Project 1 B
MEMBERS
Weiqi Wu​ Ziqi Guo Christina Chen Sara Hosseini
ADAPTING A TEXT-BASED STORY INTO A VISUAL ADVENTURE
With this project, our first challenge was taking our single reader text-based murder mystery, and adapting it into a visual, interactive experience that could be shared among multiple people.
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We gathered the locations in our story, and spread them out into a bird's eye map view, while playing around in Topia to get an idea of what it was like to walk around and explore inside the canvas.
PROTOTYPING OUR WORLD
To understand more of Topia's functionality and how we could use it to bring the town of MythValley to life, we first created a preliminary prototype to experiment with how we could place the different locations inside of MythValley, how we could use teleportation to travel across the canvas, and what kind of media we could add to enhance the experience beyond visuals.
INTRODUCING MYTHVALLEY
After feeling confident our prototype and receiving feedback from Karen, we decided to start focusing on fostering more collaboration among players when they enter our world. Our previous prototype provided little context into the goal of the story, which is to solve the murder of Augustine.
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In the updated world, we developed an entry point, created a central information board for players to gather ideas, placed greater emphasis on enlarged clues, as well as special zones for further discussion.
We also made an effort to refine our illustration styles by drawing custom assets with marker, ink, and watercolour brushes to preserve the hand-drawn feeling.
A CLOSER LOOK INTO CLUES
For several objects that hinted at information related to Augustine's death, teleportation was used to enter areas of the map which went into further detail and enlarged important clues. This would help to improve the player experience by limiting the time spent to travel by walking across the canvas.
ENCOURAGING COLLABORATION
Although players could talk to each other within Topia, there was no place they could create and store information together. In our Twine game, a key aspect of solving the murder was a notepad that included clues that the player encountered.
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To bring this into Topia, we decided to build upon the central information board as a gathering centre. We drew custom sketch and note assets containing links that players could interact with.
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The Sketchtogether board and the FigJam link that opened up, provided players with another way to communicate and take notes with each other making working together more creative and expressive.
HEARING THE WORLD
To make the game more interactive, we decided to personally record and narrate key story elements, attached curated music to fit the mood of different locations, and added sound effects in some sections. Not only are the players seeing our world but also hearing it too.