First Group Meeting
Last saturday myself, Iris and Lin had our first group meeting in the libray to discuss the project and to further develop our ideas and agree on our expectations and what we would all live to achieve with this non-linear narrative.
Story Ideas and Development
We all agreed that it would be very interesting to trying and show the main character of the plot at different stages and ages of his life. We began to find inspirations and discuss various media that had these types of stories or concepts in them. We discussed Video games such as To the Moon which allows an old man to relive his memories from different points in his life and Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, About Time, The girl who leapt through time etc. that all were quite similar in these kinds of topics
Narrowing Down the story concept
During the meeting we had many ideas and exciting plans for experience which would be great but we realised that we would need to dial it back to be something that is achieveable for us to create within the time that is given to us under our deadline. So we had the idea to have the entire experience set inside one single apartment that the player will explore over the chracters life at different stages in their life. This means that one environment can be created and replicated multiple times with certain differences to then create four different scenes or areas for the player to discover and explore.
We were thinking that perhaps their could be three or four different ages and this way we could tell and interesting and cohesive story because having less than this may not work very well as a full narrative if you only travel to one other time period. The environments being simpler as well means that we feel this is achievable and in the time frame given in the deadline.
World/Environment Layout
After out meeting and discussing the different ideas for the game I started to spend some evenings sketching out ideas for the enviornment and how the player could transition from one place to the next. I also wrote down some rough age ideas of the charactert starting at 70 and then perhaps being a child at 12, in his twenties and in his forties which is of course something that we will figure out and discuss over time as the narrative takes form.
Augmented Reality Idea (Cross Media)
This particular module requires us to make a cross-media experience which will require to different platforms to be considered. While we definately have decided we would like to work in Virtual Reality for the main aspect of the experience we started to look into how Augmented Reality could be incorporated as a cross-media element to our story.
In one of our classes this week we sat down with our lecturer to discuss our ideas and one idea that was suggested due to the concept of having the player being able to age through time was to use an AR face filter which would let the player see themselves at those different ages or points in life using a mobile phone. This could then work great to being a companion piece that can either be used during the experience or extra story, imagery or information could also be shown through this AR application for the story.