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Ruben's puppets

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Ruben's puppets

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RUBEN’S PUPPETS

by
Georg Luif

Master of Fine Arts
Interactive Media & Games Division
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California
May 2018

Copyright 2018 Georg Luif

Ruben’s Puppets 1
Table Of Contents
Abstract 3
Artist Statement 3
Design Goals 4
Combine Participant Structures 4
Multilateral Competition 4
Examples - Real-time strategy games 5
Stronghold Crusader 5
Age Of Empires II 5
Kingdom 5
Totally Accurate Battle Simulator 6
Player vs. Game 7
Examples - Open world / Third-person action games 7
Just Cause 3 7
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 7
Far Cry 4 7
Player vs. Multilateral Competition 8
Examples - “Action strategy” games 8
Rise & Fall - Civilizations At War 8
Dynasty Warriors 8 8
Herzog Zwei 9
Realm Of Rulers 9
Systemic Richness 10
Emergence 10
Conway’s Game Of Life 10
Emergence in Ruben’s Puppets 11
Persistence in Ruben’s Puppets 11
Interactive / Dynamic Cutscenes 12
Experience Goals 13
Discovery 13
Power 13
Backstory & World 14

Ruben’s Puppets 2
Gameplay Loops 15
Documentation 16
Prototyping Procedures 16
Example 16
Question of the prototype 16
Hypothesis 17
Results 17
Prototype History 19
2014 19
2015 19
Early 2017 19
Late 2017 19
RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) 20
Acknowledgements 21
Bibliography 22

Ruben’s Puppets 3

Abstract
Ruben’s Puppets is a video game that combines Multilateral Competition and
Player vs. Game participant structures. The user plays in a third-person perspective and interacts
with real-time strategy systems, run by artificial intelligence agents who are competing against
each other.
The story involves a world crafted by a puppet maker and two young apprentices that get so
immersed in their puppet avatars that they don’t want to leave. Ruben, the puppet maker tries to
return them to the real world but gets imprisoned by one of them.

Artist Statement
Georg Luif, born in 1991 in Vienna, Austria is an independent game developer and media artist
working in Los Angeles, California. Using a practical and accessible approach, he creates work
in which he artistically explores systemic game play, convergences between videogames and
film as well as interactive Virtual Reality.

Ruben’s Puppets 4
Design Goals
I describe the game design objectives of this thesis, and the areas I wish to explore and research.
Combine Participant Structures
In Ruben’s Puppets one of the design goals is to combine elements of Multilateral Competition
withPlayer vs. Game participant structures. I think that synthesizing these elements, “splicing
together those pieces of game DNA”, will result in mechanics that have the potential for
meaningful player choice and new types of gameplay.
Multilateral Competition
In this structure multiple agents compete against each other (see
fig. 1) - most multiplayer titles utilize this type of competition
structure.
For my thesis, I am referencing several real-time strategy games,
such as WarCraft III , the Age Of Empires series, or the Stronghold
series. These reference games involve controlling units, gathering
resources and building armies in order to defeat the enemy
factions.

Ruben’s Puppets 5
Examples - Real-time strategy games

Stronghold Crusader
This castle simulator game has sparked several ideas for
Ruben’s Puppets. In particular the fiendish AI opponents
that build structures and comment on the progress of the
player were a good template for setting up puppet factions
for the game.

Age Of Empires II
This game was released around 20 years ago in 1998 and I
grew up playing it. In addition to the great AI behaviour,
the option of setting up custom scenarios allowed for
incredible replayability.

Kingdom
This 2D sidescroller resource management game stands
out in regards to its indirect assignment of units to
buildings. The physicality of the coin collection
mechanics and simplicity of the goal are particularly
impressive to me.

Ruben’s Puppets 6

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator
This wacky simulation game lets the player set up two
opposing armies and watch them fight each other from a
spectator's perspective.
Ruben’s Puppets will have elements of spectating, but
give the players the opportunity to intervene.

Ruben’s Puppets 7
Player vs. Game
In this player interaction pattern (see fig. 6), a single
player is going against the game system. There are no
other human players interacting with the game. The
player has to overcome the obstacles put in his/her way.
This structure can be seen in several game genres, for
this thesis I am drawing inspiration from open world
third-person action games.
Examples - Open world / Third-person action games
Just Cause 3
The richness of choice in combat, as well as the fantastic
traversal mechanics are something I strive for in Ruben’s
Puppets.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Game systems interact with each other, such as the weather
system and the fire system. Players can come up with
strategies to solve problems in creative ways.
Far Cry 4
The gameplay in this title is highly systemic - players can
observe relationships between systems to make plans and
feel like they outsmart the game.

Ruben’s Puppets 8
Player vs. Multilateral Competition
The intersection of Multilateral Competition and Player vs.
Game participant structures would result in a system where
the player is competing against a system of agents that are
competing against each other. For this thesis project I intend
to have the players interfere in a conflict between multiple
puppet factions and change the outcome.

Examples - “Action strategy” games
I am aware that there are some games that go in the direction of Player vs. Multilateral
Competition, albeit with different approaches.
Rise & Fall - Civilizations At War
This game mainly takes place from a top down perspective.
Players can take control of a hero and join the battlefield in
third-person view. Resources (wood, gold, glory) can be
spent on your units or your hero. The player fights against
several enemy factions.
Dynasty Warriors 8
In this game you fight hordes of enemies with a powerful
hero with special attacks. At the same time you can also
build up a settlement into a full fledged city by gathering
materials to build and upgrading facilities.

Ruben’s Puppets 9
Herzog Zwei
The player controls a particularly powerful mech while
simultaneously having to spend resources to train units and
give them orders.
Realm Of Rulers
You play in first-person view and collect basic resources
(stone, wood, barley) to create NPC characters that do tasks
for you. At the same time you can build a simple settlement.

Ruben’s Puppets 10
Systemic Richness
This term was introduced to me by Richard Lemarchand, who, in one of his lectures talked about
how games can become exponentially more interesting if they have enough moving parts and
interactivity space that players can explore in an unique way. A space where unexpected things
happen and where you feel like you are the only player that had the experience. The possibilities
need to have interesting differences and unique consequences.
Systemic games allow the players to come up with interesting plans and they lead to
surprising anecdotes.” [...] “We call this emergent gameplay. Things that weren’t
intentionally designed by game’s makers but solutions and situations that emerge thanks
to the meeting of multiple systems.” Mark Brown, Game Maker’s Toolkit

Emergence
In this project I strive towards players experiencing emergent moments that come from several
simple systems that interact with each other.

Conway’s Game Of Life
John Horton Conway created the “Game Of Life” in 1970.
It’s an example of an emergent system - a small set of
rules that resulted in complex behaviours and a wide array
of life forms.

Ruben’s Puppets 11
Emergence in Ruben’s Puppets
The initial goal for achieving emergence in Ruben’s Puppets was to create an Artificial
Intelligence that makes intricate, intelligent plans by looking at objects in its proximity.
As an example - If a player decides to carry an axe close to a worker that is gathering branches,
the worker will pick up the axe and start chopping wood to help the player gather wood.
This could have gone farther - If the puppet king’s goal is to win the game, he will go through all
available actions to find the most efficient way of winning the game. This could mean defeating
the enemy king - by sending soldiers - by building soldiers - by gathering resources.
This system was ultimately replaced by a simpler, more maintainable State Machine based AI
system because of performance issues and in order to keep the scale of the project manageable.

Persistence in Ruben’s Puppets
The characters in the world of Rubens Puppets leave traces
behind; foot tracks that don’t disappear, arrows that remain
stuck and more. These artifacts won’t be placed by the
designers but by the actual artificial intelligence in the world.
Players will ideally start to interpret these traces and try to
understand what has caused them.

Ruben’s Puppets 12
Interactive / Dynamic Cutscenes
In one of the early versions of the game, the first thing that
players saw was a cutscene that was supposed to give
exposition and explain the backstory of the project
efficiently.
In playtests we discovered that testers were disappointed
by this forced passiveness and usually skipped the
sequence. We decided to instead go for an interactive level,
where exposition is mainly given through environmental
storytelling and small puzzles.
We came to the conclusion that not all narrative can be told through the environment. We would
have to add a character that talks to the player to provide some backstory and explain the quest
the players have to solve. In order to make this as enjoyable as possible, we decided to give the
most important “core narrative” first, followed by an offer to accept the quest. If players took
additional time exploring the room, the character would simply continue giving more narrative,
depending on the time spent by the users.

Ruben’s Puppets 13
Experience Goals
The experience goals of this thesis are the intended feelings and experiences the players will
have while interacting with the game.
Discovery
The players discover and react to the emergent behaviors of the Artificial Intelligence,
affordances of the physics systems and a variety of interactable items.
They are the agents that can test the rules of the system and see how far they can go.
They can discover new locations and reveal secrets. They can reveal mechanisms that influence
the world.
Power
Players will feel like they have an influence on the current conflict. They will feel powerful in
regards to their combat skills and agility. They can outsmart the factions with their knowledge of
the world.

Ruben’s Puppets 14
Backstory & World
We, the player come across Ruben’s puppet store when
scavenging for coal. It’s abandoned and we start exploring
the inside.

We come across a talking puppet by the name of Garth, who
explains that Ruben has created a miniature world and was
imprisoned by the tin puppet king.

We transfer ourselves into a puppet avatar that we craft and
enter the world in hopes of rescuing Ruben and claiming the
reward.

We talk to the wooden queen, Freya, who used to be one of
Ruben’s apprentices. She tells us that Ruben is being
imprisoned in Tin City by Ulrik, also a former apprentice.

We help the wooden queen to push back the tin puppets and
eventually reach Tin City, in order to rescue Ruben.

Ruben’s Puppets 15
Gameplay Loops
The game will roughly consist of two stages - the early game will allow the player to explore,
gather resources and enjoy a peaceful world, and the end game, which will start as soon as the
hostile puppet faction decides to launch an attack. During the end game, the gameplay will shift
towards a combat focused experience.
The following images (fig. 24, fig. 25, fig. 26) illustrate the structure of the gameplay in Ruben’s
Puppets.

Ruben’s Puppets 16
Documentation
Prototyping Procedures
The pre-production phase of this project involved a structured
prototyping process that I learned in Richard Lemarchand’s Interactive
Design & Production I class. The goal of this structure is to keep the
prototyping process quick, state a hypothesis and come to a constructive
answer. Additionally, having finished one prototype would typically
spark ideas for the next prototype.
The structure of such a prototype document would be as follows:
Question of the prototype
1-3 questions this prototype focuses on.
Hypothesis
What do you think will happen? What is the expected behaviour?
Results
What actually happened?
New Ideas to try out
What ideas were generated from this prototype? What things can be done better ?
Example
Question of the prototype
How do the controls feel? Is rotating while pressing right mouse intuitive ? How does left
clicking on a resource feel?
Does the hunger bar make the prototype more interesting/give you an initial purpose?

Ruben’s Puppets 17
Hypothesis
The controls should feel better than using the keyboard keys to rotate. Allowing strafing is
important for platforming control.
The resource hovering/picking up should be intuitive.

Results
Controls
The controls feel pretty good, rotating with the right mouse click seems responsive and relatively
intuitive. I wonder how it would work on a controller? Probably tricky to select items.
The strafing feels good. I also think that using cars with these controls should be excellent.
Resource hovering/picking up
Having collectables that don’t require picking up (in this case the coins) is a good addition. They
could be experience points or health upgrades.
Picking up/placing resources is OK, nothing special yet. Maybe it becomes more interesting
when there are more different types of resources.
Hunger/Lifepoints
Having a hunger stat is more of a nuisance than it helps with gameplay. Maybe that’s because
it’s simply declining too fast. A thing that was cool about the bars was the fact that the life stat
recharged when consuming food.
I think that if this were a, say, stamina bar it would be nicer.
The life points should be hearts instead of a bar, that would make it better.
New ideas to try out

Ruben’s Puppets 18
In general it would be interesting to try out having to actually collect x amount of resources for
somebody to receive a coin in return.
Try out placing resources in boxes or trains, with different types of resources. Make sure that the
placement of the resources feels intuitive and is aided by the system (auto correct to place
correctly in box.) Try having a magnet.

Ruben’s Puppets 19
Prototype History
This project has been prototyped since 2014. Though there have been several pivots along the
way, the core idea of a third-person action game that involves physical resource collection has
remained.
2014
In this version of the game, you took the role of a gingerbread
cookie, exploring the world to gather more and more valuable
resources and transporting them with vehicles.

2015
I started developing a narrative around the character and
discovered my interest in puppets and topics of sentience.

Early 2017
Over the course of several smaller prototypes, I made design
decisions about the goal of the game and a simple core loop.

Late 2017
By the end of 2017, my team and I had constructed a backstory
and overarching narrative goal, that wraps the gameplay in
context and provides a playful setting.

Ruben’s Puppets 20
RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation)
Selina Liu and I conducted a RITE session for Ruben’s
Puppets with a total of 8 playtesters over the course of
two weeks in March of 2018. Guided by professor
Dennis Wixon, we would categorize bugs, design
issues and player feedback and make changes in a
rapid manner, so that the next playtesters would not
encounter these issues again.
We recorded the sessions with two cameras and a feed from the game screen, which allowed us
to draw conclusions about player behaviour and game interaction, as well as emotional response
to the game.
Additionally, we recorded heatmap data, which kept
track of position, jumps, arrow attacks, player deaths
and more. This data provided us with visual clues on
where we could improve the level design, make them
more interesting and worth the players’ while.

Ruben’s Puppets 21
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis advisors; Richard Lemarchand, Karen
Mcmullan and Carl Schnurr for guiding me through the intimidating task of ideating and
realizing this thesis project. Along the way, I learned several important lessons about game
design, planning a project and overall professionalization.

In addition, I wanted to thank the members of my team. It was inspiring working with such great
talent. Ryan Andersen (Music), Caleb Bladh (Motion Capture), Mariana Cacique (Character
Art), Karter Duff (Narrative), and Selina Liu (RITE testing).

I also wanted to thank the Interactive Media & Games division at the University Of Southern
California for their feedback and support - Sean Bouchard, Martzi Campos, Tracy Fullerton,
Todd Furmanski, Timothy Lee, Laird Malamed, Lucas Peterson, Jane Pinckard, Archie Prakash,
Sam Roberts, Jesse Vigil, Jeff Watson.

Thanks to everyone in my cohort for playtesting and providing your valuable opinions on this
project - Atley Loughridge, Allison Comrie, Stephanie Henderson, Dave Yan, Tonia Beglari,
Brian Handy, Gabriela Gomes, Jiadi Atwood Deng, John Billingsley, Jung-Ho Sohn, Kathryn
Pustolski, Xian Lu, Xiaoliang Shen,Yiwen Dai.

Thanks to my mother, father and sister for supporting me and my passion!

Ruben’s Puppets 22
Bibliography

“A discussion of game and life”. Stanford University, 2015. Web. 16 March 2018.

“Ask a game dev - progression or skill tree systems”. Ask A Game Dev, 2014. Web. 16 March
2018.

“Dynasty Warriors”. Wikipedia, 2018. Web. 16 March 2018.

Fullerton, Tracy with Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman. Game design workshop : A
Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games: CRC Press, Jan 2004. Print.

Galuzin, Alex. Preproduction Blueprint: How to Plan Game Environments and Level Designs
Edition: 2 : CreateSpace, 2017. Print.

Rogers, Scott. Level Up! : The guide to great video game design. : Wiley, 2010. Print.

“Rise & Fall: Civilizations At War - Review”. Gamespot, 2006. Web. 16 March 2018.

“The Rise of the Systemic Game”. Mark Brown, 2018. Youtube/Web. 16 March 2018.

“What works and why emergence”. RockPaperShotgun, 2018. Web. 16 March 2018.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Ruben’s Puppets is a video game that combines Multilateral Competition and Player vs. Game participant structures. The user plays in a third-person perspective and interacts with real-time strategy systems, run by artificial intelligence agents who are competing against each other. The story involves a world crafted by a puppet maker and two young apprentices that get so immersed in their puppet avatars that they don’t want to leave. Ruben, the puppet maker tries to return them to the real world but gets imprisoned by one of them.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Luif, Georg (author)

Core Title Ruben's puppets

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/05/2018

Defense Date 05/11/2018

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

Tag game design,Georg Luif,Goldrushers,Interactive Media,OAI-PMH Harvest,Puppets,real-time strategy,Rubén,Rubens puppets,strategy game,third-person,video game

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lemarchand, Richard (committee chair), Mcmullan, Karen (committee member), Schnurr, Carl (committee member), Watson, Jeff (committee member)

Creator Email georggroeg@hotmail.com,luif@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-490229

Unique identifier UC11267252

Identifier etd-LuifGeorg-6144.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-490229 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LuifGeorg-6144.pdf

Dmrecord 490229

Document Type Thesis

Rights Luif, Georg

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