Hello all

I have currently involved my self in the development of a program that can be used for creating interactive media projects, such as comic books and movies.

The Idea behind it started as a personal test project, because i have always enjoyed making comics and movies etc using Poser and other 3d applications, but thought it could be fun if you could actually make them interactive, so the viewer could decide how the story evolves. But imagined that other users here my find something like this enjoyable as well, so decided to make it into a product, that I hopefully will be able to release here on renderosity when its finished.

Since its currently based on my own experience and what i think such program should contain, I would like to hear from others that might find something like this useful or fun and whether they have some ideas to, what would be good to have in such program.

An quick overview of the program so far

• The program is organized into pages like a book. Each page can then contain a scene which can hold images, movies, audio, triggers etc. And these pages will be linked together based on how the story should be played out based on viewers decisions or the person designing it. Much like one of those books where you read a text and then "Go to page 50" etc.  

• Ability to add images.

• Ability to add movies.

• Ability to add sound and music.

• Ability to add text elements.

• Ability to use mouse cursors when over a button.

• Ability to add progress bars which can be used to pressure viewers to make quick decisions.

• Trigger system, which is the backbone of making the projects interactive.

• Trigger type Click - Allow an image or text to be used as a button.

• Trigger type Timer - Works as a counter, which can be used with a progress bar or a text object. Can also be used for automatically changing pages.

• Trigger type Go to page - Will allow you to go to a specific page, and is how pages are linked together and in end make the story interactive.

• Trigger type Movie - When a movie is done playing it will fire a trigger. 

• Subtitle functionality - Will allow you to create and add subtitles to movies.

To be added

• Attribute system that will allow you to add and test vs custom created variables. Which can be used for keeping track of whether the viewers have picked something up. If there is a health system in the project and so forth. 

• Randomization will allow you to test custom variables vs a random roll like a dice. Which again can be used to maybe make the projects more into a game or to make the stories less linear.  

• UI elements elements that are consistent throughout the whole project and can keep track of stuff like health for instant or if you want to make the project more into a game type of thing, you can add other characteristics as well.

• Speak bubbles like in comic books.

This was a quick overview of the project. Which i hope gives an idea of what its about. So basically what its about is to create stories where you can be the main character in your own stories and share them with others if you like.

Besides the main editor there is also an player, which allow you to view/play the stories.   

Hope some think this could be a fun idea and if you have any suggestions at this early state of what could be useful to add. Then i would appreciate it, as i really want to make it as useful as possible.

Cheers

3D-Mobster

Are you saying there would be clickable areas in a movie itself? Like an mp4  video? Or is this jumping from web page to web page?

"Are you saying there would be clickable areas in a movie itself? Like an mp4  video? Or is this jumping from web page to web page?"

The clickable area will not be in the movie itself. But you will be able to add triggers (That being text or images) on top of the movie and through these it would appear as if it was the case. So it works kinda like layers, so for instant if you had a hallway and you wanted the viewer to choose which way to go, you would add triggers to each direction and put these on top of your movie and the viewer would be able to click them. And based on what is chosen you can move the story along.

So you have different ways to do it, either make it kinda like a "point and click" game where you click something on the movie clip or you could show the options as text explaining each possibility beneath it or where ever you want it to be.  

1. Go North

2. Go West

3. Speak with Jacob

etc.

This sounds very interesting. Looking forward to seeing it in action.

So I could embed a video in a web page. A man, say, walking up to a wall that has two doors. The video stops? pauses? I click the left side of the video,say--and the left door opens, and the video continues with him going through it? And if I click the right side, the right door opens and the video continues with him going through that door? Or do we jump to another web page, a new video, the man going thru the left or right door?

In html I can already put text below a video, giving the option to go left or right--but only by jumping to a new html page which will have the appropriate video. Clicking the video itself--somehow putting layers/triggers over it--I've never tried, but it does sound interesting. 

Cool idea ! One useful feature I can think of would be some kind of flowcharting functions so you can organize your story flow with perhaps optional conversion from the flowchart to a basic layout. Then the user could add stuff to the layout like images and audio, edit the hotspots the way they want and so on.

So I could embed a video in a web page. A man, say, walking up to a wall that has two doors. The video stops? pauses? I click the left side of the video,say--and the left door opens, and the video continues with him going through it? And if I click the right side, the right door opens and the video continues with him going through that door? Or do we jump to another web page, a new video, the man going thru the left or right door?

In html I can already put text below a video, giving the option to go left or right--but only by jumping to a new html page which will have the appropriate video. Clicking the video itself--somehow putting layers/triggers over it--I've never tried, but it does sound interesting.

The project is not placed on a web page. Its played through a player capable of reading all the information that make up a story. But in theory I guess you could make it as web page, that loads a new page all the time. However i find it annoying to having to wait for movies, sounds, objects etc to load, so doing it offline will improve speed so it becomes more like a movie.

But you are correct the whole movie would be made up by small movies corresponding to what selections are made. So the example you use could be the case.

I don't think there would be any problem in doing it in html if you wanted. But since it started as a personal project and i commonly ran into problems keeping track of things. The editor have a built in functionality that will do this for you, so when working on a given scene/page, you will be able to see all the input pages that leads to it and at the same time you can see all the output pages that the one you are working on leads to. So it makes it fairly easy because you can use this overview to quickly navigate through the story etc as you built it.

Also there are no limitation of how you organize your things, so you can have video playing on top of other videos, images on top of video etc.

Hope that answers your questions.

Cool idea ! One useful feature I can think of would be some kind of flowcharting functions so you can organize your story flow with perhaps optional conversion from the flowchart to a basic layout. Then the user could add stuff to the layout like images and audio, edit the hotspots the way they want and so on.

There is a built in navigation tool that keep track of all pages and how they are linked together.

The way you can look at the program UI wise, is that you have a work area, which is just your whole screen and would be one page, and you can add whatever you want to this and move it around where you think it should be. This also include hotspots, which I call triggers, which could be an image for instant and you can move this where ever you want it to be and it would only interact there, for example if the viewer clicked it.

All objects (Videos, images, triggers, texts, progress bars and so forth) can be dragged around with the mouse.

So each time you add a new page you get a clean work area where you can built the next part of the story. 

I dont like waiting for html pages to load either....so avoiding html would be fine with me.

But what format is it delivered in, finally? And where would you display it? Would the end product be seen on a webpage (perhaps embedded?), or playable only on game players like the xbox? If you made one of these stories, where would people see it?

This sounds like an ambitious and intriguing project!

I dont like waiting for html pages to load either....so avoiding html would be fine with me.

But what format is it delivered in, finally? And where would you display it? Would the end product be seen on a webpage (perhaps embedded?), or playable only on game players like the xbox? If you made one of these stories, where would people see it?

This sounds like an ambitious and intriguing project!

Everything is stored in a project folder in several files which stores all the information that is needed to run the project. The idea is as you finalize your project in the editor a copy of the player is stored together with the project and linked to it. So you can .zip the project folder and share that file and another person can then unzip it and simply run the player as you would any other file and that will execute the project. So you could share the project zip file on a webpage but people would have to download it and then run it from there computer.

You could compare it a bit to something like "Life is Strange" if you know that game which is a more cinematic/story driven type of game, but with my program there is less focus on being a game, since you can't directly control your character, so the focus is on telling a story through interactive means using high resolution graphics.

Life is strange trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AURVxvIZrmU