Author: Gibson Ross

Hello everyone,

For my final project, I took my Twine game and changed several things about it. Using what I learned from a previous narrative, I added sound effects and music that will begin to play when the player reaches certain points in the story. Addressing some feedback, I also added a way for players to inspect their weapons and the enemy they encounter in order to get a better idea of what weapon they should use. And I expanded the endings of each of the two routes, adding in another branching path for the village route as well as some dialogue options for an NPC in the castle route. Lastly, I fixed some bugs and added an option to skip the introduction if someone has already played through it.

Here is a link to my game posted on Cyberduck if anyone wants to play it: link.

– Gibson

Hello everyone,

For my rough draft, I am going to be taking my Hypermedia Narrative assignment and making it more feature complete and fleshed out. Here is what I have so far: Link

– Gibson

Hello everyone,

Click here to play my twine game for the Hypermedia Narrative assignment.

– Gibson

Hey everyone,

For my final project, I am currently planning on using a mixture of the twine module and the audio storytelling module. I am planning on creating a twine interactive story that will use audio and visual aids in order to help relay the story to players. It will be an expansion on the twine game that I made recently for the hypermedia assignment.

The central story is that of a person who has escaped a ship explosion in an escape pod. They are launched through space and land on a swampy planet where they need to reach either a village or castle (player’s choice) in order to get to safety. There will be a few major choices and some variables to make the game more replay-able.

The player will advance through the story by using the mouse to click the button to continue. There will be a background for each and every page, which will be created using the app Midjourney. And sometimes audio ques will play automatically when the player reaches a certain part of the story. The audio ques will be either things I’ve recorded myself, or they will be taken from license free sources on the internet.

I am very hopeful for this game. I’ve always been passionate about game design, and the game will take place in a universe that I have created and been working on for a while now. I still need to reach out to Will for approval at the time of writing this, however.

– Gibson

Hello everyone,

The game that I am going to be talking about in this post is the 2019 science-fiction game “Outer Wilds” (not to be confused with the RPG, “The Outer Worlds”). Outer Wilds is a space exploration game. You play as a young astronaught. It’s your first day on the job, and you’ve been given a small ship that you can use to explore the solar system.

At the start of the game you are free to explore the entire solar system in any order. You can go anywhere you want, and the game does not force you to go down a linear path. After exploring the system for about 20 minutes, the solar system’s star goes supernova, killing you and everyone in the solar system. You then wake up again–where you started at the beginning of the day–realizing that you are stuck in a time loop, and that you need to explore the solar system to figure out how to break the loop.

Outer Wilds is essentially a “space archeologist simulator,” as when you explore the solar system you will uncover ancient alien ruins full of texts for you to decipher and artifacts for you to find. The story is completely tied to the gameplay, and without the story the gameplay would not work. This is because the ancient civilization is tied to the time loop and you need to discover who they were, why they came to the solar system, and how they are connected to the time loop in order to break it.

This game always gives me a sense of wonder and awe every time I play it. The feeling of piecing together the narrative yourself by exploring the various planets and connecting the dots together is nothing short of amazing.

– Gibson

Hey Everyone,

I checked out the story “Book From The Ground: From Point to Point” by Bing Xu. This is a short story told through icons on a Google Slideshow. This is a really interesting and different format for telling stories, as most works of fiction are told through written language, film, or some other more common method.

Our story starts off with a zoom in on the world, taking us down onto Earth and into a city where we eventually arrive at a bird singing in a tree. The bird singing leads to a man waking up and noticing the birds. The story continues from this point, doing things like showing us how he starts his day.

The various signs help us learn the story as it gives us visual images. Each of the images are connected to one another in the sense that their order is important. We can see an image of a camera zooming down onto a city from space because of the icons that show a planet and then a slightly more zoomed in version of that planet than a city than a slightly more zoomed in icon of that city.

For my own project, I might use similar icons to tell my story. I could use emojis from an iPhone to show off some kind of conversation between two people. Maybe the conversation goes south and so I use a red-faced emoji to express that.

– Gibson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqShdM826k0

Hello everyone,

After checking out “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War,” I am a little bit confused on the story it was trying to tell. At one point I got the impression that the partner cheated on their boyfriend while they were deployed. There is a line that says something along the lines of “He was my neighbor” and shortly afterwards, there is the line “Forgive me.” that as well as some other lines gives me this impression.

As for whether or not this can be considered a story, technically yes. It’s sort of like a puzzle that readers have to fit together, as the story is not laid out in a direct and linear fashion like most stories do. It sort of reminds me of how games like Bioshock and Prey (2017) can tell stories. In both those games, there are audio logs scattered around the game’s map that can be listened to in different orders. Players will often listen to logs of overarching stories out of order, forcing them to piece together what happened in some of these audio logs.

I am kept engaged by these hyperlink stories because of the way that they uniquely present information to readers. It is different than a traditional book or movie and it feels more interactive.

I was very disappointed that I did not learn how to rob a bank from the second story. Oh well. This story uses its navigation structure of simply pressing on the spacebar to transition you through a linear story, allowing you to read it at your own pace. The linear sequencing is clear.

– Gibson

Here is my audio story:

https://youtu.be/x6iwLrXVWnw

Hey everyone,

Here is the link to my slideshow: Click Here

– Gibson

Hey everyone,

Here is my video: Click Here

– Gibson

There are many differences between the original book and the film adaption of the story “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” written by Ambrose Bierce. One of the most obvious differences is that not all characters look the same in the movie as they are described in the book. Some characters appear to be a different age than what they were originally depicted as.

Another example of a noticeable difference between the two works is the fact that characters seem to be a lot more chatty in the book than they are in the show. The show seems to do a good job of “show don’t tell” with some characterization being done through shots of film instead of through dialogue like it is done in the book. This makes perfect sense given the medium that the story is being showcased in. This is most strongly noticeable in the introduction of the story.

As a result of this bigger emphasis of show don’t tell, there are many different camera shots used in order to tell the story that the author was trying to express. Because of the way a certain scene is filmed, it can invoke stronger emotions in the reader that are more intense than what we got in the book of the same name.

– Gibson

Click here to view.

For this blog prompt, I put together a little fight scene with two figures that I own. The two close-up shots at the beginning are meant to mimic something you’d commonly see in fight scenes. The third image is based on a shot you’d see in some western movies.

After reading part of the book “Understanding Comics,” there are several different ways that I could approach this next assignment. For one, I could use unique ways of sequencing text in order to get across my story. In the recent story that we read in class about the rock and role pauses (the name escapes me), the author used many different ways to relay information.

One example that comes to mind is when she used a graph of a cycle going in circles to explain the flow of a conversation that she was having with her mom. Using this style showed off how a conversation in their family typically flows and the fact that it is shown to be a cycle shows that these kinds of conversations happen a lot.

Time frames are a great way to communicate to readers about the order of events that are happening in the story. For my own assignment, I could have text flash on screen to say things such as, “1 Hour Earlier” to show off something important in the story. This might work well in something where there is a lot of drama happening. Maybe there’s a murder mystery that needs to be solved, and the author wants to cut to a flashback of a scene where two characters are arguing with one another in order to further the suspension and get readers more invested in the plot.

I doubt that I will write a murder mystery for my assignment, but it does still give me some ideas for things that I could do. I am probably going to be writing a sci-fi war story of some kind, and maybe within this story there could be cuts backwards in time to events that started the war and influenced the characters in the story. I will have to give it some thought.

– Gibson