Comic Game

Date:

2009

Contributors:

Mike Daly

Download:

/downloads/games/comicgame_090706.zip

Comc Game is an interactive comic book; kind of like one of the old choose your own adventure stories but you can do more than just branching. Here is an analogy: If an old-school text adventure is like taking a test, playing comic game is like taking a multiple-choice pop quiz where the score doesn’t count towards your grade.

My original motivation for the project was to create a tool for authoring interactive comics. There were a few things appealing about this:

• I wanted to try making a C# gui app
• I wanted to learn about incorporating XNA into a forms application, if possible
• I wanted to create something that motivated others to be creative

Currently, the project has only gotten to the first phase of completion, which was basically just a proof of concept prototype client app, and a single complete interactive story. There is a lot to be desired, and I haven’t even started on the tool.

Anyway, in a perfect world, I could see a webpage that hosts an interactive comic viewer, that has a built-in interactive comic editor and hosted any comics that anyone wanted to create. Users would construct comics out of existing clip-art. This isn’t an original idea, but I haven’t seen anything that enables you to create interactive stories yet.

Once you’ve completed one path through a story, the game composites your path through the story into an external image so you can print it or put it on your webpage or whatever.

Requirements:

• Shader Model 2.0+ capable graphics hardware
• Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.0
• .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package
• DirectX 9.0c Redistributable