Interactive Explorations

And perhaps one day we’ll be able add in the physical experience on top of that and create something really cool.

But with it all done, I think we all feel a sense of pride of pulling through the whole game application together.

we spent a solid 2 hours figuring out how to create the chat and what colour in order to fit with the whole app, because white boxes didn’t work but coloured boxes had too much colour and all did not match well. In the end we decided to take colours from our background itself and give it 50-70% transparency to keep it light and we stuck with it and went off to creating all the chat graphics for every line. Three of us working all at the same time took us about 12 hours straight to finish the graphics and then we started coding it all in.

We decided on the colour scheme and Sunny went with it to create the graphics which we settled on it and started fixing the codes and making the chat template on Animate in order to start coding the whole script.

Written Letter of the Rules for the website + visitor logs of hostel

While I was writing through, we started the other characters as a joke for a quick humour, but in a way I realise that they have their own voice and character and we can make us of them to help push the story forward without only just talking to Red which is definitely a skewed truth to her words with some discrepancies and lies. Adding the extra voices just help to throw suspicion and doubt to the player and we decided to give them more role to play in the story.

It was interesting how it caught a lot of attention back home with such a simple plot and simple coding, and everyone was wracking their brains of how to figure this story, or riddle, out.

We started working out the first prototype without much graphics in order to test it out on Animate and get familiar with it as we need to push through it for a lot of hours and we want to make sure we get things right and understand Animate so that we know it before we start grinding out every scene only to realise we made mistakes.

The website is like an extra to the application that adds to the story but much of the information adds a lot of backstory but may not be necessary. We can use the website in order to tell more of the backstory of Daisy as we don’t communicate with her so this is our way of knowing Daisy and her past. We can bring in codes and clues to hint to whats going on.

Another suggested upping the sex trade situation by perhaps giving more awareness of the sex trade situation in Philippines such as statistics as stats are hard to put across in the script. We could end the game with them.

Sunny did up a few idea for the Hostel Logo and we’re testing out the colours that we want to represent it as well. We settled with Red as red has the colour representation of sex, as well as the main character’s name and we wanted to make that connection with the sex trade and prostitution.

It is very interesting to see what people think and their comments have been taken into a lot of consideration on how we revoice Red. While we tried to make her snarky and entertaining, it can backfire as annoying and bratty and we have to remember that we need to make the audience want to help her.

This tutorial we went back and focused more on the story and how we could get the voicing of our character right. Chris had suggested that we test run with people off script, with only the story beats of what would happen, and let them respond freely, to get much more natural responses to use in our script instead. We definitely took that idea and I brought it to two friends in oder to help later before we start writing the script. 

I’ve wrote out the rough story beats of what we would like to do with the interaction with Red, we decided to keep it all digital and in one screen due to time and manpower and money limitations, let’s be real. So I crafted it to fit into a single chat on the mobile application.

Though we aren’t dealing with Mental Illnesses with our project, it was interesting to understand how games tackle touchy subject and done it well, especially games like The Cat Lady which is a simple point and click game but goes into a deeper into the main character and her depression and a poetic way where it brings in self care and trying to help get the main character through progressing and finding her way back to finding things worth living for.

Timeline of Red and Daisy

This video really helped understand the children affected by the sex trade and prostitution which could help make Red much more relatable.