Week 12: Famous Last Words... Storybooks done!

It feels a little weird writing famous last words again, but I did a bunch of work on both of my projects (Ramayana Tiny Tales in Indian Epics and Twine Games for Myth-Folklore), and they are basically DONE. I'll do a read-through on both of them to finish up in Week 13, and just like I'm encouraging students in the class to do, I'll be finished with the class in Week 13.

And I'm really happy with how both Storybooks turned out. With the Ramayana one, it's not like there was anything new exactly, but I had a lot of fun choosing the stories to include on the four pages, and I'm also happy with the use of pictures side by side with the 100-word stories. So, I'm thinking that for the web presentation of the Tiny Tales of the Ramayana and Tiny Tales of the Mahabharata next semester, this is what I'll use: a Google Site with 20 pages (10 stories on each page), as opposed to doing it as a blog. It will be worth trying as an experiment anyway! So I'll basically clone this Ramayana website and reuse the design again, since I am pretty happy with how the pages look: 

Beyond the Ramayana

Lesser Known Folktales and Legends of

Rama, Sita, Hanuman, and Ravana

Here's what a page looks like, with alternating left-and-and-right for the image placement, plus a different color background to help mark the division between stories.

Finishing up the Twine Games project was the most exciting because I wrote my first Twine program: instead of just being a "survive" or "exit" type of game, the Anansi Game actually has variables that keep track of how many lives the player has left, how many trophies they have, which contests they have already completed, etc. It took a long time to do it, but now that I learned how the variables work and the if/else statements, I could design another game like this much more quickly. I've always wanted to learn how to do actual Twine programming, and it turned out to be even easier than I thought! Plus I was really proud of how the design of the game really reflected the nature of the trickster so that by playing the game you were, in a way, experiencing the dynamics of the trickster life itself. But without actually having to put your life on the line, ha ha.

The Anansi Game

So, I'm behind on my NaNoWriMo because I spent most of the weekend working on finishing up these projects, plus also doing a mountain of paperwork for my dad's estate (the probate-by-Zoom court hearing was last week, sigh). 

But... since I am basically done with this class (just revisions, plus one more "famous last words" post), that means I can dedicate next weekend to really plowing through on the Mahabharata, which I am excited about. Lack of time, not lack of excitement, is the problem. In fact, maybe I will go write at least a few Mahabharata stories now.

Meanwhile, that's Week 12 over and done.. .and ready for just one more week to call the class finished, with two Storybooks this time, and I'm very happy with them both. :-)