River - a short interactive film experiment

[Nate North]

This is a short interactive film. This one has a specific design, for a specific purpose.

It was an excercise in my ability to control scope creep. It was partially successful at that, but I'm actually not crazy about how this video turned out.

If you're trying to watch it right now while reading this, first things first, I don't think it works in the embed form, so you'd probably have to watch it on youtube. At the end of each video, there is a choice of two options, which lead down various forks of the river. I'm not sure they show up in the embed version.

Here are the design constraints and goals I used for this one.

1. It was supposed to take a week. 70 hours max work time.

I think I got pretty close to sticking to that. Maybe it ran over into 80 hours. If anyone remembers this far back, the earliest stated goal of the Save Point project was to focus on the strategy of prioritizing speed of narrative construction. In example, you might wonder why this film doesn't look as good as my contest entry "The Search" from almost 2 years ago. Notice however that this film is 17 animated videos, created in the same time it took to make that one.

2. It was designed to tell the simplest, most chill story I could come up with. Difficulty level 1/10. I stuck to that, though I didn't want to. All part of the master plan.

It's as intended, a peaceful boat ride through the jungle, interesting sights and sounds, but ultimately low key, with no tension. It's basically the opposite of Save Point in that respect, but I had a different goal here.

3. I wanted people to be able to finish the entire story in about 5-6 minutes.

Mission accomplished.

4. Keep quality high, don't embellish, no repeats.

Partial failure. lots of errors, a few repeated scenes, it's fairly weak. Putting a hard limit on hours spent meant leaving in mistakes, and just gaining the XP from those.

5. Finish it, and move on quickly.

I screwed this up. and this was important. To be fair, I got sick a good bit this month from having to take too much migraine medication. Energy was low, I made some design errors early one, etc. But that's the experience I intended to get. Finish the project and release it, then look back in the clear light of hindsight and analyze all the places where I diverged from the plan, and note why. Bottom line, I'll need to be very disciplined at this type of process to confidently execute on the much higher level the Save Point launch will require.

6. Get my own gut reaction to how I felt about the quality I could achieve at this speed. The pipeline has options now. I can do more action or interaction scenes slower, and pad out time with simpler content, which is what this is.

I don't love it. It's ok. Honestly, I can't imagine why someone would watch this. Not really a problem though, this was an excercise in design focus, and that aspect did work out ok.

At the end of "River" I did accomplish some of what I set out to do. I've found that mental obstacles become less daunting, less taxing, and easier, the more you repeat them. Scope creep is one such obstacle, and I did manage to stick to the original design, even if I don't find the outcome super riveting. That's an important skill, that will be even more important as I tackle the much larger goal of SP chapter 1.

In any case, the reason this whole page of text is here is to put out the idea of gaining experience in the process of finishing something on a deadline amidst conflicting goals, something I learned to value while developing content in the corporate world.

Anyway, I make it sound terrible, but it's actually kind of enjoyable. You can play through it a few times and see different things each time, and it doesn't overstay it's welcome too long.

I'd welcome any comments about aspects such as sound mix, visual interest, section length, etc. Feedback would be helpful. I'm not looking for much feedback on story or choices here, since these parts were severely cramped in this design, and I already know how to improve them once I have more time and space to work.

 

[sfoster]

First video looked cool, but the rest of the videos all kinda sound and look the same, i didn't get any value as a watcher out of the additional videos

 

[CelticRambler]

I'd welcome any comments about aspects such as sound mix, visual interest, section length, etc. Feedback would be helpful. I'm not looking for much feedback on story or choices here, since these parts were severely cramped in this design

Visual interest and section length would, for me, go hand-in-hand with the story and the choices, so it's hard to comment usefully on the former given that it was essentially an exercise. From a practical point of view, I lost interest in the story after the first minute, so played the rest of the video at 2x speed to get to the choices.

The quality of the images is certainly much higher than way back at the beginning, so that's progress. For an official release, pay attention to the placement of the choices: if the choice is "turn left" then the clickable link should always be on the left - some lefts were on the right. The situation obviously wouldn't arise if the choices were less ... directional.

I was a bit distracted by the several references to "the tribe" when it felt like I was the only one in the story. The occasional other boaters didn't appear to have any connection to my journey. For future development, I'd be worried about the distinct lack of engagement/interaction with the in-game world: the disembodied voice reading a story exaggerates that lack of interaction - it's missing the essence of the CYOA stories upon which you based the idea. But if that's what you meant by the zero-tension storyline for this purpose, and you already have more dynamic scenarios in the pipeline, then ignore that!

 

[Nate North]

Visual interest and section length would, for me, go hand-in-hand with the story and the choices, so it's hard to comment usefully on the former given that it was essentially an exercise. From a practical point of view, I lost interest in the story after the first minute, so played the rest of the video at 2x speed to get to the choices.

The quality of the images is certainly much higher than way back at the beginning, so that's progress. For an official release, pay attention to the placement of the choices: if the choice is "turn left" then the clickable link should always be on the left - some lefts were on the right. The situation obviously wouldn't arise if the choices were less ... directional.

I was a bit distracted by the several references to "the tribe" when it felt like I was the only one in the story. The occasional other boaters didn't appear to have any connection to my journey. For future development, I'd be worried about the distinct lack of engagement/interaction with the in-game world: the disembodied voice reading a story exaggerates that lack of interaction - it's missing the essence of the CYOA stories upon which you based the idea. But if that's what you meant by the zero-tension storyline for this purpose, and you already have more dynamic scenarios in the pipeline, then ignore that!

I think that's all valid critique, and thanks for taking the time. I'd call the left on the right type stuff "errors" and I'll go and fix those. Just minor oversights, while trying to rush something out and move on.

I'm a bit confused about the idea of the narrator reducing interactivity, since that's kind of a 1:1 for CYOA, just a story being told and choices presented. I'm sure your feedback here is valid, I just wonder if perhaps I don't fully understand what you mean, since interactions are fixed, and content in this case doesn't have much of an effect. Maybe that's what you mean.

I can shed some light on "the tribe" in this case, that's a blanket covering a technical issue. I wanted to have a consistent main character, and Save Point will, but it takes a number of extra steps to make that a reality, per shot, so in an effort to meet my time limit, I decided to make it the story of a tribe, so that I could use any scene of people boating down a river. We're talking about a 66% decrease in dev time, so it was significant. Not saying it was a good idea, just an experiment, just explaining the logic. One consistent main character, or 3x as many scenes, was the choice I had.

Interaction with the world is something that I agree is really needed to immerse, and this didn't have that, very similar reason to last paragraph.

At the end of the day, cutting every corner and being as cheap as possible with my time had some major drawbacks that hurt the product. That's predictable. I did however manage to complete a self contained experiment, learn some things, and move on to improve the next thing with that experience. Ultimately, the big struggle is creating something more fun and engaging with what right now is a very sparse budget of man hours, and trying to balance that against a very hostile reward model from youtube (it's about an 80% tax on a pretty low base income now).

Thanks for the review!

Ps, one thing I'm curious about is did anyone make it to the end, the temple of the gem? In this one, I had a specific sub goal where I wanted to make is so short, with so many paths leading to the ending, that it would be far more likely for the average viewer to reach it, and at least have a complete story arc. Perhaps it was too low key to entertain for even 5 minutes, but that would be useful information to have.

 

[CelticRambler]

I'm a bit confused about the idea of the narrator reducing interactivity, since that's kind of a 1:1 for CYOA, just a story being told and choices presented. I'm sure your feedback here is valid, I just wonder if perhaps I don't fully understand what you mean, since interactions are fixed, and content in this case doesn't have much of an effect. Maybe that's what you mean.

one thing I'm curious about is did anyone make it to the end, the temple of the gem? In this one, I had a specific sub goal where I wanted to make is so short, with so many paths leading to the ending, that it would be far more likely for the average viewer to reach it, and at least have a complete story arc. Perhaps it was too low key to entertain for even 5 minutes, but that would be useful information to have.

I think these two points are related. To answer the second one first: no, I didn't - after about a dozen selections, I ended up in a loop with the same choice as earlier and by then, I'd had enough of sitting in a boat floating down a river so went off to play CGPGray's rock-paper-scissors instead (www.youtube.com/watch ?v=PmWQmZXYd74) - to compare the two experiences. [Edit - space added to YT link to prevent it auto-embedding]

Regarding the first point, this may be a variation on the theme of "which has the better scenery - the book or the movie?" Personally, I'm quite happy to listen to someone reading a story, and use audiobooks to help pass the time on long journeys, but in that situation I don't want a visual accompaniment - I want to see the story unfold inside my head using my own imagination. On the flip side, if I'm watching a movie, I don't want closed caption subtitles and audio-description telling me what's going on, and certainly don't want a continuous voice-over. This exercise - and I fully accept that it was an exercise with a different objective - is neither one thing nor the other.

As for the quest, that's another aspect where I think you'll need to clarify your objective and/or target audience. When I used to read (and write!) CYOA stories, there usually wasn't a single story arc, but several possible arcs according to the choices made - and not all of them resulting in a positive outcome for the reader. OK, so this is picking up again on the low tension point you acknowledged - but even in a short test video like this, I would have expected my character to have made a bad choice and have been eaten by cannibals/killed by fire ants/carried off by the aliens who built the pyramids/etc.

In the same way that a First-Person-Shooter video game usually ends with the FPS getting shot/blown up long before achieving the mission objective, it's important that there are "real" consequences for each choice made - which takes us back to the length vs interest equation. IIRC, in a (much) earlier example, you had clues in some of the scenes that would help guide the subsequent choice, and that's what I mean by "interaction". If this is a quest of any kind, I want to be able to strategise; and for that, I need the narration and the imagery of the early scenes to contain nuggets of information that'll become relevant later on.

 

[Foxtrot25]

Reminds me of the old Choose your own Adventures books from years past.