Recently I’ve been working on figuring out the interactive aspects of our project. Over the weekend I realised that while we’d been talking a lot about the audience experience, we hadn’t really asked ourselves: ‘what are we going to give the audience to do?’.
The interactive component to our project is definitely key – and so i started brainstorming ideas regarding how we could go about creating a structured interactive experience for players….
After discussing and developing some of my ideas with Bec, Holly and Jeremy we started to develop a system which I think will work well.
The current plan is to introduce an ‘objective list’ which players will be able to browse and attempt to complete. From this list, players will be able to select an objective they find interesting and then complete a range of tasks which relate to that objective in order to progress the story.
By giving the players the chance to select ‘objectives’ or ‘narrative missions’ I hope that we’ll be able to give audience members a sense of agency and overall contribution. This will also provide us with a way to give players instructions and guide their experience through the story of Atticus Barlow.
I’ve started to work on creating a network of objectives, with the aim of creating a system similar to a video game ‘skills tree’ in which some objectives can only be completed after others have been finished. This process is actually proving to be more difficult than I thought it would be, and I’ve realised that linking all the characters and story information together will be a challenging task. This challenge will be worthwhile however, as I believe that the objective list will allow us to more efficiently produce and publish our narrative content.