concept
My favorite thing about media is its ability to tell stories. Particularly, in interactive media such as video games, the storytelling is incredibly immersive as the viewer has some agency in navigating the way they experience those stories. For this reason, for my midterm project, I wanted to engage in some sort of storytelling. What I envision is something that is at the intersection of being a game/a visual story. I want to have a character that moves in an explorable region and interacts with different objects in the scene to get bits and pieces of the story.
Ideally, it would look similar to something like below, but it would have more distinct objects and probably only one playable character. I also want the setting and the story I’m trying to convey to be somewhat personalized to me and some of my own experiences, though I’m not exactly sure what yet.
design
For the design, I think I am going to heavily utilize images for more rich scene-setting/worldbuilding. I would like the interactive objects, however, to be made in p5.js, so it’s easier to allow the player to interact with. I also would make visuals to convey the story, that would need to be drawn.
challenging
My main worry in this project is that it relies very heavy on visuals. I’m not exactly the best artist, so I’d need to find specific sprites for the story that I want to tell and background images. In addition, because I want some element of story telling through visuals similar to graphic novels, I’ll have to think about how to get those as well.
In addition, I’m worried about how to handle all these different aspects, especially transitions between different states (as this was something I struggled with in our last assignment as well).
how I plan to handle it
I think some part of it would be through finding assets online, and other would be finding creative ways to develop those as well, such as perhaps drawing them myself to make the project more personal.
For the more complicated/technical challenges, I think the best solution is to make the story as succinct as possible and start small. I’ll implement the small functionality first – such as making a few objects interactive – and only having one animating object. If I figure out how to do that, the rest should be easy hopefully.