space race

Scene Breakdown:

1. Bedroom: Player learns that the avatar rises early, is somehow involved with science, is a male, wears glasses, and lives alone.
2. Main Level: In this scene, the player gets to learn a lot more about the life they’ve just fallen into. In this scene, the player obtains specifics about the current time and place, current events, employment of the avatar, and the avatar’s personal life/friendships.
3. Driveway: Honestly, not a lot happens in this scene. I loved the aesthetic of the Thunderbird and wanted to include it. The player meets the avatar’s best friend for the first time and uses an object they previously found.
4. Diner: In the diner, the player, again, uses an object they previously found, is again with the sprite that is their best friend, and meets a stranger who furthers the context of the story.
5. IGY: Here, the player begins to fully understand the job of the avatar and how serious their tasks are. The player meets other employees who give additional details about their work.
6. NASA: A timeframe transition happens here, the player finds themselves in the same setting as at IGY, except the satellite and other employees are gone. The player is invited by outside narration to read the current events of how the space and the world have evolved since the jump on their own time and exit upon finishing.

Abstraction, Transitions, and Timeframe:

In my Bitsy game, I used McCloud’s concepts of abstraction, transitions, and timeframe in multiple different ways. For abstraction, a lot of the design elements in my game look nothing like what they are supposed to be, but by placing them in the right environment, the player is able to fill in the gaps themselves and connect with the game even more, this is what McCloud referred to as “amplification through simplification” (p. 30). For example, the booths in my diner scene are just squares with no added detail but being placed next to the bar top and the singular tables, the player is able to interpret what is going on. For transitions, I utilized both moment-to-moment and scene-to-scene in my game. Moment-to-moment transitions show basic movements occurring (p. 70) and can be seen in both “home” settings and between the two, Scene-to-scene transitions take place across significant distances within time and space (p. 71), like the jump from the driveway to the diner. For timeframe, I got purposefully vaguer as the story progressed, to allow the player to imagine the story however they would want to, it’s a story about dreaming big and I wanted it to be more open-ended. In doing this, more and more time and physical space occurs between each scene as the narrative progresses, these concepts align with McCloud’s discussion of elasticity and closure between panels (p. 86).

Theme Park Inspiration:

The biggest thing that I pulled from the readings and viewing over theme parks into the little world I created was from Lesson 1 from the Imagineering in a Box lessons, and it was the concepts of ghost and story graphics. Ghost graphics are aspects of a world that come from set design and let the player/guest feel that the world is real. Story graphics add to the narrative within the world. When I was trying to figure out how to give the player all of the information about the world they were experiencing, I thought back to these graphic concepts many times, especially when deciding which objects within the world that the player was going to interact with. Operational graphics were another part of the lesson, and that did apply to my story in terms of navigational clues for the player but were not as prominent as ghost or story graphics. By keeping in mind how connected or disconnected the player would be from each artifact and object in the world, it was easy for me to decide where the player would be allowed to travel in each space. I also feel like these techniques allowed me to space out the interactions and animations in a way that didn’t make any area of play too “busy” to not be overwhelming for the player at any point.