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Maerd - The last Save Point demo


Logline: A cat is trapped in a surrealistic maze, and must find a way to escape.

This video is the starting point. At the end of each video or "cell" you will see choices. Make a choice, and the film continues.

I originally had planned to wait until this film was finished to post it. But I haven't posted an update in a month, and this last test/demo won't be ready to publish for 2 or 3 months. I didn't want people to thing the project had died off, with a 4 month gap between formerly weekly demos. We're not going slower, we're actually moving much faster than ever before.

For people following the project, this is the first trial of a working "standalone mini chapter". It's designed to help us field test the system in practice, so we can begin refining our approach to things like cell transitions, interconnections, timing, and so many other aspects.

Though quite primitive and clumsy in comparison to the desired final product, this will be the first time you can see the system up and running as intended.

As of this moment, it is filled with errors of all kinds, typos, bad edits, lazy scoring, truncated plotlines, and the like. I'm posting it because from this one link, people can follow the entire construction process as it happens over the next few months, and I can just update this post as new content is added, rather than posting with each added cell. There will likely be about 50 cells or more in this demo. Right now there are 10, some incomplete or unpolished.

You can start to get the idea of what this will be on the technical side though. Obviously the actual Save Point story will feature human characters and dialogue. In this case we have created a small, minimalistic story for purposes of gaining experience in a final deployment scenario.

As the next few months pass, the maze will grow, develop a coherent storyline with more action and events, and become a more polished experience overall. Right now most plotlines stop unexpectedly. As of this post, the second floor of the mall is the end of existing content. The experience so far is mainly exploration, with the more dramatic parts still in development.

Across a year of explanations, I frequently had difficulty getting across exactly what this would be, and while in terms of the larger story, that's still true, I think that what it is should really click for a lot of people here with this demo. I'll update this post every time 10 or so more cells are added to the chain.

Any feedback is welcome, but be aware that this is purely a workprint in development, and we are aware of many obvious flaws, such as the misspelling of the main title, lol.

Check back every few weeks, on this same video, and you'll find new doorways in places you visited before, often opening up into worlds you've never seen.

About half the current content is behind the link "the city portal" so if you make one of the other choices at that point, you may want to go back and pick that one, since most development has been down that path so far. If you do get into the story, please be patient, as it takes about 12 hours of labor to create each cell, so this will build slowly.
 
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Just a random dalies reel, production of shots is now pretty much constant. Right now, based on a few people that tested it, a person can get lost in the maze for about an hour. It will need to be a lot bigger.

So here's what the math looks like (simplified guestimate writeup)

I spend 1k on ads, and 1k prize money per cycle. For ROI I need a minimum of 1 million hits per cycle.

1k in ads will probably get about 220k people to the entrance.
of that 220k, 200k will quit after the first couple of videos, leaving 20k viewers. Ad revenue extracted 220k x 1 or 220k impressions.
Another 80% fall out after 15-30 cells, maybe the first or second time they hit a loop. Ad revenue extracted 20k x 22 or 440k impressions
the remaining hardcore viewers actually determined to win the money regardless how long it takes, or simply enjoying the game, try to complete the maze.
let's say I make the minimal path to the treasure chest 200 steps, average path 300. Some would not complete, so let's call it 150. 4k x 150 for 600k hits

So conceivably, by those guestimates, I could see maybe 2300 return on each cycle. 15% return, monthly or weekly, dependent on demand. Returns could be snowballed by scaling up ad reach, and as AdWords data aggregates I'll be able to optimize keywords towards demographics that tend to play the game longer.

Here's where it gets interesting. There are a lot of adjustments that can be made to affect how this whole formula works. 1k prize money is not a big deal in America, but there are places where it is. While ad payouts are lower in these areas, the view count and channel boost are the same, meaning that it would drive up search rank globally, even if this was only a huge hit in Sierra Leone.

The protagonist here is a cat, and it doesn't talk, so why is that so important from a financial perspective? Because with only a few paragraphs worth of text to translate across the entire product, I can rapidly redeploy into other languages with minimal expense.

It's also wide open to engineering the ROI. If I'm loosing money, I can make the maze more complex, if I'm making money, I can raise the prize money, increasing the draw of the labyrinth. My suspicion is that this would be a huge winner somewhere on earth, a perfect match for some culture or economy, and finding those hotspots would be trivial with sufficient advertising budget.

This is probably boring, but I give so many purely visual updates, that I thought a bit about the business side of the project might offer a change of pace.
 
I am a big fan of computer Games, and love movies too. I think this maze concept is very similar to the Portal franchise designed by Valve.

It was a highly successful game. I think the narration Test for The Red Mansion worked wonders for me. So I highly encourage you to follow that approach regarding this project.

I have high hopes for this one.
 
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Do you have a proto-maze that represents the entire game? It seems to me that if you have amassed so many assets, you might want to make a version of the game/movie that has a much easier, less complex maze for test purposes. Maybe the viewer/player has 20 choices throughout. Some will lead to dead ends, in which case the person will have to backtrack then go another way. Maybe this could be set up for play by invitation only. Market research. Have an extensive questionnaire afterwards. ... Just an idea.
 
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Do you have a proto-maze that represents the entire game? It seems to me that if you have amassed so many assets, you might want to make a version of the game/movie that has a much easier, less complex maze for test purposes. Maybe the viewer/player has 20 choices throughout. Some will lead to dead ends, in which case the person will have to backtrack then go another way. Maybe this could be set up for play by invitation only. Market research. Have an extensive questionnaire afterwards. ... Just an idea.
It's kind of a confusing question from my perspective because that's exactly what this thread is. I was doing literally exactly what you're describing, a year ago, and I finally mapped out and rendered enough location segments and traversal cells to start creating a functioning map where I could solidify the routes the plotlines would take. Kind of like pulling all the edge pieces out of a puzzle box and assembling them, to get a clearer view of the scope and shape of the image to be assembled. Initially it was a was for me to get some experience testing the feel of the product, which has helped a lot, and then turned into a mapping of how all the locations in which the story would take place were connected.

After having this odd experience with almost everyone I talked to, I think I should note again that the alpha state labyrinth is already functional, in exactly the way you described. If you watch the video in the original post to the end, there is a single choice box, showing the cat choosing to walk through the glowing entrance door. If you click on that, it takes you to another world, and on and on and on. It's still small, but you could play it 4 times and end up in places you've never seen before each time.

Feel free to try it out. I haven't integrated much story yet, so right now it's basically just a maze made out of the locations, but you'd be surprised at how much is already there if you wander around for a while.

Has anyone gotten to any of these locations in the above alpha? -

A cave with a monster inside

A futuristic hallway with moving blue lights

A zero gravity swim through the corridors of a space station

An abandoned graveyard

riding a drone over a river in the jungle

A vast spaceport with huge ships flying around

an abandoned mall

A haunted mansion filmed in black and white

They are all in there right now, if you make choices that lead to them.

So what's there is kind of a skeleton structure, that helps me see an overall map, and where development time needs to be spent.

I put this alpha up here for people to test for me, and then everyone seemed like they just watched one or two videos, so I haven't gotten much feedback yet. It's just a maze in this early state, with story points coming in future versions, but there is a lot of content in even this alpha.

The original design was for 10-15 choices, but it's already gone past that and I'm still just mapping out the world locations.

The worst thing is that this entire project is just a practice run for Save Point proper. It was clear to me that I needed a huge amount of task specific experience before launching into the real thing, where mistakes early on could cause huge problems later.
 
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Now I see.. Sorry, It must be my mind. I forget things sometimes. Yes, I did watch that video all the way through the first time I saw it a while back. I did click on one of the options then watched that video. I did not realize that what I was doing was playing the game. I just thought I was watching the next video you were sharing... So, this time, I clicked through 7 or 8 choices as the cat made its way. I did not sense continuity, just short scenes of a cat walking around some wonderful sets. Beautiful colors and light... Nice music too, but no real sense that I was on a journey. To be honest, after a while I was getting sick of the cat, and I'm a cat person! The cat didn't give me anything to which I could relate. Just a cat walking around, probably looking for food. All I could think while watching was "I wish I had a map to keep track of where I am and where I'm going".

I think I just assumed that you were going to have someone write some code so that the journey would be contiguous. You know, the cat stands there sort of milling around until the player chooses what to do next, then the cat continues- no break in the graphics, music or animation. Maybe that's exactly what you have in mind and you're just not at that stage yet.

A lot of very good looking video! I think it is unanimous at IndieTalk that you have a singular talent for visual composition. Hands down. The best!
 
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Yeah, you're basically right on target on your appraisal. I think I can clarify why it's kind of boring right now by just listing my priorities,

1. Make it exist.

2. Make it fast and easy to work on.

3. Make transitions seamless (the very first cell transition is an example)

4. Make it interesting/identify stakes and goals early/install ways to show progress toward goals/install secondary characters etc.

Because the maze needs bulk for the financial model to work, probably about 500 cells. I'll still need these travel segments, so not much wasted time here. The structure even this "walking simulator" (so many people have done this that it's now a category in game stores), gives helps me build out the world in my head, and also serves as a location scouting phase.

We sort of fake the cat looking around and waiting for you to choose in a few cells already, it's one of several routes that's been tested, and it's probably the winner, so good call on that. Some of this sub project is just so I can A/B compare different approaches to things and see what works best in the field.

I can't program any part of the interface in the youtube format. They give me an interface, it's very limited, and that's it. I can have this rebuilt in 10 interfaces, most of which will work better than youtube, and that's the plan, but it's a part of the plan that has to happen after funding comes in, and a prerequisite to that is more than 12 people knowing about it, lol. I can probably put this on PS5, iphone, and Android native for 8 grand each, and have a smoother transition and choice experience there, as programming is possible.

As Sean brought up, Netflix has it's own system for Choice fiction shows, and it's built in and ready to go, so at some point in development that might become an option.

Lol, thanks for your kind words about my visuals. I think you're overstating it, lol. There are a lot of talented people that come through here, and some of the most talented ones are just kind of soft-spoken.

This guy is a really cool visual artist on the forum, he did a number of these,

 
OK. I apologize for not watching the 1st video all the way through. I'll go take another look.
No need to apologize, I made some pacing errors on this very first cell, and corrected it when the front entrance was replaced in the thread "New front door" which is a faster paced version of this with stronger visual impact. It's definitely an error on my end to put a 2 minute credit block at the beginning of a youtube series. Plus, like you said, no story hook in there yet, so I probably need to prioritize adding them, it's not even a big deal.
 
You know, I don't know if it was political or what, but FLASH would have been the obvious answer before it was deemed obsolete by youtube and then skipped over in HTML5. I loved FLASH! It was easy to program and could have done exactly what you want.
 
You know, I don't know if it was political or what, but FLASH would have been the obvious answer before it was deemed obsolete by youtube and then skipped over in HTML5. I loved FLASH! It was easy to program and could have done exactly what you want.
yeah, you're right. What happened with flash is that it was riddled with security holes. It was legacy code from the old days, and it was very good for a long time, but something about the way it was structured made it ideal for trojan horse code, and that's why it got phased out.
 
You know, I don't know if it was political or what, but FLASH would have been the obvious answer before it was deemed obsolete by youtube and then skipped over in HTML5. I loved FLASH! It was easy to program and could have done exactly what you want.

IMO what killed flash was when apple refused to support it on iphones.
Iphones are such a huge market share and if your website doesn't work at all on an iphone youre better off going with a different technology.

I agree with you though, actionscript and event driving programming was a fun way to code.
 
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