Narratives: Interactive Narrative Project

The third project for our Narratives module is the study and production of a Flash based Interactive Narrative sequence. Using at least 10 still images and Macromedia Flash CS3, we have to build an interactive story sequence which is affected by the choices the user makes throughout it. Basically, at certain parts of the story, we have to make the user decide what to do in the situation and thus see the consequences, whether it could be progressing the story onwards or coming to an abrupt halt.

User interaction is the core of this project along with the story itself, and we have to try and include as much interactivity in the project as much as possible. This can include clickable buttons or parts of the image, moving around with the mouse and also clicking on a given option when asked what to do next.

To be truly honest, I was stuck for inspiration on this project, not as much as for the One Shot Film but still to a reasonable degree. But then it hit me...I've got quite a lot of games that are pretty much interactive narratives but with a few extra features and such. There's one particular series of games that I own which is what I'm going to base my work around. As I think I mentioned in the past, I produce video based parodies of a Nintendo DS series called Phoenix Wright as a hobby. It's an existing internet trend, but I decided to contribute my own tribute to it which has become pretty successful and well-loved on Youtube since I started making them back in June this year.

The video parodies I make are called Phoenix Wrongs, and the original inventor of them produced them through Macromedia Flash, where as I produced my versions of them through a video editor called Sony Vegas. I have wanted to learn how to make a Phoenix Wrong through Flash though for curiosity's sake as well as it does produce more polished results than a video editor can for this. Hence I decided to combine my Narratives project with my hobby and thus the final idea for my Interactive Narrative was born.

My final idea is going to be an Interactive Narrative based around the Phoenix Wright series, which will involve travelling through various areas one at a time. In each area will be three characters from the series who all have been accused of murder and it's up to to the user to pick who is the guilty party out of the three people. The right choice will move the user forwards, but the wrong choice will either move the user back to the start or preferably just make the choice again. I had 2 of my friends look over the structure map and the basic idea of my project, and they suggested having some sort of a description appearing when you hover over a character. I also told them about a couple of ideas I had in mind, where one of them would be the character changing their pose or expression when you hover over themm which would be easy to do with sprites from the game itself. The other idea is when you hover over a character, a spotlight style effect will appear on the respective character, with the rest of the screen going dark, to help make it more obvious that the characters themselves are interactive.

I really like this final idea that I came up with, and I'm confident that I'll be able to produce it to a pretty reasonable standard at least. It's based on a game which I'm very passionate about and do love interactive narrative work especially in the games that I have. With the previous two projects, as extremely enjoyable as they were to make (especially Pixilation!), I didn't feel they did turn out to be the standard the course expects from us to be honest, especially upon seeing the interactive narrative work by the students who were in the first year last year. That's also part of the reason why I chose to do the Phoenix Wright idea, as it's something that I've been working with for a long time and I'm pretty confident with, hence it should help to improve the actual standard of my work. When it comes to humour, I have to say I am really good at it as shown by my fan's reactions and comments to my videos on Youtube, but prensentation and polish have always been my mortal weaknesses. My videos may excel in the humorous department, but they always lacked the finesse of other videos such as other Phoenix Wrongs made by other fans of the series. I definitely can't pass this course with humour alone, hence why I am determined to bring up my presentation and production skills up to as high as level as possible to help ensure that I do well in this course as well as in the future with anything else.