Interactive Narrative

The Project

The new task is to come up with an idea for an interactive narrative; be it flash comics, digital graphic novels, 3D 1^st person exploration, point and click, etc. One of the examples shown was a graphic novel done I think on iWeb, consisting of 5 options to choose from during the whole game-play with only 1 proper linear outcome; with more or less 15-20 pages in between them.

Research

On my research I started by looking at familiar works that I think is very influential to me and also in gear with this current project, some of them are as shown below.

INFAMOUS 1 & 2 opening cinematic

MGS Digital Graphic Novel

Then I went on to look at how different graphic novels/ comics/ manga utilize different drawing styles; line drawings, shades and also angles and panels. 

Various Marvel comics

The Walking Dead

Man With No Name

 Orange

By then I have a pretty clear idea that the atmosphere and style is going to be moody with touches of bright colors, very inkish, brushy, very grungy; and the execution will be; again more or less like how it is in MGS Graphic Novel and INFAMOUS. Basically lots of different layers of drawings simply transformed and aided with audio and SFX to give an illusion of it being animated. However, at the end of the day, since IT IS first and foremost have to be an interactive experience and having only about a few weeks to finish the project, its clear that making it graphic heavy, too many panels and too complicated will be downright suicidal.

Concept & Development

So I came up with a pretty simple concept of a duel that consist of choosing different options throughout the fight and ultimately leads to 2 different endings.

This will all be in a digital graphic novel style, so all drawings will be done in Photoshop and then transferred to after-effects for simple animations and then to iWeb to put it all together and have an interactive animation. After roughly working out the branches and path, I came up with this (this is the final branch image that I come up with after different sketches)

Branches

Storyboards

And of course some concept design

and lets not forget influences/ inspirations

 Afro Samurai

Man With No Name

Once Upon A Time In The West

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Sukiyaki Western Django

Jagger is a character that I doodled on a piece of paper years ago, I really like him but didn’t know what to do with him till now. Jagger's name came from his 'jaggy' hair and the title 'Jaggy Sam' stands for Jaggy Samurai but also sounds like a name, its simple and I think its rather catchy, it came up the moment I finished drawing him and just stuck with it till now. The concept for Jagger is to have an overpowered character, he's seen it all, seasoned, he's a foreigner in a new place but he just wants to chill, have a drag, have a drink, paint nature and he is also a vegetarian. The antagonist in the duel is called Cal, named after Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry; Harry Calahan, because he IS after all modeled after Eastwood's character 'The Man With No Name'.

Now, at this point I don’t have much story to tell, but the interactivity is definitely there.

Got the green light from Nigel and peers seems to think it’s a solid concept so then I started working on the panels one by one.

1^st few panels into the project and already I am struggling to even get the first scene out, I noticed how I’m not used to drawing more than even 1 picture in a day and even when I did manage to get more than a few panels out, they will be in slightly different consistency and needs a lot of reworking to keep it more or less uniform. Then it dawned on me that I will never finish this project anytime soon, fortunately the university gave an extension.

I stumbled upon this artist on the net with her works on similar uni project, which I find rather simple, moving and inspiring.

Rumination by Yuumei (Interactive Narrative)

At some point I was heavily considering the idea of using Adobe Flash instead of iWeb; its definitely much more customizable and much more interactive if used properly, however after tweaking with it for 3 sleepless nights to no avail, I was defeated by action scripting, it is too much of a pain to learn and get used to at this point (even with a premade script template). After fruitless search in trying out different software for interactivity as well, I am back with iWeb. The problem with iWeb is that is not nearly as interactive as half of what I need it to do, so there’s a lot of compromise; page have to been changed and reload after every choices, there’s also no function that allows buttons to appear only at certain times. iWeb is bearable but definitely not really doing my work justice, however I came up with a lot of adjustments and tried it out (to get used to it) as I was working on them panels, each week I will also use the After-Effects on Media Lab (as mine wouldn’t run properly on my laptop) to get the animation done as I slowly, but surely geting the panels done on Photoshop.

Final week before hand in, all panels are drawn and animated, also came up with a short story to briefly introduce the audience to the world of Edowest, which is a mash up of old west and old east (Edo). Jagger the main character had been wrongly accused of murdering a group of people in a posse, the youngest surviving member had caught up with him and thirsty for revenge. I kept it brief because there really isn’t any point in exploring the story too much when all you see is a 5 minutes duel sequence between 2 characters. Also I put in loads of SFX and original music on the video which If I say so myself; made the animation much smoother and nicer to watch. Also, I start putting in dialogs although initially I was going with the dialogs I had on the storyboard, but decided that its too shallow and could've been otherwise used to bring out the story more. Lastly I came up with a logo before finally putting all the pieces together on iWeb.


Jaggy Sam Logo

Working on iWeb had not been an easy journey so far and at this stage; with its unpredictability involving videos and hyperlinks and layers that messes up on different browsers (Safari, Firefox, etc), it gets brutally frustrating to work with. It is definitely a good software for blogging with simple images, text and links, but it is just simply not made for making clips of video animation interactive. Fortunately with all that being said, I managed to pull it off; at the very least all the hyperlink and branches works, managed to put in my own music on it which wasn’t a smooth process either but eventually it worked. Disappointingly, there are still some glitches when opening it on Firefox, some of the buttons would be invisible but everything else works fine.

Conclusion

In conclusion, in this project I’ve learnt so much about working very quickly to get loads of work out in a really short amount of time and it definitely trained me; at the beginning I can barely finish more than 1 piece of drawing each day, whereas now I could tank at least 3-4 drawings each day. It was a difficult and tedious process but which I really enjoyed and really proud off. I will also be importing this work on to Flash as soon as I can work out the action scripting or get somebody to help out, because as I mentioned before putting it on a blog making software like iWeb is not doing my work justice at all and will only be a temporary solution.