TALE OF TALES game demo project

AL-JAHIZ

http://entropy8zuper.org/html/drafts/al-jahiz


screenshot

VIEWING REQUIREMENTS

  • Flash 5 player
  • 400Mhz CPU
  • sound amplification
  • Internet Explorer on PC for full screen view


INSTRUCTIONS
  1. Click "episode 1"
  2. Click on buttons
  3. Let email messages come in
  4. Open email messages by clicking on buttons
  5. Click on links in email messages and let sites stream in
  6. Click on window in left bottom when it starts blinking
  7. Click "Quit" at end


  1. Click "episode 2"
  2. Move cursor to stop screen saver
  3. Click on buttons
  4. Roll over avatar
  5. Click on button
  6. Let email messages come in
  7. Open email messages by clicking on buttons
  8. Click on links in email messages and let sites stream in
  9. Roll over pink dot in lower left window when it starts blinking
  10. Click to stop screen saver
  11. Let email messages come in
  12. Open email messages by clicking on buttons
  13. Click on links in email messages and let sites stream in
  14. Click "Quit" at end


CREATORS
Auriea Harvey: concept, programming, graphics, animation, sounds
Michaël Samyn: concept, programming, graphics, animation, sounds


DESCRIPTION
Al-Jahiz started as a commercial project commissioned by Lifetime Television (NYC, USA). But due to a change in management and policy, the project was prematurely stopped. We have been looking for investors to continue this project but have not found any yet. Al-Jahiz was intended to be a 13-part web site series. Five parts have been made of which two are available on our web site. We were paid 14,000 USD for this draft.

Al-Jahiz is a story about Sofie Declerq, a young woman who works for an auction house, set in the not so distant future. The interface to the story is her very minimal corporate computer desktop with a webcam application, a web browser, an email client and a personal avatar. By reading the email messages that come in, followong links to fake web pages and fiddling with other pseudo-software, the user learns about the narrative. In a way, the user becomes Sophie. We had all sorts of plans to extend this project to sending actual email messages to the users, and so on.

Al-Jahiz is suffused with Middle Eastern elements: decoration, imagery, music and sounds. But it mixes those tradtional elements with modern and hi-tech ones.

Al-Jahiz uses narrative elements to embed the user in an atmosphere. This embedding is more important than the actual story which, despite of its links to various traditions, is relatively thin. In fact we wanted to hire a writer because we felt we personally lacked the talent to make the story interesting in and of itself. We discovered that we were better at re-interpreting already existing stories in very surprising ways, than starting from scratch and inventing the narrative itself.