Animated Narratives - Week 7 (KJD)

Week 7 Reflection

For this week’s work, I created a small visual novel experience in Unity. I explored the idea of using sound in animation/games/interactive experiences. I have to use sound to introduce information that can’t be seen on the screen. I took the idea of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds and worked on it in my game. The game flow by using this premise looks like this:

- After a long day of work, I crash to bed and call it a day. I turn on the fan as it's a bit warm in the room. I fall into a deep dream, enjoying my apple juice on the ship.

- Enjoying the view of the ocean. The captain sounds the horn but it doesn’t sound right. Even the captain is confused.

- Then the horn gets louder and louder to the point that it's unbearable. I frantically wake up from the dream and I still hear the horn.

- The fan in my room is faulty and the motor is making that devastating sound. I turn off the fan, open the window and go back to sleep.

You can play the game on itch.io and it has a Mac and Windows builds (Dar, 2022). I used a real-life occurring problem as an example for this premise. I recorded a first-person view of my room of me going to sleep and waking up and placed them as my intro and outro videos of the game. Whereas the main level which is the game is like a dream reality. I focused a bit on the visual side of the game so to speed up the prototype process, I took a free cruise ship model from Turbo Squid (Costa Dano Cruise Ship, 2012) and optimized the model in Blender for engine use. Then I used audio from my past undergraduate projects to add ocean, seagulls and drowning sounds.

 An example I can take is the movie Gross point (Christie, 2016) where the actor goes to the shop and the song is playing in the background (non-diegetic sound). As soon as he enters the shop, the same song is playing in the shop’s speakers (diegetic sound).

This game prototype turned out to be a lot better than my week 4’s game prototype. I worked on adding a wide variety of background sounds for the dream scene, worked on added post-processing and a better narrative sequence with some simple 3 acts. There are still a lot of potholes in the level such as: Why is the ship empty? Why is some section blocked off for the player? Where is the captain of the ship? Are we stranded? Some of the questions stated here can’t be explained as even I have no idea on how to explain it from a narrative concept point of view.

Week 7 References

- Christie, D., 2016. Gross Point Blank Live or Let Die. [video] Available at: <https://youtu.be/omcQzPqeHJA> [Accessed 25 April 2022].

- TurboSquid. 2012. Costa Dano Cruise Ship. [online] Available at: <https://bit.ly/3v7Qi4w> [Accessed 24 April 2022].

- Dar, K., 2022. itch.io. [online] itch.io. Available at: <https://grenadeable.itch.io/an-7-weird-dream> [Accessed 25 April 2022].

- Unity. 2016. Free HDR Sky. [online] Available at: <https://bit.ly/3k2LyqB> [Accessed 24 April 2022].

- Cadhatch.com. n.d. Free Seamless Water Texture Patterns with Normal Map. [online] Available at: <https://www.cadhatch.com/seamless-water-textures> [Accessed 24 April 2022].

- Nadeem, A., 2021. Smoke VFX Particle System | How to make Smoke in unity using Particle System VFX. [video] Available at: <https://youtu.be/jQivfs34Wb0> [Accessed 24 April 2022].