After all the recent talk about avant garde hats, I started thinking first,
that I better learn ActionScript 3 sometime soon,
and second,
that I should take another look at a CD-Rom from 1996, Orly Draw a Story.
In this game a Jamaican girl and her frog friend can have various adventures, but you have to draw parts of the story. It's brilliant. The five slabs on the wall are story choices.
The animation goes over your drawing, the paint features stay within the drawn line exactly. There's music, dancing, funny comments about what you're drawing and the color you've just chosen.
I had a hard time getting the program to play, because it was designed for Windows 95. It's a Broderbund production, more than ten years old. I actually worked/consulted on a joint project that went nowhere, around 1997, with one or more of the people responsible for this great production. Wow, I would love to get a chance to work with them now. Did any of you ever see this cd rom?
The stories were funny and the characters strong. Great music too.
You could choose the pencil or paint, colors from a silly panorama of paint pots, or textures. It was so easy to make sense of it all. Dinah was only 7 at the time and loved it too. Of course she was the target audience.
sorry it's blurry, but look how well it integrates into the scene.
I had the sound turned off when I drew this one, so I thought it was supposed to be just a head, not the whole monster. At the outset just the eyes and mouth were there on the blank paper.
For some reason print screen didn't work for this, so I had to take camera pix while it was playing out. It must have been built in Director.
14 comments:
Broderbund is part of a family of companies that bought and sold each other which included The Learning Company, founded by one of my personal heroes, Warren Robinett.)
Incidentally certain facts like "who is my heroes" are covered on the about page of mah unkempt blog.
Say Sally, on the subject of shared environments, did you know folks are using environments like Second life and World of Warcraft to film things with virtual cameras?
Oh wait, you know? I already posted something done in Gmod? ack. Well here is a Weird Al video someone did in World of Warcraft. It's somewhat less rediculous. :)
I actually took classes in Director on campus here several years ago! Made a couple of fun things.
Sally,
I've never seen that game, but boy, does that look cool! Since I was a kid I've loved anything where I was invited to draw part of the environment.
The green monster head is so funny. I love it!
Jesse,
W.R. sounds familiar. I remember he hid "Created by Warren Robinett" in a hidden room in my all time favorite Atari 2600 game, Adventure.
Jesse, You might want to switch your blog over to blogger. I know, for an itech guy like you that seems so minimall. But google must be running some excellent filters on the blogs to keep spam to a minimum. (Crossing my fingers that I'm not opening the flood gates.)
I didn't know shared environments was the word for them. That's an amazing concept that you almost don't want to think about, a virtual camera!
Sal, what version of Director did you learn? Adobe's reviving the program, and I'm really curious what new features it will have. I got text to speech working briefly a couple of years ago with a pig character named Slimfast.
Namowal, you would LOVE this game. It is designed exquisitely, with sound effects and unique symbols that are fun in themselves. It doesn't have the corporate pc lite feeling that so much of what's done for children seems to have these days.
And they pick nifty items for you to draw-- like the eye in a periscope, or the monster, or Prince Charming. They manage to integrate it so well into the story.
If I'm totally without something to do, maybe I'll shoot a video of the playback of one of them. I had to fool with a few Windows settings to get it to play on Windows XP, and it still threw out one error that I just ignored.
A little off subject (as usual), but I just had to say that ALPHABET is my very favorite computer game of all time. I had to order it from Amazon in Germany. Unfortunately, the DVD won't play on the newer Macs--you need to have OS 9, or Windows 95/98/NT 4.0. I think it came out in 2000.
Here's part of a review by Brigit, age 10:
If you asked me about what my favorite part of it is, I'd tell you it's the "G" game. I can't explain all 26 separate games so I'll just tell you about the "G" game. What you do is you have a little "g" and all of these little "g's" around it and you have to eat all the other "g's" until you get so big that you turn the whole screen red, the color of the "g" and then you feed the hippopotamus.
The next favorite game is the "i" game. The "i" is very scared. If you have a microphone the "i" will run when you yell or blow into the microphone and soon all those little "i's" will be bring out bigger, capital "I's." Don't worry, they're just as scared.
There are absolutely no problems. It is very, very interesting, and I can play it over and over and over and over.
The graphics on the "T" were very, very good. The sound and music were very, very good.
I don't recommend playing it with another girl because it would be, "Do the "q", no, do the "s", but my mother loves to play it and she especially likes the "a." My mother doesn't play any other games.
http://www.gtpcc.org/gtpcc/alphabet.htm
Director 8, I think?
Linda, It's maddening that you can't even get screen shots of Tivola's alphabet when you use google image. I'd love to see what this game is like.
Jesse, that Weird Al video you linked to is so well done. What's the story there?
I'm guessing it's a Weird Al song, with great lyrics, satirizing something else? Does this video take its edits from a Weird Al video or is the short original? The editing in places is really great, and the whole thing is much fun to watch.
Sally, any chance you have an old computer with Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 on it? If so, I'll send Alphabet straight over.
Hey Sally! Yay someone else likes Weird Al. :)
It is astounding how many people think Weird Al went away in the nineties? He slowed down a bit.. but then — like You, Prince, and Wil Wheaton — he found the Internet and decided this would be a great place to live.
So he doesn't always parody specific songs or specific artists, greater than half of his work is fully original and Hardware Store is a great example of that.
So far as the video: With the advent of youtube, AMV's (Ameture Music Videos) are becoming spectacularly common. Al publicly supports them, links to good ones from his myspace page, and even produces most of his videos now via internet production venues (jibjab comes to mind).
The most recent video Al used any professional studio to create (that I am aware of) was White and Nerdy in '06.
Oy, time for me to quit hogging the couch here. I've decided to reinitiate my blog all up on Blogger.
Sally, your suggestion was right on three points:
1> I first passed on blogger because I didn't get to host it on my own machine.
2> I stopped using the blog I hosted strictly because of comment spam (same reason I surrendered to Gmail for all my mail hosting needs)
3> "Get out of my house!" (point taken ;)
Now if I have more than a soundbite to say I shall use Trackback and that is the way the blogosphere is supposed to function.
Tanks for having me over!
Jesse, I'm glad you joined the googlesphere. I noticed you'd turned off comments on your old blog and thought this might solve the problem. If comments aren't enabled, a blog can be frustrating to read, even if you never post comments. It just feels like a window you can't open.
About Weird Al, I went to a taping of a weird tv pilot at NBC in Burbank around 1983. Among the groups onstage were The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Weird Al, and my friends Al and Bob who were the original Couch Potatoes. I don't think the show ever aired, but it was lots of fun to watch!
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