For those of you who’ve looked around already, you might have noticed, on my “Flash Media” page, an interaction with the same name as this blog post. If you have, you might have read the description about the project, which I think is a necessary preface to the interactive experience, or game, or whatever you might view it as.
I’m currently in the process of collecting all the necessary files, and putting the project on my server, simply for the sake of having all my stuff on this one server. That being said, I figured I would tell the long winded version of how this whole thing came to be. The short(ened) version is permanently with the actual project, so for those of you who don’t have that much time, click here.
The project was a final assignment in my Digital Narrative class, in the Spring 2010 semester. The class was focused on how storytelling is done in today’s digital media, including dialogs and interactive experiences. This specific project was to be an interactive story or experience, and given the time allotments we had (over a month) and fact that it was a group project (4-person teams), it was supposed to be a pretty large experience.
After a couple swings and misses in the idea department, me and my team decided on a story idea that ran right with the whole college experience. We decided to make the project revolve around a person who goes out, gets really drunk, meets a girl that he thinks is his perfect girl, and then wakes up the next morning to realize he doesn’t remember anything about her, and is determined to retrace his steps and find her. Yes, we were influenced by The Hangover.
The interaction itself is simple; at the beginning, you pick one of three very stereotypical characters: a nerd, a hippie, and a frat guy. As you play (as one of those characters), you interact with a number of different people in different locations, retracing the character’s steps from the previous night. At certain intervals in the conversation, the user gets to choose how the character responds to the conversation. Given the subject matter, we tried to make the dialog as funny and outrageous as possible. Because of this, it is filled with offensive stereotypes, sexual innuendos, and very strong language. It was pretty fun to write.
You’ll have to play to see how the experience ends; there are several endings for each character, and not all of them positive. But there certainly is an ending, which leads me to see this project as more of a game than anything else. You’ll see what I mean.
The reason I’m putting time into writing about this project is that it is easily the best thing I have ever worked on, and is the project that I am most proud of. Not only because of how great it turned out, but also because of how much work me and my team put into this whole effort. I honestly don’t think I thought of anything else except for this project during the last month of the semester. I wish we kept track of the amount of hours it took us to write and revise the scripts; since there are several options in the dialog, we had to create an exponential amount of conversations to correspond with the selections. We were doing it forever it seemed. Not to mention how each member of the group was in charge of recording a few different characters. I was in charge of programming and wrote over 7,400 lines of code, and the other members of my group spent just as much time editing audio, creating visuals, mapping out the dialog, and simply checking everything for consistency.
So this is my best project, to date. Easily. And I almost didn’t include it in my portfolio because of how amazingly crude, offensive, sexually charged, and bigoted it is. Overall, it’s some pretty mature content. We rated it “R.” There were some things we had that I pulled because I thought it was a little bit too awful to hand in for a school project. In the end, our professor actually wished that we hadn’t held back at all, and included the most offensive stuff we could think of. I guess that’s the difference between college and high school.
Anyway, you now have a pretty good idea of what this thing is all about. And you’ve been warned about the mature content, which honestly, hits you right off the bat with the first song that plays. So click on the screenshot below to enjoy. Unless you’re my mother. In which case I’d really like it if you didn’t play this game.
