Narratives for Interaction: Project Update

‘Beyond Seen’

Following a heavy production and filming schedule, we decided to simplify the plot to something more relatable and doable.

We’ve minimized the casting in the storyline but still holding main content of the plot.

However, we’ll still be shooting scenes of the character’s environments namely Home, School & Studio.

Updated plot

A new location of dance studio is added as the updated plot follows a student dancer in her everyday life. She seems popular and things look good on the surface. However, a darker side unfolds as the player navigates along.

We have started the filming and will be shooting as well as editing concurrently.

Premises: Home, School, Dance Studio

 

Additional POV

We have also incorporated a bonus play for users – to play in the point of view of her friend. The purpose behind this is to trigger some thoughts on what a player could have done to help their friend in retrospect.

Behind the scenes footage

Narratives for Interaction: Interview & Planning

Overview – “Beyond What We See”

As presented from last week, our group is interested in making an interactive movie game based on mental health in Singapore. The consequences of the storyline will be based on the player’s choices during the course of the narrative.

Our story is based on the life story of Sha, currently 24 years old. She had depression and Borderline Personality Disorder.

Our full presentation:

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Moving ahead from the presentation, we kicked start our project this week in terms of finalizing the planning process. Agenda achieved:

  • Interviewed Sha (main protagonist based on her)
  • Storyline planning + branching choices
sha

Interviewing Sha was very pleasant as she was open to sharing about her experiences

 

From our interview, we were able to hear her personal story of her battle with her mental problems – she felt left out at home, was bullied in Secondary school and Polytechnic, not understood by her peers and at times her visits to the psychiatrists proved ineffective. She is a success story – able to overcome her hurdles, she now an advocate and she has an app geared towards helping those with mental health problems.

After the interview, we were able to get a clearer gauge on how to complete the story. We have finished the story and this is the outline on the branching plot.

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With the planning process more or less finalized, we are now ready to proceed in the making of this project.

Interactive Narrative Inspiration

These 6 Unique Video Games Battle Anxiety and Depression, One Level at a Time

With our project on the topic of mental health, I found an narrative game that also seeks to raise awareness on this illness. A feature of this game that caught my attention were the kinds of metaphors is uses to illustrate depression – it’s not direct which leaves room for interpretation.

 

The game has its high and low points where at certain parts, the character drifts and breezes through a canopy and the music gets cheery and faster. The mood gradually changes where falling leaves start to get fewer and backdrop gets gloomier – a great play of  metaphorical emotional landscape. Essentially, the player is going on a search on their passion.

 

For our project, perhaps we could adopt the idea of contrasting moods of what a person with depression might go through. Also, the play of character choices where the outcome of the character might not exactly correspond with what the player chose.