4TH WALL
A downloadable project
HOW TO PLAY
CHAPTER 1: OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM
Point & click narrative.
- Move your mouse over the image to find interactive areas.
- Click them to advance the story.
- Interactive areas are either images or text.
- Click X icon below the game to go back to the home page.
- At the end of chapter, click restart icon (bottom right) to replay.
CHAPTER 2: WHAT DESTINY HAS PLANNED?
Card battler top trumps style game.
- Choose a card in your hand (left set) & beat the challenge FATE selects from its own.
- Tap/Click cards to move to the next card in either your hand or FATE's.
- Tap/Click FATE's challenge symbol (centre icon) to play your card.
- Tap/Click anywhere to move on from the title, tutorial & end screens.
- Win all 9 hands to reveal your destiny.
CHAPTER 3: HELLO 1979(ISH)
Point & click narrative.
- Move your mouse over the image to find interactive areas.
- Click on them to advance the story.
- The interactive areas are either images or text.
- Some text links are highlighted, while others require exploration.
- Click the X icon below the game to go back to the home page.
- At the end of a chapter, click the restart icon (bottom right) to replay it.
CHAPTER 4: ONCE UPON A TIN MINE IN THE WEST COUNTRY
Bitsy retro explorer.
- Use the cursor keys to move and interact with game characters and objects
- Discover the story by exploring the play area
- Collect the gems to finish the game
CREDITS
Game, story, music & occasional vocals : Ash Green
Song vocals : Ellen Louise
Individual chapter credits listed below.
CHAPTER 1: OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM
Original images : Anna Shvets, Cottonbro studio, Karolina Grabowska, Ksenia Chernaya, Alexander Grey, Solen Feyissa, Joonas kääriäinen (pexels.com); febrianes86, ed_davad, majacvetojevic (pixabay.com); Open Clip Art; British Library Flickr
Story, image tinkering/warping/collages, music: Ash
Made with : imgm by Leon
CHAPTER 2: WHAT DESTINY HAS PLANNED?
Bark image: Anna Shvets (pexels.com); Cover: Anastasia Shuraeva (pexels.com); Open Clip Art; Cards: British Library Flickr
Design, coding, music: Ash
CHAPTER 3: HELLO 1979(ISH)
Original images: Felipe Balduino, (pexels.com); Robin Higgins, flutie8211, Thibaud, Roy Inove, David Zydd (pixabay.com); Beggars Banquet (Gary Numan Cars Cover); Open Clip Art; Shutterstock.com.
Story, image tinkering/warping/collages, music: Ash
Made with : imgm by Leon
CHAPTER 4: ONCE UPON A TIN MINE IN THE WEST COUNTRY
Original images: Pavel Danilyuk (pexels.com); Open Clip Art.
Story, game, music: Ash
Made with: Bitsy by Adam Le Doux
MUSIC
I ALWAYS WANTED XANADU
SO LONG GONE
BEACON LIGHTS
More music
GALLERY
ABOUT THE PROJECT
This project is mix of games, short interactive comics, music, and scrapbooks.
It was inspired by so many things - my love of late 1970s and early 1980s synthpop & UK culture; supernatural comics & TV such as Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974/1975), Sapphire and Steel, Misty; children's TV detective series like Scooby Doo; absurd comedy; UFO sightings, the strange and unexplained, folklore and magic.
I spent a lot of time exploring different ideas, even mooching through the British Library collection exploring old copies of Misty comics and Smash Hits magazines.
I wanted to reference so many of the things that interested me, and in particular I wanted the 1970s/1980s references to be a reflection of the time, but that didn't mean they had to be 100% accurate in terms of timelines and who did what etc. As long as things fitted together into a plausible version of 1979 to 1982 history that was okay for me. I say plausible, but only if you imagine that cow headed pop singers really did exist in an alternative version of the UK, and that Are 'Friends' Electric? was never no.1.
Whenever I found something online that was relevant to the project I bookmarked it. And if you're interested, you can find those bookmarks here. The last time I checked there were about 300. This includes bookmarks related to content for the game, as well as ideas and tools for creating it and giving the music some 1981 authenticity.
I wanted to give the game an old school retro vibrant feel, as well as a comic feel to it as well. I spent ages trying to settle on a single game tool to create it all in, but in the end that was just holding me back. I decided that I wanted to create a whole range of chapter styles, and (so far) I've been using imgm by Leon for the digital interactive comics; Adam LeDoux's Bitsy for the retro style ZX Spectrum style games; as well as aloelazoe's Bitsy 3d ; and I created a few chapters in Javascript using p5.js . Bitsy, Bitsy 3d and imgm are so easy to get to grips with.
A lot of the images used in comic sections and interludes were created from original stock images from sites such as Pexels.com and Pixabay.com, except for Videl and Selina - The Midnight Detective Club band members - who are a couple of photographic models from Shutterstock. (I'd really love to know the real identities of those two models.) I then collaged, cut out, tweaked and warped the images, added text in Canva, and made them lo-fi psychedelic grungy using paint.net.
The videos were created in a similar way - selecting free footage that worked together, and if needed included characters that looked like Videl and Selina. Then I grunged them up.
The music and the background to the the band is a key part of the game... an imaginary synthpop band taking inspiration from early albums by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Eurythmics, Japan, Heaven 17, Ultravox, Blancmange, Yazoo, and Gary Numan amongst others. This playlist will give you an idea of the type of music I'm talking about. Though this is the key focus, the first song I started working on was inspired more by Dollar, Bardo, Olivia Newton John and Tight Fit. That song ended up as So Long Gone, and also Body Twist. And the title of the band and game project came from a track I wrote as part of one of my other music projects, Replay in Neon.
As I was creating the project, I also wrote a few blog posts (on my other itch,io account), which go into a bit more detail about different aspects of it.
As time goes on I'll write more blog posts and add more content to this page - so please keep an eye open for anything new.