Setting the Scene May 1, 2008
Posted by Miss Collins in : Class work , 11commentsToday groups 1 and 3 worked with me on the importance of scenes, environments and settings.
We came up with a good list of criteria for what a good game setting should have: Lots of interesting things so the player is entertained, but not too many things or unnecessary things because the player might get confused or lose interest.
As with our dialogue work on Tuesday we then talked about how we can apply these ideas to story writing. It was said that we need to entertain and not to confuse with too much information. We also agreed that because, unlike in a game where the player can see the terrain that you have created as your world, a reader cannot know what that world is like unless you describe it to them. This involves amazing adjectives and astounding adverbs!
Our main activity was to rewrite basic sentences using more exciting and entertaining language and adding adjectives, adverbs, and more information.
I’d really like everyone to add their improved descriptions here as comments as they were really impressive!
What gets us talking? May 1, 2008
Posted by Miss Collins in : Class work , 1 comment so farOn Tuesday we got together to look at conversations we had written and discuss how the dialogue in our game does more than allow your player to talk to random animals!
We started by brainstorming the different reasons why people talk to each other. We came up with lots of reasons including gossiping, telling jokes, interrogating people, teaching and learning (I didn’t suggest that one, honest!) and asking for things on a menu. We then put these into categories:
Communicating a need, communicating information, requesting information, and pure entertainment. (I think gossiping covers most of these!)
So we need to think about what the conversations in the game were doing. We looked at Morgan’s game as one of the good examples that people have created. The conversation between Larry the horse and the player communicates not only the need for help, but also information about who the villain is, and what role the player character has in it all.
We tried building a new conversation together, which spawned lots of great plot ideas about magical or dead bears! We might try that again later!
What we finished by discussing was how this was similar to conversation writing in normal story writing: you always have to think about what you are doing with a conversation and how it moves the story forward for the reader.
The World Builder Display May 1, 2008
Posted by Miss Collins in : Class work, Images , 1 comment so far
The display inside our classroom is beginning to reflect the huge amount of work that we have done so far on our World Builder project. All our collage Land of Fairy Tale characters are up there, as well as the images from famous fantasy stories such as “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Lord of The Rings” that we used to develop our own characters. There is a Middle Earth section, with maps from “LOTR” and “The Hobbit”, I have one completed Elf Name picture by Morgan up too. More please!
