald gets the bulk of his life together, but still leaves trivial tasks or problems unresolved; 3 to normal endings: compromises were made; 3 to bad endings: Donald messes up academics and social life; and now worst ending: Donald makes very serious mistakes that result in serious consequences.
Generally, players weren't able to get to the best ending on their first try, which reflects how hard it is to balances out work, well-being, and social life in a real-life.
The main idea behind the project was to use comic strips to make a message while also engaging the audience. We believe that comic strips are powerful in attracting people's attention because of their dramatic and hilarious nature. We were also inspired by the beg-borrow-steal and remix-and-spread concepts we became familiarized during module 1 and module 2. Hence, we borrowed comic art that are already made and available on the internet, and remixed it with our own storyline.
Instead of making another "Choose Your Own Adventure" type of game which simply savored the audience's curiosity of the storyline, we decided to reflect on something more meaningful. We have always thought about making something that could raise awareness of the highly competitive stress culture here at CMU. However, it would not be interesting to create something that directly preach the audience about the importance of time management and balance between social and academic life.
Therefore we decided to use comic strips to narrate one typical day of a CMU freshman. We chose to depict Donald Duck as the protagonist who had to manage his relationship with Daisy, make friends, and gets his work done while maintaining academic integrity. Donald was very rich in his emotions, and they could be very effective for the narrative of the story. While the experience of dealing with stress from all aspects of a college student life is shared by everyone, people don't tend to show inner frustrations and seem calm on the surface.The use of comic strips here serve as a appropriate media that highlights and brings out these inner frustrations, since the characters' facial expressions and postures are dramatized.
1. Course Readings - Performing Interactivity:
Dixon's article on interactivity in performance shaped the direction of our project. For the major part of the article, Dixon emphasized on the four different levels and categories of interactivity. We can rank in ascending order in relation to the “openness of the system and the consequent level and depth of user interaction”: Navigation, Participation, Conversation and Collaboration. Our project involved all levels of interaction, as the audience is directly involved in the direction of the performance.
2. Previous work - Tim's Dilemma:
The performance "Generative Play" project that both of us were a member of was the main source of inspiration for this project. The goal was to create an interactive piece in which the audience would stay engaged by actively directing the performance. That project did not have too many choices for the audience, and some of them did not make much sense. A major advice that the staff and audience made last time was to have something more meaningful. That is why we decided to reflect on the community.
3. Dungeon Stompage (Research Project):
http://chooseyourstory.com/story/viewer/default.aspx?StoryId=12792
This is an online choose-your-own-adventure style of game that uses little animation but is rich in its storyline, which motivates the player to continue and finish the game. The various items are animated with pictures, which, when clicked on, would make the player use that item. Besides that, however, there isn’t really incorporation of media. Another downside is that the plot may be too long for an average player to effectively reach the ending.
4. strange Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck comic panel edit (Research Project)
http://data.whicdn.com/images/171009463/large.jpg
This is a random comic strip whose lines are replaced with philosophical questions. It is interesting that while Donald Duck’s worried look matches his new line, Mickey Mouse’s ominous smile fits even better with the harsh words that he is speaking. We can use a similar kind of irony in our project.
5. The Terrible Truth About Time Travel (Research Project)
http://www.collegehumor.com/post/7036566/the-terrible-truth-about-time-travel
This game closely resembles what I envision as the final product of our project. Instead of dry words, each choice would be animated with self-explanatory images. In addition to that, as we said in the proposal, the pictures would be actual comic strips, with the lines replaced.
We had multiple iterations. We made a first-cut of the project before the desk crit. The first-cut, whose screenshots were attached below, was very similar to the final turnout, but the theme was totally different. The story's theme was "Scrooge vs Apple", which was a non-sensical subject of Scrooge trying to win back his taste of apples. The comic strips had their lines replaced, which we found very effectively narrated the story.
At desk crit, we gathered advice from Daragh, Kevin, as well as prof. Corbett from the Game Design department. One important question that was often asked was what we wanted to achieve using comics. This is why we came up with the idea of using the dramatic effect of comics to reflect on everyday issues.
Previously in the proposal, we said that we intended to create a meme-like style in comics. However, Kevin was especially skeptical if by making comic strips memes we could achieve what we wanted. We also discussed about this issue and finally decided to just change the lines. This was important because in order for the comic strips to connect with each other to form a story, each comic strip could not stand out to interrupt the flow.
The specific procedure of creating the comic pictures are as follows:
1) We first gathered a bunch of comic pictures of Donald and Daisy
2) Following the storyline, we carefully chose relevant pictures to transition and progress through the story
3) Photoshop the pictures to update the conversation bubbles, as well as modifying the background to fit it in the context (since our choice of comic pics were limited, we weren't able to find a perfect picture for every scene).
4) Bring the photoshopped pics together to produce the google slides
As Prof. Byrne mentions while providing feedback for our project, maybe we overdid the slides to include both the comic pictures and a sentence of explanation of it at the bottom. I think prof. Byrne has a good point in that comics exist by themselves and the sentence is redundant in that it distracts the audience from the comic picture, which is the meat of our project.
As far as the content goes, what we find is that audience who really tried to reach the best ending often overanalyze the decisions to make, and this is definitely partially our fault for not making the tradeoffs in each choice clearer. When it's the first time to choose what Donald should do when he has 3 assignments and Daisy invites him to the party, both "going to the party" and "go home and study" could lead to the best ending, and it's the decisions that follows that Donald has to make very carefully. I feel like we could give people more hints to remind them of what're at stake each time audience are asked to make a decision.
As for the implementation of the project, I believe we could do better with Unity, because this is the first tool prof. Corbett suggested that we use. Since neither of us has ever used Unity before, we're actually unsure how awesome it is and if it's worth it to devote a considerable amount of time into learning Unity. Although I do think being able to have the comics move along horizontally like a strip does is a better representation of our project.
Tim's Dilemma: http://ideate.xsead.cmu.edu/gallery/projects/mad-lib-theatre
Comic generator: http://dilbertmashups.com
We borrowed ideas from performance projects such as "Tim's Dilemma", various Meme tennis projects such as "Loss.jpg", and Beg-borrow-steal. We intend to create a choose-your-own-adventure kind of game, whose protagonists are famous comic characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. We would cut strips from different comic series, change the lines, and place them in a different order so that they constitute a story of our own. We would make the audience choose from a selection of strips, which each leads to a different story, similar to what many of us did in the Generative Play project. Our new strips would have a meme-like feature in that they might be a little non-sensical but have the potential to spread, and might have some profound underlying meanings.
The reason we chose to create something like this is to make the audience as well as the creators ourselves to participate in and enjoy the game-like performance, but also reflect on the issues raised by the meme-like comic strips.
Di’s 3 research outcomes:
1. Dungeon Stompage:
http://chooseyourstory.com/story/viewer/default.aspx?StoryId=12792
This is an online choose-your-own-adventure style of game that uses little animation but is rich in its storyline, which motivates the player to continue and finish the game. The various items are animated with pictures, which, when clicked on, would make the player use that item. Besides that, however, there isn’t really incorporation of media. Another downside is that the plot may be too long for an average player to effectively reach the ending.
2. strange Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck comic panel edit
http://data.whicdn.com/images/171009463/large.jpg
This is a random comic strip whose lines are replaced with philosophical questions. It is interesting that while Donald Duck’s worried look matches his new line, Mickey Mouse’s ominous smile fits even better with the harsh words that he is speaking. We can use a similar kind of irony in our project.
3. The Terrible Truth About Time Travel
http://www.collegehumor.com/post/7036566/the-terrible-truth-about-time-travel
This game closely resembles what I envision as the final product of our project. Instead of dry words, each choice would be animated with self-explanatory images. In addition to that, as we said in the proposal, the pictures would be actual comic strips, with the lines replaced.
Chelsea's research outcomes:
1. Memes in Disney movie scripts
Watching or reading comics as a little kid might not be exactly the same as doing so as an adult. In these Pinterest posts, snatches of conversations or lines in the Disney movies were taken out and turned into memes. I think this could be very relevant to our project as we're going to use Micky Mouse and Donald Duck, two cartoon characters everyone became familiar with in his or her childhood, to illustrate some things that seem naive on the surface, but are more of concerns in adult life.
2. Choose your own adventure : The Abominable Snowman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure:_The_Abominable_Snowman
This is an interactive movie in that audience can direct how the storyline goes with a remote control. Both this movie and our project make use of cartoons and require audience participation. This concept is very similar to what we want to achieve in our project, and we could also adopt something similar to the voting scheme used in this movie.
3. Horrible Things That Happen To Cartoon Characters That Don't Have Their Morning Coffee
https://creators.co/@JJMoya1955/3981798#_ga=1.154452477.414941183.1480587053
The artist drew and photoshopped animated characters to emulate their looks before drinking coffee in the morning. In our project, since we attempt to use comic strips and fill in the conversation bubbles as the storyline progresses, I think we can draw inspiration from this artwork and photoshop the characters in the comic strip as well as updating the conversation bubbles, and make the display more lively.
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