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Cardamom: an experimental videogame musical

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Cardamom: an experimental videogame musical

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Content Cardamom
An experimental videogame musical
By
Bethany Martin
Master of Fine Arts
Interactive Media & Games Division
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California
August 8, 2017

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Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 3
Story: ....................................................................................................................................................... 3
Themes: ................................................................................................................................................... 4
Types of Interactions: .............................................................................................................................. 6
Pre-production ............................................................................................................................................ 7
Ideation: ................................................................................................................................................... 7
Prior Art: .................................................................................................................................................. 7
Production ................................................................................................................................................... 8
Recruiting: ................................................................................................................................................ 8
Development: .......................................................................................................................................... 9
Re-design ................................................................................................................................................... 10
Testing: .................................................................................................................................................. 10
Iterating: ................................................................................................................................................ 10
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 11
Take-aways: ........................................................................................................................................... 11
Further development: ........................................................................................................................... 11
Bibliography: .............................................................................................................................................. 12

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Introduction
Story:
Cardamom is an interactive musical where the player, as a cat, becomes involved with
the three tenants of a nearby apartment complex. Each tenant is dealing with their own struggles
in regards to work/life balance, and through the player’s interactions can come to realize the
error of their ways or descend deeper into their unhealthy lifestyles. The game is similar to a
point-and-click adventure game, but being a musical, it is also interspersed with songs from the
tenants that lament their hopes and fears at different points during the game.
After the beginning parts of the game, the player is paired with the tenant they showed
the most affection to, who effectively becomes their owner. This tenant is the one who the player
can to help or hinder in improving their lifestyle. If the player plays their cards right, their tenant
may even end up with one of the others!
The game offers multiple endings depending on the player’s actions. Its target audience is
middle school children, and its purpose is to draw attention to the importance of having a healthy
lifestyle.
Characters:
Cardamom - The player protagonist, Cardamom is a cat that was abandoned in an
alleyway nearby an apartment building. The main character doesn’t talk and only communicates
by selecting items.
Victoria - She moved to the City to pursue her dream of being a Broadway performer.
She’s already an understudy on an off-Broadway production, so she’s doing well. She’s very
close with her family who always paid special attention to her who now live very far away. She

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expects people to make the first move when it comes to getting friends and lovers. But they
won’t do so without effort. The good ending for her is that she makes friends with the people that
live in the apartment. The worst ending is that she feels so lonely and misses her family that she
has to leave.
Susan - She moved to the City to pursue her dream of being a creative director of a news
publication. She works an entry-level position as a writer for a newspaper, writing relationship
advice. She is constantly being asked to work overtime and meet ridiculous deadlines. She
doesn’t live in the now because she’s too concerned with meeting her goals in the future. She’s
kind of the main character of this story because her mentality is common among young
ambitious creatives. The good ending is one where she has achieved work life balance and begun
to have a semblance of a life.
Kent - He moved to the city to pursue his dream of being a famous musician. He’s
relatively young and his family still pays for his rent and cost of living. He doesn’t have a job
because that would get in the way of him “making it”. Recently he’s had a lot of anxiety about
not being discovered. He doesn’t like to get out of bed anymore. He knows he should be
practicing guitar but he’d rather flirt with the other two residents or go out on the town. His
dream is too heavy for him to carry. He’d rather say he could have made it if he’d tried, rather
than try and risk failure.
Themes:

Cardamom is a mash-up of an educational, musical, and dating-sim. Cardamom is a
covertly educational game, the game teaches about work-life balance, and forming meaningful
relationships. Cardamom is a musical; it uses musical numbers to progress the story and reward

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players for their involvement. Cardamom interactive narrative format uses the branching
structure common in dating-sims.
A major theme present in Cardamom’s story is creating clear boundaries between your
career and life, as a creative. Organizing your life to be both enjoyable and productive is no easy
feat. And even if you somehow manage to get to that point, you’ll still have to deal with
hardships such as relationship troubles that can easily throw you off your groove. Adopting a
healthier lifestyle is not an overnight change, as I tried to reflect in this game, but rather a
gradual one that you have to work at. Relationships, too, can easily help or hinder your personal
growth, and learning to cultivate positive relationships in life is key in being able to become your
best self.
The game features stat-based branching in determining the outcome of the player’s
experience and that has been utilized in Cardamom in interesting ways. Cardamom borrows the
structural format from that traditionally seen in dating sims, Cardamom allows players to choose
which tenant they’d like to befriend. The decisions they make subsequently putting the player on
that character’s “route” and gives them the chance to help that particular tenant. The tenant’s
current work/life balance also alters dialogue; making each playthrough feel very personalized
and having the player feel like they’ve had a personal stake in the game’s outcome.
Cardamom is one of the first of its a kind, by being an interactive musical game.
Musicals are a genre present in theatre in film. Cardamom re-imagines the musical in video
game using elements into their gameplay, and so wished to change that. Tell the story of
Cardamom through a game and musical made the serious themes and ideas we had more
lighthearted and digestible.

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Types of Interactions:

The game is played with a mouse, and will later be ported to tablet; the main format of
interaction in the game is clicking. The player clicks on the character to make them talk, clicks
on choices to make decisions, clicks on animals to have them play instruments, and so on. There
are choice points in Cardamom. The player must pick one of three objects in an environment for
the character to interact with. There is also an inventory system in Cardamom where the player
can chose to give objects to a character in the apartment to change the outcome of the story.
The most common interaction in the game is the pick one of three objects, interaction.
These choices directly impact the character’s stats. Each character has their own inner stats, the
stats being things like work or relaxation. Cardamom is able to direct them to continue on their
path or re-direct them into healthier lifestyle choices during the pick one of three scenarios.
There is also occasionally a use an item interaction in Cardamom. At points in the game
the player can pick up items and hand them to other characters. The item retrieval missions allow
the player to decide who they will give a particular item to, and by doing so, impact the
progression of the story. For instance if you give the over worked writer the dancer’s key she’ll
have to stop working to and return the key to the dancer, thus both of them have formed a small
friendship.
The third and final interaction in the game doesn’t impact story it just impacts the way
the player listens to the music. You can choose to hear the opening song in 9 different sequences
by first encountering the residents in different orders. During one of the musical numbers you
can turn on and off animals, as sort of a DJ mixing mechanic. The third and final music
mechanic comes from the second storypoint break up scene where you can select a character to
hear their particular verse. Other music events are controlled by stats, the same way the dialog

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branches based on stats. The music branches, and the player will hear different pieces based on
their owner and their ending (happy or sad).
Pre-production
Ideation:

Cardamom is an idea that spawned out of the prep class for my thesis last year. I knew I
wanted to make a game where sound was primary. At first, I was thinking I’d make a game about
eavesdropping/listening as a mechanic. Then maybe listening would unlock emotional states in
the cat, and the player could solve puzzles that way. Through iterating I found that the less cat-
like mechanics were more interesting to me, music became very important. Before my pitch day
to the game to faculty, I decided the game would be a musical.
Prior Art:
I had three prior art references, that were pivotal for the project: Drood, Dominique
Pamplemousse, and Ghost Trick. The first Drood is an interactive stage show musical, a “who
done it” where the audience decides the ending. The second Dominique Pamplemousse is a
linear adventure game musical. The last Ghost Trick is a game where the player makes slight
interactions as a ghost to impact the game’s story.
Drood is a Broadway interactive musical stage show from 1985, written by Rupert
Holmes based on the unfinished Charles Dicken’s novel, the Mystery of Edward Drood. This is
the only other musical I could find where audience were involved in determining the story.
Drood is a classic “who done it”, and the audience is allowed to decide the culprit of a murder is.
The audience interaction comes at the end, in form of a vote, similar to a murder mystery party.
No matter who the audience decide they are right and get to hear a final song based on their pick.
Cardamom is similar in that player determines the songs by making choices. There’s not one big

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choice at the end of the game and the choices you make in Cardamom are more frequent
nuanced.
Dominique Pamplemousse is an adventure game where player plays as a detective in a
black and white stop motion world. All or most of the dialogue in Dominique Pamplemousse is
sung; the production quality is very indie having been created by only one developer, Squinky.
The game is the first of its kind to have singing and story intertwined in game. Cardamom differs
in that we have a much larger team, Cardamom’s narrative is branching, and the player is able to
change the outcome of musical numbers.
Ghost Trick is a game for Nintendo DS where players use a ghost to interact with things
in their environment. Players jump from object to object moving things until eventually they
solve the puzzle. I think this relates to Cardamom because it uses a similar indirect interaction.
The player might want something to happen but only be able to trigger it in a round about way,
such as continually mentoring the writer not to work so hard. A big difference between
Cardamom and Ghost Trick is that in Cardamom the player is acknowledged as a character (a
cat), while in Ghost trick the player is a Ghost and never acknowledged as a character.
Production
Recruiting:

A rule amongst game MFAs is that you should never commit yourself to a project that
you can’t do on your own. This is/was sound word advice, however I committed myself to
something I couldn’t possibly do without other people. I have an art background and since
attending USC, I’ve picked up engineering, but I can not sing, compose or song write.
The first person I got on my project was Maria Ferreri she came on as a narrative lead,
she also helped me recruit the other two writers on the project. I got a healthy handful of artists

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from a pitch day we had in September and since then art has been pretty manageable. I never
successfully got anyone to come on to take over engineering, but it was a task that I could do in a
pinch. I was most scared when I didn’t have anyone on writing the music.
When I started Cardamom, I believed I had a composer/song-writer that I could work
with for the entire production, but this plan fell through over the summer. Cardamom being a
musical demanded music and lots of music, more music than most composers made for multiple
projects. Even composers used to working with students couldn’t produce quickly enough. In
August of my thesis year I had to recruit for the heart of my game.
I was lucky enough to have Crystal Chan in the new IMGD first year MFA class, and to
find Alex Ruger through a friend. Crystal Chan came on as my songwriter, she has a quirky dark
tone that is perfect for Cardamom’s story themes. Alex Ruger is a fast, reliable and bang up
composer and he is able to do orchestration passes quickly on anything Crystal writes. They’re a
killer team and I was lucky enough to recruit them.
Development:
This game started in April 2016 with just myself, Bethany Martin, and Maria Ferreri, an
undergraduate student at USC. After we nailed down an outline for the experience, Maria got to
work writing the script while I got to work building the mechanics in Unity. By the end of the
summer, the script was on its third revision and the game in Unity was beginning to take shape!
From there, I recruited the rest of the team--totalling to about twenty people over the course of its
development--who helped flesh out the art, write the songs, and organize everyone.
Notably, our producers Bryan Zhang and Allison Comrie did an excellent job keeping
people updated with the state of the project and checking in with tasks, while our art director
Catie Jones helped manage the large amount of artists on the project and enforce consistency in

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style. With a little help from some pad thai and soda, our weekly meetings were extremely
productive, and by the end of the fall semester the first “level” of the game was fully
implemented.

Re-design
Testing:
Cardamom has been primarily tested for story, all bug testing was done internally. It was
rare that a testing player would encounter/uncover a bug. Most of testing was devoted to making
sure that players understood their choices and that the narrative was clear. The initial tests lead
us to change the input format of the game from keyboard to mouse. Then to adjust the way the
player would navigate the scene. Later tests with the new players showed us that we needed to
change some of the prompts for the choices and make more clear when the choice phase was
over.
Iterating:

October’s vertical slice of the game, the character Victoria (the dancer character) was
locked out of her apartment, and the player had to go and get the key for her. During this period
of time the game was played through keyboard input. From having my advisor Matt Korba play
it, I decided to switch to mouse based on some feedback her had about the key input inventory
system. This in turn impacted how the character would navigate the build. At the time it was
much bigger space that felt good to walkthrough, once the game went to mouse it had to be
changed to a more immediate type of navigation.
The next bit of iteration was just polishing the player choices, the pick one of three
scenarios were not clear to people for the longest time. At first I tried putting “pick one” text

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over the choices, and people didn’t read it. The next step was adding a thought bubble where the
cat would prompt that the player was now making a decision. The next bit was making inactive
states of the objects appear after the choices. When we first went about writing and designing the
environmental choices it wasn’t clear to me, that wouldn’t be so straightforward. Then the
amount of work we needed to put into it to have them read was just unexpected.
The changes that needed to be made on Cardamom were time consuming, but all and all,
the feedback that we got and the choices that we made to address that feedback took the game
from interactively broken to being playable.
Conclusion
Take-aways:
I learned more on making Cardamom, than I would have, had I favored a smaller team,
or a smaller scope. From developing it: I learned how to manage a large team, how to interface
with composers, how to coach voice actors, how to use two audio tools, how to direct sound
designers, and when to take and defer responsibility. I’ve come to appreciate the amount of time
it takes just to manage a team, but how rewarding it can be to work on a project that is not solely
your own.
Further development:
I’m going to continue development of Cardamom into the summer; I’m disbanding the
team. I was lucky enough that I coached my team into doing all the work necessary for the
project, so there is a lot of work/content that needs to be integrated for the game to be completed.
And once I’m no longer managing the team and coordinating meetings, I’ll have plenty of time
to finish the game. My plan is to have a completed game by fall of 2017, and then to port that
game to tablet.

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Bibliography:
Martin, Bethany, Cardamom, 2017, Los Angeles, CA

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Asset Metadata

Creator Martin, Bethany Kathryn (author)

Core Title Cardamom: an experimental videogame musical

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 08/07/2017

Defense Date 04/04/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cats,game theory,musical,musical game,OAI-PMH Harvest,videogame

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lemarchand, Richard (committee chair)

Creator Email bkmart87@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-423440

Unique identifier UC11264795

Identifier etd-MartinBeth-5684.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-423440 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MartinBeth-5684-0.pdf

Dmrecord 423440

Document Type Thesis

Rights Martin, Bethany Kathryn

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA