For this project, I set out to create a love letter to (i.e. blatantly rip-off) some of my favorite new and old-school games, including Dark Souls, Shadowgate and Mass Effect. Primarily, I wanted to create an interactive comic mixed with elements of old point-and-click adventure games. I purposefully left the controls somewhat vague, and omitted any form of obvious exposition or explanation of the “story.” I believe that the fore- and background imagery alone can communicate events as they unfold little by little. I wanted to leave the viewer (player?) in a somewhat confused state; my hope is that they will construct their own narrative based around the images they see (another nod to Dark Souls). Also, because the “path” of the narrative splits in different directions – and events can unfold in different ways depending on interaction – the story may be slightly different for each person. There may even be more than one ending…

My challenges once again came in the form of wrestling with HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and JavaScript. The somewhat complex path of the narrative I wanted to create likewise required some fairly complex JavaScript (in my humble opinion), and thus frustration was sometimes in surplus. However, I likely spent as much time coding as I did refreshing my browser and trying to locate files. Ultimately the most challenging and time-consuming part of the project was drawing the frames. I’m a notoriously slow artist on a good day, and juggling my artist and coder hats while trying to make everything function properly was definitely interesting. I hope to expand further on this project in the future, again in the spirit of today’s video games.

I can promise that you won’t have to pay for the second half.