Sam Scaife - Digital Media Design BA

As I mentioned in the last post I've had this brief for 1 week now so I've started coming up with ideas for what I could potential create.

The main idea I currently have is to create a horror piece. I think this genre is really suited to interactivity and the immersion provided by the ipad. while jotting down idea I realised that something similar to what I had in mind had already been created, Hotel 626.

I am yet to play Hotel 626 as currently I have no internet access and the game is restricted by the time of day. but I intend to play through it and see how it creates its story and what features could be used on the ipad. this description from cyberentries sums up the project; 

In honor of Doritos bringing back two intense flavors from the dead, we created an intensely scary website. You're trapped in a hotel and have to complete challenges--like singing a demon baby to sleep--to get out. Hotel 626 uses several groundbreaking techniques to dial up the experience. Your webcam sneaks a picture of you and shows it to you later--inside the lair of a madman. Your one salvation is a phone call on your actual cell phone with directions on how to get out. To make it scarier, you have to play in the dark. Hotel 626 is only open from 6pm to 6am.

Using the camera without the user knowing and restricting time are two very powerful story telling tools which help to build an atmosphere around the game. I was thinking about how it would be possible to play with time before I came across this as I believe that by taking real world variables and integrating them into the story you will get greater immersion and the boundary between the real and virtual will become blurred.

One issue which I have noticed from writing up my notes is that I have overlook a section of the brief where it states Take an existing short story. It was explained to us that this is in the brief so we do not get too distracted with character and story design and focus on user experience and user interface design. However I think that a large part of the UX will be from the story, if you want to create a story for an older target audience you will need to carefully integrate the interactive elements with the narrative.

I wrote down a really boiled down version of what I think this project is all about in my sketch book, I'm going to put it here as well so that I can refer back to it.
It's all about brining together multiple elements