interactive MEDIA
Super Super Rok is an interactive comic I created as my graduation project at Warsaw School of Advertising in 2017. In 2013, Riot Games published their Spirit Guard Udyr motion comic (unfortunately, the original interactive version has been taken down) to promote a new skin for their League of Legends champion Udyr. It made a big impression on me; I wondered how it was made. A year later, I was a student at my new school; one day we were asked about the topics of our graduation projects - just the very first ideas. I still remembered Riot's motion comic and I wanted to do something similar. I was still clueless when it came to "how" and a fair amount of googling had not helped me much. I found, however, a few interacive webcomics that featured branching storyline and let the reader make choices from time to time, which was basically what visual novel games do. What is more, at the time I could name a few visual novels that didn't have any choices - the player's role is just to click through the linear story with no gameplay at all (this is actually a subgenre - kinetic novel). Realizing that there are games strikingly resembling interactive comics and interactive comics strikingly resembling games made me raise two questions: where is the line between the two, and, can I use a game engine to create my project? It turned out that, with some tweaking to the code, I could - so I did. Ren'Py, an open source visual novel engine, turned out to be pretty easy to work with; the Python-speaking community was there to help with more advanced changes, too.
The comic itself is a keepsake for me and my friend, Nira (the redhead also called Stefan), to remember the great times we've had together during a year we spent as flatmates. Initially we were going to create the project together; eventually each of us made a piece of their own - I produced the comic, she created an animation - on the same topic.
The project is available in Polish only - but it still has homemade pictures and music to be enjoyed! Kudos to my friend Matt for helping me with arranging, recording and mixing.
Created with Ren'Py and Krita.
Download links:
The Maize Maize was created as a dissertation project at the end of my game design course at Kazimierz Wielki University (Bydgoszcz, Poland). It’s inspired by the communication centered problems my partner and I experience in our relationship at times, and it was created as a personalized game aimed at him, and made for him, to present how each of us sees the problematic situation, what are the thoughts and feelings each of us experiences during these, how we misinterpret the words and actions of the other, and what we can do about it to handle the problematic situations better as they appear.
Though the gameplay is simple - the player's task is to find four good memories in the labyrinth, gathering four pieces of a vinyl record after experiencing each of them, and find their way back to the main chamber where the pieces, joined into one intact record, can be played - finishing the game might take a while, and might be a very frustrating experience. The player gets lost in the maze, they're confused, finding themselves walking in circles over and over; it sometimes feels like there's no way out, and no progress is being made, no matter how hard they try. This is what trying to navigate through a quarrel sometimes feels like in a romantic relationships - especially for my partner. There is always a good way to resolve the situation, and there's always something each party can do or say that will result in a better outcome - however, this is often easier said than done. It's not easy to convince yourself to show your caring and forgiving side when you feel hurt and wronged by your partner and what you really want is for them to admit it and apologize first. The gameplay of The Maize Maize was designed to reflect these feelings.
The main character's memories are real good & bad memories of my partner's and my time together, selected by my partner (not knowing what it was for), while the main situation of the game was made up by me - though it might well be something that could happen. Though the project is very personal, I tried to keep it free of content that couldn’t be understood by a player unrelated to us; I tweaked and omitted some of the details that would make the situations presented in the game too unrelatable to other people, as well.
The game is far from perfect, but it was a valuable learning experience - I got to work on my writing, digital painting, coding, sound recording & editing skills, as well as on the communication itself - my partner created the changing music for the maze; it was tricky to communicate exactly what I needed without explaining the whole project, which was supposed to be a surprise, to him! Additionally, working with the contents of the game daily, I do believe I now understand my partner a bit better.
Created with Ren'Py and Krita.
illustration
GRAPHIC DESIGN
PHOTO EDITING
Pixel art
Broccoli Propaganda game build is available here.
Bits of music
Though I've never received any music education, I've always loved to sing, harmonise, and experiment. Some of the results are down below. The last one is a part of music created for my interactive comic (see: interactive projects at the top) I created with a friend of mine, Mateusz Chenc - as a musician & sound designer, he helped me add the instrumental sounds I wanted and put them together with my voice.
Thanks, Matt!