Assignment 1 - Narratives

Research

Hero's Adventure


It is a game that allows players to choose their paths as a young boy. You can be a "Hero" that saves the dynasty, or you can be a gangster that beats everyone up. There are many ways to grow, many types of weapon to use. The background of the game should be around the Song dynasty or referenced from famous Chinese Wuxia novels by Jin Yong.

The game was released on 8 March. It is a SLG game. I have played the game for about 70 hours. 

I loved this type of theme ever since when I was a child. Things like The Three Kingdoms and those Chinese Wuxia/ Kong Fu movies really attracted me. This game is very fun as it gives the players a large amount of choices and freedom. You can meet different npcs and team up with them, or kill them for loots etc. You get to play from 0 to 100 of your character. Just like the game, on the 100th day in game, you will have to fight the final boss.








Divinity: Original Sin 2



I started playing this game in early April. I have played it for 28 hours. Just like Hero's Adventure, it gives you freedom to do whatever you want. This game was very famous, I believe it is one of the best RPG of all time. It has complicated skills systems, a lot of choices, very detailed world, well written stories.


Total War: WARHAMMER III


Total War is one of my favourite game series, it is SLG. I've played the three kingdom and shogun versions. For WARHAMMER III, it was my first time playing warhammer series. I've played this for more than 100 hours, but not all in this semester. I think I have played it for20-30 hours in March as it had a new update with the something empire. I enjoyed watching the stories between different "countries" while managing my own kingdom. It is a very big world.

Marauders



Recently, I've been playing some Marauders with my friends. It is a game that looks like Escape From Tarkov and Dark and Darker. A fps game that you have to kill and loot with your teammates in some space stations or space ships. And when you died, you lose everything you have on your character. I played 50 hours but I did not really enjoy it, I couldn't play this game in full screen. I had to play it in a very small window. And my laptop still can't handle the game.

League of Legends

I also played a lot of League of Legends. I was playing Gwen a lot in this period. I am very into Gwen's mechanics recently. The attack animation is smooth, the design of this champion is cool. Gwen is a doll that somehow became alive, and her weapons are scissors and needles. I really like the colour used on her.

Titans Season 3 & 4

I watched this DC series about the titans over this semester and last semester. I have already watched all the episodes released, there are 11 episodes in season 4 for now. The first half was showing before Christmas, and the rest were released weekly from mid April. I found it quite interesting to watch. I really like the parts about Jason Todd, he was turning into a bad guy as a Robin, then became Redhood.


Three Kingdoms

Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyHxk-iuUdDxRCCeddRj-vdUoza3sacVU

I was watching these old tv drama program on Youtube. It has 95 episodes, 45 min each. I watched all of them in about 3 weeks. Its basically a drama of the three kingdom story. Some of my friends think its boring, but as I am a big fan of the three kingdoms story/history, I loved watching it. Usually, I would search each characters' historical life on wiki to try to understand more.


 My Choice

At the beginning, I wanted to make a 2D game. My idea was to make a 2D parkour platform game like Cookies Run. However, it takes a lot of time to create the assets for game, My mind was kind of stuck at that moment as I don't want to make things like sprite sheets and coding. 

When I started the game League of Legends, there was a comic that advertise their new products (skins). I started to think of making comics. I haven't draw for a while after graduated from college, so I would like to do some drawings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBUuHqGiomM


I did not think too much on the story, it is a very simple story. I wanted to draw in as it was happened in the old Chinese dynasty as I've been watching the three kingdoms drama program. Therefore, it appears to be an old Chinese brick wall with a big entrance and a man in old Chinese costume at the beginning.

I used Photoshop to draw all these drawings. I must say that some of them are not detailed and not well drawn, because I've always been struggling about the angles and the structures. The story is basically about a man who appears to be a thief trying to steal from a dungeon or someone's tomb and he was punished and killed by the ghost in this place.

The story at the end was a bit too quick I think, but I could not think of a better ending/scenes to draw to represent how the thief was punished.

After drawing all the pages, I imported them into Animate. I wanted to make it readable on web with a little bit of animations so Animate was a good choice to make this comic as I can put it on a html5 canvas.

The comic only has a very small amount of animations as it is a comic that should be quite still.

One of my concern is that I did not have anyone talking in the comic, which could potentially be hard to understand the story. 

Overall, I quite like page 2, 3 and 6. Page 6 especially, I think the animation looks pretty fine. And it really shows how the man got scared and even his hat and mask fell off on his head and face. However, the last two pages is bad to me, I think its too simple and very plain.



Bibliography

Divinity: Original Sin 2 (2017), PC [Game]. Larian Studios.
Total War: WARHAMMER III (2022), PC [Game], Creative Assembly, Feral Interactive, SEGA.
Marauders (2022), PC [Game], Small Impact Games, Team17
Hero's Adventure (2023), PC [Game]. Paleo, 半瓶醋工作室.
League of Legends (2009),  PC [Game], Riot Games.

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