Animated Narratives - Week 8

The topic of this week is New Narrative Forms.  This week we watched videos to understand the key concepts  for representing and communicating concepts in class.We created a game using the following premise "When people blink, the sun blinks, and the world is dark." While doing this, we understood the topic of the week much better as a group.

Original Premise:

When people blink, the sun blinks, and the world is dark. (by Lu Zhang. )

The Big Idea:

This is a game for desktop, capture players' eyelid movement to control the game. The player needs to control the character and blinks timely to avoid the enemies in order to retrieve collectibles to finish the game.

Game play:

-Player searches in a dark forest for sun flowers. (intro tutorial)

-Enemies will randomly attempt to attack the player, player will hear sound getting closers with some visual cues (glitching scene?)

-Players dies upon contact with enemies

-Player needs to blink their eyes to enter invisible state to dodge the enemy (until the sound went far); or

-If invisible state is in cooldown, player will have to keep running to buy time until the cd is reset

-After collection of all sun flowers, the forest will be lit up and become peaceful again

HOW HAVE YOU USED YOUR THEME TO SHAPE THE DESIGN OF YOUR INTERACTION?

We will leverage facial detection to collect signals of player's eye movement. When player blinks, it will trigger changes in the game.

And also we use spatial sounds to create the proximity of enemies.

Theme:

We honestly didn't have a big intention/ theme throughout the discussion. We were discussing just to make it just a fun little game. leveraging the eye-blinking element. We discussed and iterated a few versions of the concept for too long even missed the end of the class.

We thought this game could be developed/ wrapped in below directions, which we haven't made the decision yet.

Embracing the fear of unknowns, which we might change the mechanics where more action should be done dealing with enemies

or

Reminding people to rest the eyes (steer into an educational direction, closing eyes for certain seconds to fill up the energy )

The Constantine movie and its comics are the most similar things to our game idea.In the movie, the main character can switch between two worlds. Moreover, these two worlds seem completely different from each other. While there are creatures in one world, humans and other creatures live in the other.

In this week's topic, I understood the interaction between the game and the player much better. For a story to continue, these interactions must somehow be present in the game.