Superheros
We, Matt, Maureen and Iris are from Group 3, and our project is a story about superheros. More accurately, the player will first choose their superpower from invisibility, super-strength and flying, and then randomly assigned to one of the three scenarios and trying to save the people as superheros always do. The objective of this game for the player is successfully stops the crime and save all the people and get to an happy ending. However, unlike in movies, superhero doesn’t always success even if they chose all “correct” answers. We’ll set the possibilities and the computer will decide the ending of the story. In my scenario, the player will control the trend of the story by making subtle personal choices but the ultimate challenge will be a moral question that has no right or wrong answer to it. My scenario will be in second person narrative which can furthermore make the player feels and acts in their role as a superhero.
Our work will be presented with a digital form. Like mentioned in the introduction of Literary Gaming: “With a new generation of cross-media writers emerging on the horizon, a greater variety of explorative texts will become available. ” Our game relies on algorithms that enables the player to interact with the text. Their decisions will affect the ending of the game. Such interactions might be hard to present without the help of modern computer science technology. However, our works are subject to constraints as well. We need to set a bunch of rules based on our discussions and write the scenarios accordingly. For example, we even set how many options will we give the player each time. Although our scenarios are not written collaboratively, but for the good of the project we worked like The Unknown mentioned in Rettburg which is built upon respect.
The benefit of team working is that we can divide the work up and thus each of us don’t have to write as much as we have to when working individually. For example, each of us only have one scenario to write but when adding up in total we have three different scenarios. Also different scenarios that has different perspective in them will make the game more playful. However, since we need to write the algorithm to achieve the functionalities and to present the texts as an interactive game, we need to work collaboratively and determine the trend of the stories in advance. If we didn’t agree and shared how we’re going to write our scenarios, it might cause difficulties when writing the computer program later on. Also, each one of us has different schedules so finding a commonly available time to meet might become a challenge. I assume later on coding might be a real challenge. In my experience combining individuals code might cause a great problem of what should a function takes in and what should comes out. If this cannot be handled properly, the program will not run and we’ll spend lots of time changing what we’ve coded.
We’re thinking about finish writing the scenarios before this Tuesday and starts the coding part later this week.
Your project idea is great! It is a good try that each team member writes about the story of one superhero. In our project, we will arrange our work by different tasks so that each person can do his/her best part. It will be more challenging since each of you will have to be responsible for a whole small project. But it is more fun and exciting that you will compare your own work with your teammates and improve your work a lot. I am looking forward to playing your game!