Week 4 Objectives

As stated before the contract meeting will be held this week on Friday the 1st of October, in room C39 at 12 noon with Alison Varey and Susan Turner where the final draft of the learning contract will be agreed upon and submitted.

I plan to continue, complete and carry out the following for this week:

• Continue researching choose your own adventure books.
• Continue researching interactions with games.
• Continue researching storytelling.
• Agree upon and submit the learning contract.
• Carry out further research on structure and decide upon a suitable structure.
• Update the project plan.
• Research drawing styles.
• Research drawing characters.
• Research Anime/Manga.

Week 3 Recap

Week 3 Objectives

• Review the Learning Contract and make any amendments.
• Continue research into Comics and interactions.
• Research possible structures for the comic.
• Research intended audience.
• Research genres.

 The following will be started during week 3:

• Research choose your own adventure books.
• Research interactions with games.
• Research storytelling.

The date for the Contract Meeting has been agreed as Friday the 1st of October and will be held in room C39 at 12 noon.

So far I feel that more research into interactions is needed as I have only came across three seperate interaction methods. The most popular one being the tree structure that has many branches leading the story off in different routes, another technique takes the branching structure and adds a secondary element to it making it a lot more diverse but also rather difficult to follow the understanding used within the design process. The third and final technique I came across was the one most commonly seen in games that don't just offer the one linear path through the story. Instead depending on the choices the player made during the game would effect how different circumstances played out later on. I intend to spend some time in week 4 researching structure as I feel it would help to gain an idea of different methods even if they are similar to the second example with the 'branching' structure just being added to

I have been unable to put much time into researching storytelling this week, largely because I have been waiting on the books I have ordered to turn up in the post and intend to look into this in more depth once they have arrived. The 'Making Comics' book by Scott McCloud did touch on it, detailing how different techniques can enhance the storytelling but gave little advice in developing the story.

So far the project is on track and I am confident that I can keep up the pace and meet the deadlines I have set myself on time.

The additional tasks for week 4 are:

• Carry out further research on structure
• Update the project plan

Project Plan

Thought I would upload a picture of my project plan here to keep a record of what tasks I have to carry out each week although I am aware that I do need to update the plan and add milestones that are achieved and what deliverables are produced once certain tasks are completed. This will act as an additional task for the next set of objectives.

Reading

I intend to look into storytelling in more detail once more of the books I have ordered arrives, I have made a start on Scott McCloud's 'Making Comics' as it arrived yesterday although I have not got too far into it. I did get halfway through 'Understanding Comics' before having to return it to the Uni library and am currently waiting for my own copy of the book to turn up in the post.

Intended Audience & Genres

Intended Audience

My project will be aimed mainly at the people that enjoy older comic books as well as people that like to watch Anime or read Manga. I find that such people tend to mainly be the following:

• Students (and lecturers) in media courses, though not uncommon to be enjoyed by students outside of media courses
• People that work with and/or spend a lot of their own time on computers
• Gamers and people involved in the production of games
• People that work within the media industry
• Young adults that are towards the end of finishing secondary school
• People that enjoy the Goth/Alternative scene
• People that grew up watching cartoons

I want to create a more mature feel than the majority of comic books currently deliver such as the Marvel comics as they are generally aimed at young teens although they do have exceptions to this. II want my own project to have a darker and possibly more serious feel to it, being aimed at people from the age of 18+ with the choices on offer ending in some questionable outcomes depending on how they choose the story to progress.

Genres

I have been looking into different genres in order to help decide what I would like to create for my comic, where as it is not immediately that I need to decide on a genre I do feel that considering the different options will give me a better idea of what I could do.

Vampires

Although a very popular concept I do believe they have been a bit overdone as of recently, following the success of Buffy and Angel we now have such movies and shows as True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Being Human, Underworld, Blade and of course the massively successful Twilight. As for books there are a whole host of popular novels currently available, again we have Twilight as well as the popular JR Ward and Sherilyn Kenyon books to name a few. Manga and comic books suffer from the same popularity with plenty of different series to choose from, like Hellsing, Vampire Hunter D, Vampire Knight, Castlevania and Trinity Blood to name the more popular ones. This is great if you love vampires as you have loads of choice and there is always something new to read/watch but this also puts me off creating yet another vampire comic when so many already exist.

Wizards and Witches

I don't think this genre is overdone and there is a lot that could be done with it, the only downfall that I can see is that anything created in the future that does fall under this category will inevitably be compared to Harry Potter. Although I do like the idea of something similar but with a much darker twist that would include such things as killings, murders and rituals etc, I am not quite certain on how effective it would be. The older generation that did not grow up with Harry Potter, and mainly the ones that don't like it will most likely consider anything of the same genre to suffer from the same teen driven, school child drama. 

I confess that myself and some of my friends do not enjoy Harry Potter as we just consider it to be aimed at a much younger audience and find very little that would be considered cool, largely because it is aimed at younger people. Its noticeable that anything of a similar genre has copied Harry Potter by also aiming itself towards the younger audience such as Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief and Disney's The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I personally disliked all of these movies and I do believe the genre now has a stigma attached to it as to the audience which does put me off.

Zombies

Zombies have been around for a long time as they used to be one of the big horror monsters of popular culture. Recently there has been a resurgence as many old zombie movies have been remade, albeit many of them have discarded the once telltale sign other than the decomposing flesh commonly associated with them, this being the staggering and shuffling as they slowly advance towards their prey. The modern day movies have a tendency to replace this with having them run after people in a state of frenzied bloodlust. I imagine the reasoning behind this is that a monster isn't a very frightening concept when it becomes apparent that you can easily outrun it, even at a brisk walk.

As well as the remakes there has also been plenty of tongue in cheek movies and games made in fun of the shambling horde that have been pretty successful. Shaun of The Dead and Zombieland were pretty fun movies (even though the second one did have the zombies running) and such games as Dead Rising 1&2 encourage the player to kill the zombies in a variety of hilariously different ways, dress them in hats, take photos or mow them down with a sit on lawnmower.

I do like the concept of zombies but I believe there is only so much that can be done with them in the form of  comic book, maybe if they were to take a background role, not being the main feature of the comic but a problem within a certain direction of the storyline that could be encountered.

Heaven & Hell

If I were to follow this theme I would make sure that I avoided religion, which may pose a few problems. People do tend to take religion quite seriously and the last thing I would want to do is to question, make fun of or upset people that follow a specific religion.

However I do think that it is an interesting concept, what immediately comes to mind when thinking of this subject are the Spawn comics and books created by Todd McFarlane. Which have agents from Heaven and Hell that use the world we live in as a sort of battle ground where they try to claim the souls of the people living there. This is generally the background story to the comics as a lot more does go on involving the main character who died but then made a deal with the devil and has returned as a spawn, a demon with some impressive powers, although the more his energy to use them the shorter his time back on earth becomes.

I like the idea of angels and demons doing battle with one another or followers of cults, possibly even have a main character that hunts them down.

Super Powers

Possibly the most popular comic books available, the majority coming from either Marvel of DC comics. As much as I do enjoy the genre and many other people do I think that the sheer amount of comics about superheroes many of us have never heard of is quite off putting. Mainly as it has become quite a hard feat to come up with an original superhero.

Gamers

Quite a popular genre, mainly for internet comics and videos although it is features are mainly in good humour including jokes, funny situations, slagging off new game/movie releases, using game references and being very tongue in cheek. It would be very hard to create a serious comic for this genre and the popular ones that attempted to tackle serious storylines were met with many complaints by fans and just weren't interesting to the readers. For this reason I have decided that this genre will not be considered for the comic.

Gangsters

Although not a common genre for comics I do really enjoy it and think that it could possibly work as gangster movies and shows tend to be pretty popular and generally very well written. I myself enjoy a lot of gangster movies with films such as Scarface, The Untouchables, The Godfather, GoodFellas, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Layercake, Lucky Number Sleven, as well as Oceans 11-13. I really like the backstabbing involved, the hits or robberies that are planned and how everyone is always trying to get one up on each other and think it’s an interesting concept. I also enjoy when there is a bit of mystery involved, it's not immediately apparent how something has been pulled off but when the plan is revealed later on it makes the viewer go "Ahh that’s pretty clever".

I think this is a definite consideration as the concept for the comic as it does allow a lot that can be done with it and many different characters can easily be introduced, as well as killed off.

Fantasy

Elves, Dwarves, Goblins and Orcs are the mainstay of most fantasy movies/books/comics. I think the genre should definitely be considered as a possibility as it is pretty wide in what you can do with it, certain creatures are not required and you can create a world that follows some specific rules that separates factions from one another. Over the years there have been many fantasy movies/books to act as a reference tool, the most prominent of all being the Lord of The Rings trilogy and the truly epic scale of the storyline, struggle and the battles it involved. the books effectively told each of the 9 members of the fellowship's story, the struggles they encountered and the challenges they faced. 

I like the idea of a fantasy setting as there are no set rules that have to be followed and it is very easy to create your own and create your own world with its own kingdoms, history, beliefs and perils.

Sci Fi

I am a big fan of Sci Fi and believe that to that end I may be a little biased towards it as a genre. My own favourite show would have to be Firefly, this featured a crew of outlaws trying to make a living scraping by on whatever jobs they could get hold of while always trying to avoid the authorities. I really liked the concept of them always being on the run and having different adventures while managing just to get by and how a job gone wrong could spell some serious consequences. I am also a big fan of the Warhammer 40k novels, I enjoy these mainly because they are very dark and pretty grim offering a large amount of conflict with some very vividly detailed bloodshed as well as some really well done storytelling, plot twists and discoveries that the reader does not often expect.

Sci fi tends to be a pretty popular concept as many of the target audience also tend to enjoy such movies/shows and books such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Serenity, Starship Troopers, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, Dr Who and Red Dwarf to name a few. The Sci fi genre is especially popular with computer games with many popular titles like Half Life, Deus Ex, Starcraft, Quake, Final Fantasy and Halo.

As with Fantasy there is a lot that can be done with Sci Fi, the scope is left wide open for the person(s) creating their universe to fill with anything they deem appropriate, this allows a lot of flexibility as there isn't much that cannot be done.

Conclusion

The most appropriate genres that could be considered and offer the best opportunity to create something new and a little different appear to be Fantasy, Sci Fi, Gangsters and Heaven & Hell. The inclusion of Zombies, possible even Vampires and Wizards/Witches could always be taken into account and could make a pretty interesting sub plot to the comic but they would not feature as the main genre for the project.

Structure

Books

Many choose your own adventure books follow the tried and tested method of using a 'branching' structure that generally will provide the user with an interaction within the story in which they will be required to decide upon the path that the story will take, further on they will be presented with a similar process and so on until they arrive at an appropriate ending, concluding their adventure. I came across a few different examples of these kinds of structure maps.

Since this appears to be the tried and tested method for 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books I decided to look further afield, mainly towards games as nowadays they offer many choices. I came across some history about 'Choose your own adventure' books that I found quite interesting. I have included a quote and link to the source bellow.

In 1969, in the course of making up bedtime stories for his children, Edward Packard wrote Sugarcane Island, the book that became the prototype for the classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The William Morris Agency submitted the book on Packard's behalf to several major publishers, all of whom rejected it. In 1976 Packard approached Vermont Crossroads Press (VCP), known for its highly creative and innovative children's books, about publishing the title. R. A. Montgomery, co-founder of VCP, had designed several "you"-based role-playing games for the Peace Corps, McGraw-Hill and the Edison Electric Institute in the early 1970s and immediately saw the potential in the book's format. He proposed making it into a series, and calling it "The Adventures of You." Upon publication of Sugarcane Island, Publishers Weekly called it "an original idea, well carried out." source

I find myself returning to Hello World by Jason Shiga. I really liked the inventory system he used as I found it to be a really innovative and different way of doing things from the norm which is why it interested me. His books don't just offer choices in the form of branch A,B or C but keep a record of what you have achieved through the items you have acquired while also offering the option to use said items to encounter a completely different option or branch to those already on offer. The beauty in this is that other people could arrive at the same junction and be given the choice of A,B or C and because they may have came to that junction through different circumstances they will not have the same items that you might have had and therefore could have a completely new set of options available to them depending on the items that they have picked up along the way. Where most 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books do offer a good deal of replay or reread ability the inclusion of the inventory system in Jason Shiga's book offers an almost endless amount of branches to choose from in each of the plot points that require a decision, mainly due to the fact that the same point could offer completely different outcomes depending on the items you have acquired.

Games

I have been looking into modern games also as it is now common place for big budget games to offer multiple endings, encouraging players to play through the game a couple times just to see the different outcomes according to their actions this time round. These generally rely on a series of moral choices that will determine whether they are good, evil or somewhere in between. They can also rely on certain events for example in Mass Effect 2 depending on what 3 crew members you assigned to your squad out of the 9 or so, or what character you gave a specific task would determine what characters died as a result. This would be towards the end of the game, after you have spent a good 20+ hours getting to know and love some of these characters, leveling them up, getting them equipment, learning their strengths and weaknesses while enjoying the dialogue you could have between them.   

Ideas

The 'branching' structure is a tried and tested method that does work well but play through it enough and you would quickly encounter each of the different endings. That doesn't mean it is a bad structure to use, it would work quite well for an interactive comic. however I would like to try my hand at something a little more complex and if that doesn't work the branching structure could always act as a fall back. One idea is to create some kind of moral choice bar, the reader/player would still have to be presented with some 'branching' options these would have a good/neutral/bad choice that would have to be picked from. The user would also encounter specific points in the story that would play out according to their previous choices. For example if they keep being bad to people they get the bad guy ending and vice versa for the good ending.

books, books and more books

Although I do not plan to do any drawing this week I have been itching to give it a go although I'm sure that my drawing could do with some practice if I am going to create a comic so I bought a load of books off Play.com and Amazon.com that I believe will act as a good resource for when it comes to creating comics, writing storylines and drawing characters. The books I have purchased are listed below:

1. Making Comics - Scott McCloud
2. Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
3. Writing for Comics - Alan Moore
4. Manga for Dummies - Kensuke Okabayashi
5. The Art of Drawing Manga - Ben Krefta
6. The Art of Drawing and Creating Manga Action - Peter Gray
7. The Art of Drawing and Creating Manga Women - Peter Gray
8. The Complete Book of Drawing Manga - Peter Gray
9. The Monster Book of Manga - Estudio Joso

Week 3 Objectives

There was no meeting this week as my supervisor, Alison Vareywas busy and unable to attend. As agreed before hand I have e-mailed her a copy of my project plan and the learning contract. Following my project plan I have set myself objectives for this week that I intend to carry out:

• Review the Learning Contract and make any amendments.
• Continue research into Comics and interactions.
• Research possible structures for the comic.
• Research intended audience.
• Research genres.

 The following will be started during week 3 and continue through week 4:

• Research choose your own adventure books.
• Research interactions with games.
• Research storytelling.

Week 2 recap

 Week 2 Objectives;

• Produce a Project Plan
• Carry out research into Comics as well as Anime/Manga
• Research and consider different types of interactions that could be used and incorporated in my design
• Complete the Learning Contract
• Set up a Blog

I set up a Blog to keep track of my project and take notes on thoughts/ideas etc.

I carried out research into comics and interactions and plan to continue this work next week.

I was able to produce a project plan to give me a guideline to follow on what work needs to be completed and when. I shall keep the plan updated each week depending on how well the work progresses.

I completed the learning contract which states what I will have achieved by the end of this semester.

It was decided that the research into Anime/Manga would be better suited at a later period in the project when it came closer to drawing/designing characters and developing the story.

I uploaded both games I had created in College with flash to Newgrounds and have provided links at the top of my blog for anyone interested.

Interactive Comics/Stories

I've been looking into existing media that could be presented or described as an interactive comic or story. I wanted to see what type of interactions they contained and how effective they were as a medium to tell a story.

Dead On Arrival

Matt Gibson and Geoff Gaviria created the interactive comic in 2007 for their final year project at the University of East London where they were both studying BA (Hons) in Interactive Media.

I really liked the photographic style that they applied to the comic and thought that it was done well, I also thought that the turning of the pages was done really well, I had been considering doing something similar for my own comic. I thought that the use of music in the background added a lot of depth to the story and fit the scenes well.

A few criticisms I would make of it though was that even though I thought the panoramic views were done well I believe that they could have done a lot more with them, these were the main interactions that were included within the comic and even though they did allow you to look around each one they only offered one interactive object that could be clicked on that would continue the story. Another thing that I believe could have been done better was if the story offered a less linear path, the comic does offer some choice towards the end as to what other characters you want to confront but it inevitably ends with the same result each time you play it through.

Ctrl Alt Del

This is a popular web comic that recently done a "choose your adventure" styled space themed comic where the creator decided to present a choice during specific parts of the story and leave it up to the fans to decide what story arc he would then follow for the next comic. The process behind this was rather simple he'd offer up a choice of A,B and sometimes C ad get the fans to e-mail him with their choice. The option with the most votes would be the route the story took.

I prefer this kind of structure for the story over the one in Dead On Arrival as it had many different paths that the story could branch out into, many of them ending in a different way. The creator of the web comic published the structure he had devised for his comic here. Although the downside of this is that it has very little interaction at a single user level and with it being a published web comic it will not hold a lot of replay value for the viewer.

Dead Cal

Dead Cal is another example of an interactive comic/story that I came across, although I wasn't impressed with the level of interaction it provided, a simple click on the page for the next text box to appear or scene to change. I also thought that it stayed on the one scene too long which made it rather boring pretty quickly, I ended up losing interest pretty early on.

Facade

This is quite an interesting concept. You play a character in a 3D environment that can interact with the other two characters that dwell within the apartment. The story begins with you being invited over by the couple as they haven't seen you in a while. You are able to interact with the characters by typing in text and entering it, responding to the other character's questions or asking some of your own. As with many games like this I did attempt to break the game being overly offensive and and rude towards both characters but it deals with this by throwing you out of the apartment.

I did enjoy the level of interaction that was presented, although not all requests or comments are understood by the characters they do still respond to the majority of what you say to them, including getting drink orders correct.

Hello World

Although I didn't get to interact with this comic I did view the video on how it works. Essentially the comic is presented as a book that has been cut in half. The top half is used as the narrative for the story while the bottom half keeps a record of your inventory throughout the story and according to the choices that you make. The narrative like most choose your own adventure books gives the user a choice on what to do or what item in their inventory to use and tells them what page to go to for the outcome of their decision. I haven't seen an inventory system incorporated into one of these books before but do find it to be quite an interesting and intuitive feature.

The creator, Jason Shiga won an Eisner award for “Talent most deserving of wider recognition.” in 2003 for the production of his choose your own adventure comic book.

Week 2 - Everything has to begin somewhere (Week's Objectives)

I came up with the idea for my honours project over the weekend (so from about Friday the 10th), I hadn't actively been thinking about it as I already had a project in mind and just happened to be going about my day to day business when the idea struck me and I knew that this is what I really wanted to do as I knew I would enjoy working on it and it would make a nice addition to my portfolio. I really wish I had thought this up sooner and could have started over the summer looking back at all those wasted days playing games and watching films, hence the appropriate heading :p 

I had my first meeting with my supervisor, Alison Varey yesterday which I found to be very helpful in that it brought to light a lot of aspects that I hadn't considered. She was also able to point me in the direction of some books about writing/making/understanding comics by Scott McCloud that could help with producing my own comic, therefore I made sure I picked up Understanding Comics out of the Uni library. I'm currently about a third of the way through it and am finding it to be thoroughly interesting as it shows how certain (often overlooked) aspects when applied can add to a comic giving the desired scene a much more dramatic feel.

I was also able to arrange regular meetings with Alison that will take place every Tuesday between 11-12 with the exception of next week as she will be unable to attend.

I plan to create a comic strip that the reader can interact with, similar in a way to the Choose your own adventure books offering the reader choices to make as to which direction the story will follow, or possibly have their actions decide where the story goes. The comic will also be animated, even if its only for a short period of time each of the sections within the comic will play a short animation in sequence.

Week 2 Objectives

I will carry out the following/work on/complete for next Tuesday.

• Produce a Project Plan
• Carry out research into Comics as well as Anime/Manga
• Research and consider different types of interactions that could be used and incorporated in my design
• Complete the Learning Contract
• Set up a Blog

Introduction

My name is Chris Mooney, I'm a 4th year Honours student currently studying at Edinburgh Napier University doing a course in Interactive Media Design.

For my Honours project I have decided to create an interactive animated comic. I will use this blog to keep a record of my work, thoughts and ideas and will include regular updates as the work progresses (at least one entry per week).

I welcome and encourage any comments, suggestions or criticizms and will try to respond to these as best I can.