A Journey Through the West

Room 1 the beginning of the story talk to Caleb, a young man to get oriented and try to find your way home.

Room 2 you meet Glenn a harder mobster who directs you to the saloon to get you started on your journey to find the unkillable cowboy sporting a futuristic firearm who may be able to get you home.

Room2a The saloon is where you meet Maria a young woman who once traveled with Graham Johnston she is willing to detail some of her travels.

Room 3 after talking with Maria and Learning of Grahm you begin your journey to Medina, the next town over and stumble into an old camp ground where you find a horse amongst other materials helpful for tracking the cowboy.

Room 4 The entrance to medina you find two bandits also looking for the cowboy that sports a futurist firearm that could be from your time period.

Room 5 Medina you meet Grahm and he helps takes you to a mysterious cave where you find a portal to take you home.

Room 6 enter the cave and return home.

I attempted to use abstraction to my advantage after seeing Scott McCloud's examples, I wanted to create sprites and a world that while pixelated felt alive and relatable.  It was difficult to create a wide variety of sprites that were different, yet still looked human and something we could understand. I tried making multiple different body types,  and various shapes to convey the different kind of people in my story.  Looking at the different ways we recognize faces of cartoons helped me throw together some diverse sprites that represent many different types of people.(pg.31)  As far as transition goes I attempted to use scene to scene type transitions using rooms as it's own individual story with its own characters and then put all these rooms together to create the world. Each has its own chunk of story and combined it makes a large story. (pg.74) My approach to timeframes was using sprites and the environment to single time changing. Sprites mention the distance required to make it to the next town as well as the color palette changing for night with the moon in a reflection. It's hard to convey time passing in subtle ways that someone could notice without blatantly telling them time has passed. (pg.96) 

The biggest thing I took away from the theme park lectures and videos was how powerful visual story telling can be and that it's the little things that make the largest difference. People notice small details which can help set the scene more accurately. Making a game set in the wild west meant that making sure I used iconography related to that time period to put people there.  Another way to help set the scene and help create my world is dialogue that sounds like it's from the wild west. Trying to make sure my sprites had southern draws and used words frequented in that time period. I also wanted to recreate the places I had in mind when making my Twine game which was nice to see some of the areas come to a game with more visual capabilities and makes me wonder what else I could do with Grahm Johnston's story. I think looking at the Super Mario World attraction in Japan gave me the most ideas and clues on what to do for my story.  I saw commitment to the idea of making that space as immersive as possible, and I wanted to commit to making sure mine would be as immersive as it could be.