Mar 03 10

Midterm: Choose y/o Adventure

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Interactive 1 Midterm Project

Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books from when you were a kid? The basic idea is this: You start on page one with some background story, and are confronted with a choice—do you pick up the dagger, or not?. Depending on your choice, you turn to a different page, and the storyline is altered.

You wake up to find yourself in a cave. The air is dank and musty, and a most foul odor hangs in the air. How did you get here? You can’t remember.

Ahead of you are two cave entrances. The one on the left looks rough and has pebbles strewn across the ground. The one on the right is smooth and moist. There is no sense in staying here, you think to yourself. “I might as well follow one of these tunnels.”

  • Choose the left tunnel: Turn to page 34.
  • Choose the right tunnel: Turn to page 23.

Your mission is this: create a choose-your-own-adventure story website; only here we wont be turning to pages, we’ll be linking to them. On each page, you’ll be confronted with new choices and the story will take any number of twists and turns.

Due

The project is due on March 17th.

Requirements

  • The story must have a total of at least 15 inter-linked .html pages
  • The story must not be linear, (e.g. “Click next page > Click next page > Click next page”) but must involve alternate storylines.
  • It should be creative and cool.
  • The story should be interesting and fun to play. It can be about anything: time-travel, a dorky Dungeons and Dragons affair or a frat party. Be creative!
    • Please don’t be lewd. I have to read through this, after all.
  • The page design must be creative, readable and high-quality. Go for pro.
    • Experiment to find out kind of design works best with your content. Scary story? Perhaps a dark color scheme is appropriate.
    • You probably don’t need a complex layout. One column of text is fine. This is a game-book, remember.
  • Links must not be broken, e.g. you need to make sure all of the page links actually work and link to each other.
  • Remember to use your knowledge of HTML and choose the most descriptive possible tag for content in the page.

When your project is finished, the directory structure will probably look something like this:

  • my-adventure/
    • css/
      • screen.css
      • alternate.css
    • img/
      • cool-gradient.gif
      • troll.jpg
      • etc…
    • index.html
    • passage.html
    • super.html
    • another-page.html
    • etc…

Make sure the index file has a title, name for attribution, copyright etc, as well as the story intro.

Tips

  • Having trouble planning your story? Try creating a site map.
  • Remember, you only have to create your CSS design once. From there, you can link in your stylesheet on every page.
  • Try designing special styles for certain pages. For example, a page where the player dies could have a different design from standard pages.
    • You could link in a different stylesheet, or use a body class to target your styles to.
  • Try incorporating images into the story with the <img /> tag. Create your own, or search for Creative Commons images.
  • Great games have incentives! Maybe you could give your player points for reaching certain pages intact.
  • You could use your experience with creating buttons to design buttons for your page options. Cool!

Grading

  • For your midterm, you will be graded as a team. The grade your project receives will be the grade that you get for the midterm.
    • It’s your team’s responsibility to make sure you’re creating a great project. Work hard, create cool things.

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