“Kamusta ka, Anak?” is a phrase in Tagalog translated to “How are you?”. Anak means child in Tagalog and often this term is used by many parents as an endearment towards their children.

For my final project, I wanted to utilize visual and audio to convey the story I wanted to tell. The story I tried to tell is about the main character moving to another country as a nurse while she leaves majority of her family back in the Philippines, hence the use of Tagalog. Because of the distance, the strong connection between mother and daughter begins to weaken. It’s only after a specific event that allows the main character to reconnect with relatives despite the establish connection being cut. Most of the inspiration came from watching how the loss of my grandmother affected my mom. My parents support system are in the Philippines and coming to America rendered them having no one to lean on in a physical sense. I made this video to help understand my parents struggles and how technology has been helping them remember that they still have pillar to lean on.

Translation Note: The words on screen are the translation during speaking portions while the text message portion are mixed Tagalog and English. I tried to make sure all the phrases are translated but there are words that are hard to translate directly.

My final project will be a Twine interactive story game. It is a rewrite of one of my old stories, Evesoul Journal. 

In this story you will follow a teen girl named Ellenar. The driving point of the story is the fact that her sister has been missing for a year, but her sister used to tell her about another dimension and left her journal of notes and research of this world at home before disappearing. Using this journal, Ellenar manages to enter into the mystical world, and begins her quest to find her sister. 

The story will be very word driven but will have color indications on characters and surroundings. There will be sprites of Ellenar to better indicate the mood of the character and a feeling for her as you progress through the story. There will be chances to interact with things in order to give the reader a feeling of choice as well as collection of information. There will occasionally be secret links. 

I hope this project turns out at least half as good as I would like it to, and in the future, I can use it as reference and connection should I ever have the ability to officially make Evesoul Journal into a comic or such.

I like to approach making comics from a “basic till dramatic view” where most frames can be simple rows of square frames, till something dramatic happens. The dramatic thing could be any variety as well, from an epic fight scene, to a death scene, to a surprise, anything that isn’t a “regular” situation for the comic. Like during a conversation, characters might just get sequential boxes with different camera angle views as the conversation goes on, until something “dramatic” happens, so the boxes can become bigger, misshapen, even broken sometimes depending on what is happening. One of my favorite versions of this is when a new character is introduced, they themselves can look as if they are standing in front of the panel, rather than in it. Their hair or clothes could be crossing over the frame walls of the panel, making it as if they are more important than anything else on that page. 

That is the kind of comic design I would like to go for.

https://dtc-wsuv.org/ahiggins22/ahiggins-twine/

Here is my video on YouTube!

https://dtc-wsuv.org/dtc354-luers/ravens-hollow.html

Here is the link to my hypermedia project. I struggled with figuring out how to end it because I felt like I could have gone on and on for a while. I wanted to keep it as short and simple as I could for this project because I do plan on my final being longer and more in-depth than this was.

I really enjoyed working with Twine for the hypermedia project so I’m going to use Twine for my final project as well.

For the hypermedia project, I kept it pretty simple and straightforward. For my final, I want to include more. I want to play around with how to make it to where you can’t progress to the next if you don’t find a certain item in one scene. I also want to include some images in the project.

My story for the final is going to be about a teenager whose grandmother goes missing. When the teen gets to grandma’s house, she finds it empty and has to search for clues as to where her grandma is. The clues will lead her to the woods behind grandmas house where she finds a cabin occupied by a witch. She’ll be given the option to return home or be transported to another realm where her grandma is being held. She won’t be able to get into the other realm if she didn’t find all the clues/items in her grandma’s house beforehand.

I always liked the “choose your own adventure” books as a kid, so I’m really excited about creating this project.

Here is my Twine story!

https://dtc-wsuv.org/dtc354-luers/sgarcia-twine.html

I know this is a blog post for the description of our final project, and I’ll try my best to describe it, but I do not fully know what it will be yet. That sounds concerning, but I am just stuck choosing between two of my projects right now. For my final I am going to choose between my Hypermedia Narrative or my Diagrammatic Narrative. I quite like both, and they are certainly both the projects that you can tell I put more energy into (my bad), but I am leaning towards the Twine project. Especially after talking with Will (thank you) and the advice given about setting it up better and making sure the audience can understand the rapport between myself and them.

The story in 3-5 sentences would be: The storyteller, who happens to be me, explores grief as a feeling and a part of life. I take the audience with me to try and understand it as I tell a vague story about the loss of a pet. Whatever you think grief is, it is.

It will take place in Twine most likely now. My inspirations are the 1986 text adventure game Amnesia, and the more recent 2019 role-playing game Disco Elysium. Their use of gratuitous amounts of text make me use as little as possible on a screen so my audience does not get bored, but more interested in figuring out what I’m trying to get across.

https://dtc-wsuv.org/dtc354-luers/jhall-zeropoint/

My project will take the form of a comic with sound effects. I’m very inspired by 4KOMA, a form of comics which has four panels that generally stack on top of each other, usually comedic in nature. I really like this format because I think it is so special to be able to set a scene, make a joke, and complete a whole story in four pictures, essentially. It includes a few different methods to tell a story- image, words, and the “gutter”. I plan to tell an episodic story of my week, in a light-hearted, funny manner.  With each day, a four panel comic. The characters will be myself, my coworkers, my friends, the little devil on my shoulder. With this story, I want to bring the viewer into my world by showing them glimpses of what makes every day a little special. Each day has its own mini plot, setting, and events. The overall theme of this work is what makes our everyday better, delivered in the 4KOMA format. Once complete, I would like to move these into a video format with sound effects for each day that will add to the storytelling.

The first game that comes to mind for me is the game that sparked my love for video games when I was about 10 years old. Final Fantasy VII.

This entire game is one, very big, story. Each quest, side quest, choice and interaction helps the player understand the story as a whole and if you skip over parts, don’t do all of the side quests, etc. you may miss valuable information and items that help you understand what is happening. I think that characters, character development, and conflict is essential in THIS particular game, however, I’ve played other games that it’s not as essential. I think that for large, RPG-type games like this, it’s essential because without it the gameplay becomes monotonous and boring, not to mention if the player can’t become emotionally invested in the game somehow, they likely won’t care about what happens at the end and therefore not finish playing the game once they get bored.

For this game, the relationships between the characters are what sparked my imagination. As for emotions, we get so much story into these characters and their relationships that we start to really feel for them. When one of the main characters dies in this game, the player is already so invested that it’s devastating. This was the first time a video game actually made me cry.

The world building is key too. Each location has it’s own unique qualities and helps us feel as though we are a part of this universe when we play. Players have their favorite places and least favorite places to go and it makes it that much more engaging. This is also the first game I’ve played that had such an immense and open world for exploring and it makes the game that much more fun and interesting.

I chose to look in depth at Forever.

Symbols are described as relying on conventional usage for meaning. They are constructed for a given purpose. In this story, the biggest symbol that stood out to me was text messages. Since we all use text messaging daily, it’s easy to understand the dialogue and what’s going on through the messages on the screen. Showing us the green messages from one character and gray from the others puts us in that character’s shoes for the story. Also, when the other characters are typing and we get the three dots on the screen it’s showing us, without telling us, that there are responses coming.

Index is described as a point, reference, or suggestion for something else. There are 3 types of indices, tracks, symptoms, and designations. I think the one we see most often in this story is designations. these point or signify something while being distinct from their object. Each of the cut scenes that show us what their missing friend may be up to, can be a designation. When they talk about her being an orange dancer and then show a random video of the girl dancing on oranges, or the scenes where they are looking for her and it shows a variety of places, it’s not necessarily where they are, but it’s indicating a similarity to where they are looking and what they are doing.

Icons are split into three categories as well, Images, metaphors, and diagrams. I think these are all showcased in the story with images being the most prevalent. There are plenty of images in the background of the text that helps us feel emerged into the story.

I feel like each of the 3 pieces are a story, even though they aren’t all traditional stories and they aren’t all easily understandable. My Boyfriend Came Back from the War is not really a linear story. It doesn’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. However, pictures tell a story on their own, so even though this one was a bit confusing, the photos themselves tell a story.

How to Rob a Bank had a more clear storyline, characters, and character development. I liked that it was easy to follow along with the story, however I felt that it was a bit long and drawn out. I did really like the combination of media that was included. Having the text conversations, short videos, news papers, and social media posts all entwined made this story more engaging and interesting.

Those we love sucked me in at first. I spent WAY too much time “playing” around with this story. However, after a while it got redundant and I gave up before ever getting to the end so the story was never “finished” for me. I really did enjoy the mystery and engagement within the story though.

Personally, because I’m a writer/editor and NOT a visual storyteller, linear storytelling is very important to me. Therefore, the only one out of the three that really seemed to fit with my idea of a story, was How to Rob a Bank.

My plan for my final project is to use my hypermedia project and make it more detailed. My idea is to have illustrations for my story and maybe edit some parts that I feel might need more work. I’ll be using Twine for the final project, but if I manage to find a better way to tell my story, then I won’t use Twine. I do want to create my own illustrations using Procreate, or maybe use Shake Art Deluxe to make my illustrations look like they are animations (shaking art). 

The idea of my story is to create a story around a Homing Pigeon sending messages/letters during war time in a fantasy world. It was inspired by the pigeon stories from WWI and WWII. The pigeon (the player) can choose their path and what to do during such situations during war. 

The class modules that I will use for this project are visual narrative and hypermedia.

tommy o

This is my Hypermedia Narrative which is called, The Lake: Not Tired.