A second summer

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Content

A Second Summer

Alexander Mathew

Thesis Postmortem
prepared for the Degree of
Master of Fine Arts: Interactive Media and Games

University of Southern California
August 2015


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Table of Contents

Table of Contents 2
Introduction 3
Background 3
Radiator 12: Handle With Care 4
Games 5
Summer 5
Voyager 5
Gallery 5
Sendai 6
Fireflies 6
What went wrong 7
Misprioritization of elements 7
Not carefully picking team members then overcorrecting 8
Soft endings 8
What went right 10
Working in sprints and greyboxing 10
Play spaces 10
Finding art/ Technical art 11
Unity 5 11
What I Learned 11
Players recognize the goal 12
Players understand the pieces 12
AHA Moment 12
Conclusion/ Next Steps 12
Data Box 13
Bibliography 13


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Introduction

A Second Summer is a suite of games aimed at exploring intersections between and the
overlay of video game narrative and puzzle design. The games are small vignettes that each
stem from a different experimentation within the space, with the exception of the first, referred to
as Summer , which stands as a failed attempt to do it all. Following a brief description of each of
the games, and the space I aimed to explore, this paper will detail what went wrong and what
worked with the projects.
Yet, as thesis projects are highly personal projects, and the thesis journey being as
much about personal development as it is about game development, this post mortem will also
detail my failures and growth as an artist over the course of the year.
Finally, the paper will attempt to collect what I have learned about the overlap of games
and puzzle design as well as briefly detail my plans for future steps and explorations.

Background

Puzzles have been a strong staple in video games since near the beginning. Born out of
riddles and brain teasers, puzzles were folded into games as a way to offer mental challenge on
top of the mechanics of the game. Actionpuzzle hybrids and puzzle platformers, games that
asked players to solve a series of puzzles to further progression in the game, quickly started to
pick up popularity. Games like Lemmings and Myst, moved puzzle games into the mainstream.
Yet, rarely do games use these puzzles for anything past giving the player a slight
mental challenge. The famous series, The Legend of Zelda , is known for its mix of action and
puzzles interspersed throughout its dungeons. Though the puzzles can range from the simple,
block these seeds in the correct order, to the wildly complex, control the draining system of a
water filled temple to maneuver under water, the puzzles never seem to make sense in the
world, nor do they mean anything to the player character, Link.
While I love games like those of The Legend of Zelda , I would sometimes ask myself,
why are these things here? What purpose does this drawbridge have? Why would anyone build
a place like this? The puzzles don’t make sense as believable objects in the world’s fiction.
Similarly, these puzzles only exist to add some padding between the action elements of
the game. This felt like a waste of storytelling opportunity. Could the decision made through
solving a puzzle reflect onto the character?
I wanted to explore this space. Through my initial prior art review, very few games
actually attempted anything like this. While a few games went through lengths to make sense of
the puzzles in world, and other games tried to convey a story through the puzzles in a highly
abstracted space, only one game I found effectively did both.

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Radiator 1-2: Handle With Care

Radiator 12: Handle With Care is the second of a series of mods by Robert Yang in the
Source Engine using Half Life 2: Episode 2’s assets. Yang describes the games in the Radiator
series as shortform, experimental first person games. The game was released through mod
sites and Yang’s personal site in 2009.
Handle with Care is a short game set within the “memory repression center” of the brain.
Through a set of monitors, the player can see a marriage counseling meeting that they are
“taking part of”. After entering the memory repression center, the player is given a box,
containing a memory, to be filed away on the large surrounding shelves. Labels describing the
repressed memory, such as “Mom Naked” sit in front of some of the previously repressed
memories.
The player is tasked with filing away these memories into a given location. This is simple
at first, placing the box at a chest level location, but the challenge begins to grow as the filing
location of the boxes becomes more difficult. Players eventually need to start climbing up onto
and through the shelves themselves, moving other memories, to get to all of the locations. If any
of the memories is ever broken open, either by falling to the ground or the player purposefully
breaking the box open, the player is briefly taken into the memory. Here, the player can briefly
explore, trying to understand the memory. For example, the player finds themselves in an empty
apartment, with beer bottles everywhere, or walking on an abstracted lake, with items floating in
the water.
Filing a box away effectively works has the character bottle up more, while breaking
open a memories makes the character share. The marriage counsellor and the husband
respond to both and the “solution” of the puzzle decides the fate of the marriage.
Handle With Care is the first game I found that does what I was looking for. The game
gives the player a puzzle to solve, and by solving the puzzle, the player informs the character.
The main action of the game, filing boxes away, builds off of the concept of storing memories
away, hiding them within your mind. The puzzle growing more difficult gives a strong feeling of
the character digging deeper into their mind to bury something away. More memories, and more
volatile memories, fill up the space and need to be filed high up on the shelves.
I reached out to Robert Yang to see if he had found any other examples of such puzzle
design that he was aware of. He was very quick to proclaim that he did not know any and
encouraged me to explore. Thus, I started building.

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Games

A quick description of the games that I worked on during the thesis journey.

Summer

Summer is the development name for the first, very large project that I worked on in the
thesis journey. In Summer you play as a woman who is called out as a specialist to deal with
magical outbursts in her world. Magic exists less as a spells and incantations and more a
natural force that holds a coveted power that few understand.
The game begins with the player character, Sen, being called back to her hometown. A
wellspring of magic has burst and, being the specialist most familiar with the area, she is called
back to deal with it.
Upon returning, Sen finds that the magic seems to have burst from under her house,
threatening to tear the building down with her son inside. The player must find a way inside and
familiarize herself with the toolset that allows her to contain and deal with the magic.
Continuing through the house, the player starts to realize that the magic that they once
thought threatened the boy, stems from the boy himself. The player is presented with a series of
puzzles that work to describe the boy and his mental state. The way the player solves the
puzzle informs the way the mother will respond to her son.

Voyager

Voyager is a project about discovering the Voyager satellite. More specifically, it is about
scrubbing through the golden disc of the Voyager to hear the sounds of the earth and the
hidden messages underneath. The player explores a small field, in first person, to find the
wreckage of the downed satellite. Walking up to the satellite bring the disc into focus and the
player can begin to spin different rotating playheads to explore different sections of the audio
stored on the golden disc.

Gallery

Gallery is a game about perspective. The player explores an infinite museum/ gallery
space in which the walls, bearing paintings, stretch up infinitely upward. Each of the framed
paintings on the walls represent a memory of the player character. Upon exploring the space
more, the player will come across four large paintings that feel more like windows than
paintings, allowing the player to see in and around at different angles.
The player can enter these four paintings, stepping over the boundary like a framed
portal. They enter each painting to be brought to a specific memory, a moment that is important
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to the character. Being able to explore the memory from a removed view allows the player
character to gain new perspective on the scenario.
After exploring each of the four portraits, and discovering a hidden secret in each, the
player is able to enter a final large painting that hangs in the center of the museum.

Sendai

Sendai is a game that was designed on the anniversary of the March 11th Tohoku
Earthquake. The game follows an exploration into how layering a narrative onto a puzzle
changes the puzzle itself.
The base puzzle of Sendai, mechanically, is a standard tetrimino based tangram puzzle
mixed with an inventory system. The player is given a set of different blocks tetris shaped blocks
that fit into a larger rectangle through a series of clever rotations and rearranging.
Narratively, the game puts the player in the shoes of a character whose home has
recently been pulled into the water. The waves have receded for a time, allowing the player to
gather and sift through some of the pieces that were left behind. Though, as the water starts to
climb again, it is up to them to decide what to keep.

Fireflies

Fireflies is a game about creating the solution to a puzzle that is emotionally resonant
with the player character. The player plays as a small boy exploring a large, forested landscape.
The player comes across what looks to be a door embedded into a cliff face. A single firefly
floats past and the door seems to glow.
The player can follow the firefly through the forest to a field of fireflies near the hulking
remains of a forgotten robot. The player can explore the robot and the surrounding area to find a
unbroken glass orb. This orb can be used to collect the fireflies, building a lantern which could
be used to completely illuminate, and open, the cliffside doorway.


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What went wrong

Breaking Gamastura postmortem tradition slightly, I am going to talk about what went
wrong first. Chronologically, I ran into a lot of problems through my design and development
before I was able shift and start making stronger strides.

Misprioritization of elements

As I stated earlier, I started with Summer as the only project in A Second Summer. This
was a large project set to tackle all of the questions I had about narrative and puzzle design,
allow me to practice some puzzle design, as well a design a zeldastyle third person adventure
game with an original story. Of course, written down like this now, it seems like a misscoped
huge project but it covered many of the things I wanted to practice and learn over the course of
the thesis year. 3rd person camera programming, modelling and rigging, and puzzle design
were big things that I hoped to practice.
As I started the project, I was quickly able to start defining characters and a world. I
didn’t have an idea for the puzzles I planned to implement so I thought filling out the world and
its inhabitants a bit more would help me get there. I started working on the intro scene to the
game, building a train model and a system that let the player whiz by a series of landscapes in
an every emptying train.
When I would sit down to try to work on a puzzle the weight of the constraints were ever
present. What does this puzzle tell you about the son? What does solving the puzzle tell you
about the player character? How does solving the puzzle effect the relationship of the son and
the mother? How does the puzzle manifest in the world? How do the mechanics of the game fit
into the puzzle? How does the “AHA” moment communicate the narrative of the puzzle
nonverbally? This big list of questions stood in front of me like a wall at every question. Yet, I
was taught that a puzzle designer must consider everything at once while designing a puzzle
and refused to let go.
I continually convinced myself that the puzzles I was working on was on a slow burn.
Even though it wasn’t right just yet, if I kept on musing over it, I would be able to discover a way
to gracefully set the mechanics of a puzzle in accordance with the characters and the
environment.
Honestly, I just was not good enough at puzzle design to easily and elegantly solve all of
these questions at once. I had not had enough fundamental practice in puzzle design and thus I
was not truly seeing in the language of puzzles. I had to translate my standard game design
lens into two separate nonverbal storytelling and puzzle design lenses. Then I was trying to
fuse the image.
So, while I should have been prioritizing the hard stuff first, iterating and failing often, I
kept moving the things I didn’t understand around.
Once I broke from Summer to work on smaller projects, I was able to practice smaller
subsets of my questions as well as more fundamental puzzle design. I downloaded Valve’s
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Portal 2 puzzle designer and worked my hand at some rooms. Using an existing mechanic and
established larger world and narrative, I focused solely on the puzzle design. The practice
through Portal 2 ’s helped me build a stronger base and more confidence as I began working
through my other games.

Not carefully picking team members then overcorrecting

The first few weeks of development, I pitched the original game design of Summer to a
few sets of undergraduate students at USC. Many students were very excited about the game
and the space that I was proposing to explore. Being inspired by this excitement, I took on a few
members onto the team and started to give out tasks. The students accepted this assignments,
and the timeline we set to get them done by, and went off to work.
Deadlines came and went and I continually received only a shadow of the work I was
looking for. Proposals for fully designed environments came back as a set of lightly textured
planes and incorrectly imported assets. I found myself having to redo work over and over, giving
me more work than I would have had if I had just done it myself.
So, I decided to switch gears and just do everything myself. This was a massive over
correction for a game the scope of Summer but I was finally getting workable assets, so I didn’t
realize at first.
Deciding to work by myself had two major downsides; I now had to handle every aspect
of the game’s development by myself and I no longer had a group at the ready that I could
discuss design and production timelines with. Thus allowing me prioritize away from the difficult
problems, to rearrange deck chairs on the titanic, so to speak.
Eventually, once I started working on the smaller projects, I started to work again with a
composer and a designer/technical artist. Finding the right skilled and responsible teammates
brought me onto a quick track for development and design.

Soft endings

A few of the games currently end with a soft ending. By this, I mean an ending that does
not stop play, just a ending to new content. For example, the Voyager project has the players
creating an image of the big dipper on the voyager disc. After creating the constellation, the disc
starts to glow and the constellation highlights itself. Without another prompt, we hoped that
players would look up at the night sky and search for the big dipper. If a player were able to
successfully identify the correct constellation in the night sky, a single shooting star would race
across the sky in a magical moment.
This posed a quite a few problems and the whole thing only ever worked completely
correctly once. First, the players were not completely sure that they had to find the big dipper in
the sky. Even if they knew that the puzzle had been completed, the idea that they then had to
search for the constellation themselves did not dawn on a number of playtesters until quite a
while had passed.
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Finally, after deciding to look for the big dipper, and scanning the starridden sky for a
time, players would stumble upon the correct location, triggering the shooting star. This would
be exciting to players, some new information, and they would start to look for more. The only
problem is that this was the end of the content.
I wanted to leave the player space to play and explore the area even after completion of
the puzzle. Without a door to leave through, a new place to go to, players very often stayed in
the same place looking for something more to do.
It is important to show a clearly discernable change of state after the completion of the
puzzle and again after the “collection of the reward”.


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What went right

Working in sprints and greyboxing

Just before the USC Winter Show, I found myself struggling with the design of my
puzzles in Summer . Not only could I not create an elegant solution to the problems I was
running in to, I was quickly burning out and losing the desire to work on the project.
So, in an effort to get creative juices flowing, I took a short departure from Summer and
designed a small game about the Voyager satellite. Suddenly, I was excited to design again.
Cutting all of the baggage of the complex Summer narrative away, I gave myself the space to
think and experiment.
Following the minidefense, my second showing of Voyager, I was encouraged to fail faster and
to experiment more. This was something I kept running into a chokehold with in the case of
Summer . So, I put Summer aside for a while and started working in smaller two week sprints.
These small bursts of game design allowed me to explore questions more freely, without
the fear of trying to get everything right. It also was quite exciting working through new projects
with new scenarios.

Play spaces

A few of the games were about creating spaces of play through which the players would
discover and underlying system, which would in turn lead them to a puzzle. An example of this
is Voyager’s disc system. While starting to interface with Voyager’s disc interface, the player
explores the sounds that are embedded on the disc by spinning different playback heads. The
player gets to explore these sounds at different speeds, forwards and backwards. While
scrubbing through the sounds, the player will come across a few peculiar noises and one of the
seven playheads will start to glow. Here players will start to discover a goal where there was
none explicitly stated before. One a few more pieces are set into place, once a few more
playheads start to glow, players know that they are on the trail of something and can have an
“AHA” moment to their new found goal.
This emergence of a puzzle or solution to a puzzle through a playspace is effective when
there is strong metaphor in the mechanic. That is, when the action of the player character is
meaningful to the player character. Fireflies is about a boy exploring an increasingly magical
place. The feeling of running through a field of fireflies speaks to that magic in a natural way.
The way to solve the puzzle is to play it like the boy.


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Finding art/ Technical art

Being a very underdeveloped 3D artist, I found myself often scouring the internet for
models that could fit my needs. Amazingly, there is a substantial amount of very professional art
being offered for quite cheap or, many times, for free.
The key to finding good art online has been through persistence in searching and
creative search terms.
I would usually start with a cursory search on turbosquid.com and Yobi3D.com for any
free 3D models that fit what I was looking for. Though the truck from Voyager was actually a
purchase, I was more than happy to spend a small amount of money for such a high quality
model. Many of the models from Gallery are from a set of free assets released years ago by
artist David O’rielly. They just took a bit of cleanup in Maya and basic rerigging through Unity.
A very unexpected treasure trove of models and assets was through the Miku Miku
Dance fan community. MMD is a freeware animation program that lets the users create dance
routines for their vocaloids in a myriad of locations. Fantastically talented artists release their
royalty free work on deviantArt and subreddits. After a few quick conversions to Unity, I was
able to repurpose many of the background sets and assets.
I was also very fortunate to work with a designminded technical artist, Logan Ver Hoef,
for parts of all the games. Logan and I were able to leverage a lot of Unity’s shaders and lighting
systems to bring a unique and interesting look to all of the projects.

Unity 5

My last two projects, Sendai and Fireflies , were created in Unity 5. The diverse needs of
these two games, different cameras, character rigs, and lighting models, covered a wide enough
range to bring about a wealth of familiarity of the newest iteration of Unity’s system.
The switch from Unity 4 to 5, something I was slightly worried about, was absolutely
painless and was made far easier by the fact that my games stood as individual projects. I could
keep my earlier games in Unity 4 while using Unity 5 for the last two.

What I Learned

The fundamental goal of a puzzle from the view of the designer is to get the player to go
through a series of steps to understand the system, culminating in an “Aha!” moment and a
informed action to complete the puzzle.
Expanded, the basic template is broken up into steps:

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Players recognize the goal

Whether it is to escape a room, open a chest, or finish a line, It is first important for
players to understand what they are trying to do before they can begin to work toward it.
This can be accomplished by shifting player attention, directly or indirectly, to the key
feature that represents the goal in the puzzle. For the sake of an example, Link is shown the
opposite door closing with iron bars as he enters a trapped room. Here the player is taught “You
want to go through here but something is keeping you from doing so. Figure out what that is.”

Players understand the pieces

Next it is important to show players the pieces of the puzzle, the mechanics through
which they will be solving the puzzle. This could be a set of levers that need to be pulled or even
a group of enemies that need to be dealt with. So, continuing the example, Link sees a set of
switches that he can only hit with an arrow and each one lights up when hit. Similarly, a set of
orbs illuminate in phase as the switches are hit.

AHA Moment

This moment is the key to puzzle design. This is the point where the player, having
understood the pieces of the puzzle, has solved the riddle and knows what they have to do to
complete the puzzle. A puzzle can have a series of AHA moments, but a well designed puzzle
highlights the AHA moment, instead of letting the player stumble upon the answer.

Conclusion/ Next Steps

Would the thesis project have been better without the crash and burn of summer in the
first semester? Of course, the extra development time would have been helpful but I know that
recognizing misappropriations of prioritization was a skill that I did not have yet. The process,
the journey, is just as important as the destination. I learned about some of my predispositions
as an artist, and about being able to understand how to capture my passion, and how to ignite a
new spark.
Though many of the large ambitious goals of A Second Summer’s summer project fell
apart, the journey of the full set of projects has brought me to a place of excitement to continue.
I plan to continue exploring the ideas of this possibility space with my future work. I am
currently working on a new project that takes ideas from Fireflies , Gallery , and Sendai and
works to cohesively fit them into a single game. This time I will be working on the puzzles first.
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Data Box

Developer: Alexander Mathew

Platforms: PC

Team size: 3 at max

Team Members: Logan Ver Hoef, Jacob Pernell

Thesis Committee: Tracy Fullerton, Sean Bouchard, Jeremy Gibson

Development Tools: Unity 4, Unity 5, Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop, Audacity,
Wwise, SVN

Bibliography

Fullerton, Tracy, Christopher Swain, and Steven Hoffman. Game Design Workshop: A
Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games . Amsterdam: Elsevier Morgan
Kaufmann, 2008. Print.
Halflife 2 Episode . United States: Valve Corp., 2006. Computer software.
The ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection . Japan: Sony Computer Entertainment, 2005.
Computer software.
The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D . Kyoto, Japan: Nintendo Co. Ltd, 2011. Computer
software.
McCloud, Scott. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels .
New York: Harper, 2006. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: . New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Print.
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Swink, Steve. Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation . Amsterdam: Morgan
Kaufmann/Elsevier, 2009. Print.
Tekinbaş, Katie Salen., and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals .
Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003. Print.

Asset Metadata

Creator Mathew, Alexander (author)

Core Title A second summer

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 06/30/2015

Defense Date 06/26/2015

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

Tag Games,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-mortem,puzzle,Story telling

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Advisor Fullerton, Tracy (committee chair), Bouchard, Sean (committee member), Gibson, Jeremy (committee member)

Creator Email akmathew@usc.edu,thelastmaincharacter@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-582355

Unique identifier UC11300216

Identifier etd-MathewAlex-3519.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-582355 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MathewAlex-3519.pdf

Dmrecord 582355

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Mathew, Alexander

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

Abstract (if available)

Abstract A post-mortem for a suite of games exploring the intersection of puzzle design and narrative design.