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The Death Mask: a study in interactive mystery
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The Death Mask: a study in interactive mystery
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Content
The Death Mask
A study of interactive mystery
By
Mariana Mota Cacique
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN INTERACTIVE MEDIA AND GAME DESIGN
May 2020
Copyright 2020 Mariana Mota Cacique
i
Table of Contents
List Of Tables ii
List Of Images ii
Abstract iii
Introduction 1
Goals 1
Previous art 2
Ace Attorney 2
Her Story 3
Sherlock: Crimes and Punishments 3
Narrative Design 3
Timeline 4
Turns and structure 5
Clues and Dialogues 7
Endings 7
Characters 8
Masks 11
Integrating Inky and Unity3D 12
UI 13
Choice wheel 13
UI passes 14
UI art 15
Playtesting 16
Playtesting narrative 16
Playtesting results 17
Conclusions 18
Works Cited 20
ii
List Of Tables
■ Table 1. Suspects
■ Table 2. Inkle and Fungus Comparison
■ Table 3. Players’ accusations
List Of Images
■ Figure 1. Narrative turns
■ Figure 3. Princess and Maid Concept Art
■ Figure 3. Princess and Maid Concept Art
■ Figure 4. Queen Concept Art
■ Figure 5. Owen Concept Art
■ Figure 6. Character wearing the Noble Mask
■ Figure 7. First UI pass: includes timer for the options
■ Figure 10. Other UI passes
■ Figure 10. Other UI passes
■ Figure 10. Other UI passes
iii
Abstract
The Death Mask is a mobile mystery game where the player collect information
by changing their identity in a masquerade. Sometimes an arrogant noble,
sometimes a sneaky servant, the player will untangle a mystery of political intrigue
and murder.
By acquiring different masks, the characters will respond differently to the
player, and the information they get will change. This is an study in unreliable
narrators and how player’s perceptions mutate depending on the path they chose.
1
Introduction
In The Death Mask, the player is the Captain of the Guard tasked by Queen
Aveline to retrieve an important artifact that was stolen before the Masquerade
began. However, as the night falls, things take a turn for the worse and they must find
out what really is happening.
By acquiring different masks, the characters will respond differently to you, and
the information you get will change. This is a study in unreliable narrators, how player’s
perceptions mutate depending on the path they chose, and mystery troupes.
Goals
I have been a fan of mystery for a long time. Most of my life, to be honest. I guess
not everyone has a murder mystery phase in middle school?
For me, mystery has always been interactive. When reading or watching a
mystery, we are always trying to figure it out before the detective, always making
guesses and theories. It’s a race between you and the story: the truth will be revealed
eventually, but the satisfaction of having been correct is great.
Therefore the main goal of this project is to explore the feelings and states
invoked by a mystery: tension, surprise, discovery, deduction, and others.
One of the main experience goals is to feel smart: that’s what attracts people to
mysteries. By having to constantly figure out how others will respond to you, we
provide various moments that highlight that. And by allowing failure to be an option,
victory means much more to the players.
2
On the design side, my goals were to develop a mobile game - due to the
platform's accessibility - that used a simple core loop to drive the experience. Focusing
on a simple core loop would help making the game a cohesive experience, easier to
guide players through and to produce.
Previous art
I’m obviously not the only person to notice that mysteries are inherently
interactive, if the number of mystery games is anything to go by. A lot of the
mechanics used for these games are puzzle or gathering-based.
Ace Attorney
Who would believe a game about being a lawyer would be cool? This is one of
my favorite game series - I love the investigations and the overall absurdity of it all. It’s
not every day that you get to interrogate a bird.
On the mechanics, Ace Attorney is a game about finding the right object and
presenting it at the right time. It does make the player feel smart when they get it
right, but it also leads to a lot of “getting stuck” situations, when the player can’t
progress until they find all the clues, or present the right one.
We took inspiration from this game for our final scene, when the player has to
present information to back their accusation, but we decided to let players miss clues
and possibly get a “bad ending”. One of the reasons was to avoid the “getting stuck”
situation.
3
Her Story
Her story has a very different format for a Mystery. As a database narrative, the
control of which information the player gets it’s very loose, but well designed. The
‘ending’, although untraditional, is very satisfying.
Sherlock: Crimes and Punishments
In Crimes and Punishments, the player embodies famous fictional detective
Sherlock Holmes and has to solve several cases. In this game, the most interesting
feature is the mind map where the player can connect information to arrive at
conclusions. They may also arrive at wrong conclusions and get a bad ending.
Narrative Design
A common experience in mystery games is when the player gets stuck until
they figure out exactly the piece of evidence to present or find a specific object in the
scene. Those moments are usually one of the most frustrating parts of the experience,
the one that makes you go look for a walkthrough. But they have a reason to be: make
sure the player has all the puzzle pieces to move the story forward. In games that
require dozens of hours, missing something in the beginning that affects the rest of
your game would be worse.
With TDM, I wanted to try something a little different. Break the power fantasy
a little: let the player be a bad detective. Let them fail to get clues and move the story
along anyway. The night is going to end even if you are a terrible detective, something
is going to happen.
4
Sherlock: Crimes and Punishments does that to a certain extension. It allows
the player to make certain wrong links between clues and accuse an innocent person.
But it also lets the player know and fix it right away
Granted, the scope of the project helped this decision: the whole game is
playable in 20 minutes, which makes replaying it more doable, and less frustrating, if
you fail.
Timeline
It was important from the beginning to know what actually happened in the
narrative, as well as the actual order of the incidents. This way, we could keep track of
who knew what and when, when writing the characters. Below we have the timeline
of events.
5
Turns and structure
The game is composed of 5 parts: an Intro, 3 turns, and a Conclusion. These
‘turns’ are not visible to the player - there is no counter or visual indication of them.
In the Intro the player is introduced to the situation before the ball starts and
their first task is given: find the thief. They also receive their first mask, the Guard.
6
After the Intro, the ball starts and it consists of 3 turns. At each turn the player
can talk to 3 people who are at the ballroom. At the end of the first turn, they receive
the Servant Mask, and at the end of the second turn, the Noble Mask.
Between the turns there are also connecting scenes that are the same for all
players, for example, finding the body at the library.
After the 3rd turn, in the Conclusion, the player must accuse one of three
characters in the middle of the ballroom. That scene draws from Agatha Christie's
tradition of having the detective solve the mystery by gathering all the parts involved.
Figure 1. Narrative turns
An interesting method we used to enhance the feelings of fear and tension on
the “Finding the Body” scene was to use the same backgrounds as the Intro, but now
at night. That was in order to create the feeling that something has changed in this
once “bright” world.
7
Clues and Dialogues
There are 23 clues in the game. Those clues are pieces of information the player
gets from talking to the characters.
When designing the choices the player could take to get clues, we decided to
reward them for ‘acting like their mask’. That is, assessing what would be expected of
each role, and following it, as a manner of “narrative stealth”.
Endings
In a linear non-interactive mystery, be it a book or a movie, the audience knows
the correct answer will be given to them as long as they keep reading/watching.
Poirot will figure it out, gather all suspects in a single room and give everyone the
truth. Wherever that feels satisfying depends on a number of factors: did the audience
have the same information as the detective? Does it explain the loose threats? Among
other questions.
However, when it comes to interactive media, often the audience is placed in
the role of the detective. It makes sense: they get to solve the narrative puzzle, be the
hero and save the day. But it’s rare that the narrative lets the player fail - an exception
being Crimes and Punishments.
In The Death Mask, we decided to have 4 possible endings: 2 for when the
player accused the wrong person, one for accusing the right person and passing the
clue checks, and one for falling the clue checks. That leaves us with 3 “bad endings”
and one “good ending”.
8
Characters
It’s not uncommon for a mystery novel or game to have a large number of
characters. It keeps things complex and the audience has enough options to always
be second-guessing themselves.
The relationship between characters and audience in a mystery is complicated.
According to Malmgren, in a mystery “the reader’s interest in characters - victim,
criminal, suspects - is downplayed; the narrative holds these characters at arm’s
length”(121). Still, we tried to make the characters interesting and engaging in their
own way.
For a matter of scope, we could only have a few characters - art and writing are
time consuming. So we planned for 3 suspects that the player could accuse. One of
them is the actual culprit, one is a likely red herring, and the other is an unlikely
suspect.
Suspect Princess Bella Lord Gideon Queen Aveline
Apparent motive Cheating fiancé Wants to marry the
Princess
Want to avoid the
Princess’ current
engagement
Likelihood Unlikely Likely Actual culprit
Table 1. Suspects
For each character, we defined their overall personality, their main relationships
with the other characters, their motivations and reactions to each mask.
When designing the characters’ art style, we decided to make them slightly
non-human: their eyes and skin colors add to the mysterious and fantastical
atmosphere without being an obvious fantasy race. In the media, masquerades are
9
often liminal spaces - a night of transition, where things will change. Think of the “As
the World falls down” scene in the Labyrinth.
Figure 3. Princess and Maid Concept Art
10
Figure 4. Queen Concept Art
Figure 5. Owen Concept Art
11
We also made sure their palettes, silhouettes and overall look was quite
different from one another. It was also important that their expressions would be
visible, even with their masks on.
For the production of their final sprites, we divided the work in the following
manner: the concept artist would make the basic sketches and I would paint over
them. That was meant to divide the work, while also maintaining a consistent look
between the characters.
Masks
The masks you gain during the game represent three different roles in society:
Nobles, Guards, and Servant. That is the case because those roles are well established
in the popular mindset and we could draw from the player’s preconceptions about
how each mask should act.
When the concept was in its early stages, there was an idea of making the
masks specific to certain characters - that is, if you were wearing a mask from a
specific character, people would think you were them. However, that would require
us to spend more time introducing to the player all the relationships between the
characters before they could make informed decisions. So we decided to go with the
social roles.
When designing the masks, we went back and forth about which references to
use. In the end we decided to losely base them on the Commedia dell’arte. Loosely
because we still wanted the creative freedom to make them our own. The Servant
12
Mask was based on The Colombina, the Noble on The Pantalone, and the Guard on
The Captain.
Figure 6. Character wearing the Noble Mask
Integrating Inky and Unity3D
When deciding how to control the game’s narrative, the main plugin options
were Fungus and Inkle. Both are free narrative tools for Unity, which have their own
strengths.
Fungus has a robust visual system that already includes several features
common in visual novels. However the code base is hard to modify and allows too little
flexibility when doing things outside of its escope.
Inkle is a simpler plugin, easier to modify and procesally lighter, but lacking a
lot of features and no visual story editor.
Fungus Inkle
Performance Heavy, longer loading
times.
Faster.
13
Features More out of the box
features (e.g. sound,
sprites, etc)
Have to use tags and
variables to code most
features.
Adaptability Hard to modify basic
interface and controls.
Easier to create things
that don’t follow the
standard visual novel
interface
Editor Visual Editing (Good for
checking story flow)
Script Writing (Good for
writing integration)
Table 2. Inkle and Fungus Comparison
We choose Inkle, mainly because:
1. This is a mobile game and it needed a lighter APK.
2. We could use its tag system to implement the features needed for the game.
3. It was easier to adapt to the UI/control system we wanted.
Inkle’s tag system functions in the following way: at each passage, we can have
any number of tags needed, and access them through a list in Unity when that
passage happens. That allows us to call any command we want through them. For
example, play audio oneshots, change background, change character sprite, call
notifications, etc.
UI
Choice wheel
On UI Design, we innovated in how options are selected. Different from usual
visual novels, we don't use buttons for the option selection. Instead, we have a choice
wheel that doesn’t show the player their options until they hover over them. By doing
so, we allow the interface to stay clean unless the player is actually considering a
14
choice, as well as having the players discover and consider each option individually,
instead of having them all listed explicitly.
UI passes
We went through a few versions of the UI. At first we tried to use a timer on the
options. The player had to hold the selector over the options for a certain time before
they were selected. The point was to try to get people to read each option, but it
proved annoying to players, and interrupted the flow of the game.
Figure 7. First UI pass: includes timer for the options
2 2
2
1
3
15
At the end, we removed the timer and made the selection happen when the
player released the selector over an option. This proved to be more natural to players,
as they could ready at their own speed and got used to the choice wheel more quickly.
Figure 10. Other UI passes
UI art
For the UI art, we wanted the main elements and colors to change depending
on what mask you are wearing. For that, we decided to theme the UI as flowers, as
they fit the theme of decorations in a ball and have their own meanings that we could
use to relate to the masks themselves.
16
The UI colors change depending on the player’s current mask, to reflect how
“they see the world differently” depending on who they are. It also helps the player
keep track of which mask they are wearing, as there are several signs of it.
Playtesting
Playtesting narrative
Testing narrative is usually difficult because, more so than mechanics and
levels, scenes are highly contextual: that is, their interpretation depends on what
comes before and after. That makes it hard to simply give playtesters a scene from the
middle of the game and draw useful conclusions: they don’t know the characters or
the situation yet.
On TDM, the levels are scenes, the puzzle and gameplay are in the narrative. So
testing it early and often was imperative.
Our approach was to first have an inkle prototype - inkle is a text based
interactive tool similar to twine. We chose inkle due to its integration with Unity3D
that facilitated future workflow.
In this first prototype, we wrote a short paragraph for each scene, that would
give the player the main information we planned to show at that point, and
established the basic structure of the narrative. We playtested it at the beginning of
September and the objective was to learn if players understood the story, the
mechanic, and could remember the characters.
In this prototype, their only choice was which mask to wear for each
conversation, as they didn’t have dialogue choices.
17
For the following playstesting, we tested the actual writing in stages - both to
gather player’s impressions at different points of the narrative and to accommodate
our production schedule.
The first stage included the first turn of the game and then players had to
answer who they thought had stolen the sword and why. The second stage tested the
game until they player found the body, and then we asked the players who they
thought had committed the murder and why. The last stage encompassed the whole
game until the accusation scene. By always asking players what their own solution is,
“this requires that they read the story carefully enough to identify major and minor
"clues" which will contribute to their solution” (Beehler 2).
Playtesting results
On the last playtesting stage, we were mainly interested in whatever players
could solve the mystery. We tested the game with 10 players, until they could accuse
someone. We kept track of who they accused and the clues they had.
Right(1)/
Wrong(0)
Player 1 1
Player 2 1
Player 3 0
Player 4 0
Player 5 1
Player 6 0
Player 7 1
18
Player 8 1
Player 9 0
Player 10 1
Table 3. Players’ accusations
The players had a success rate of 60%, what we considered good, as it was more
than if they were picking at random (33%), but not so high that the mystery is
considered trivial.
Conclusions
During this year, there were several lessons learned. A lot of them involved
mysteries, narrative and team management. Here are the main takeaways.
Our team consisted of, besides myself, one engineer, one character artist, one
remote background artist, one writer, one producer, and one composer. I had weekly
individual meetings with most of the team, when I would get their derivables and
assign new tasks.
Assigning concrete tasks with clear weekly deadlines was one of the things
that helped the team stay on track. Managing even a small team can get chaotic if
people don’t know what is expected of them.
One thing I wish to have done differently when it came to the team, was to have
more team meetings. We had them semi-regularly, but a higher frequency might
have helped build camaraderie. However it was hard to find time on everyone’s
schedules.
19
About designing mysteries, there were a lot of iterations and listening to the
players. That’s because we can’t really predict how people will interpret the text and
we wanted to know what conclusions people drew with the information we gave
them.
The game will be shown at the USC Games Expo 2020 and hopefully it will be
published on the Google Play Store. I hope whoever plays it has a good time playing
detective - I know I had a good time working on it!
20
Works Cited
Beehler, Sharon A. “Close vs. Closed Reading: Interpreting the Clues.” The English
Journal, vol. 77, no. 6, 1988, p. 39., doi:10.2307/818612.
Malmgren, Carl Darryl. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction.
Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001.
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
The Death Mask is a mobile mystery game where the player collect information by changing their identity in a masquerade. Sometimes an arrogant noble, sometimes a sneaky servant, the player will untangle a mystery of political intrigue and murder. ❧ By acquiring different masks, the characters will respond differently to the player, and the information they get will change. This is an study in unreliable narrators and how player’s perceptions mutate depending on the path they chose.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Mota Cacique, Mariana
(author)
Core Title
The Death Mask: a study in interactive mystery
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Degree Program
Interactive Media
Publication Date
04/25/2020
Defense Date
04/15/2020
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
game development,Interactive Media,mobile game,murder mystery,OAI-PMH Harvest
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Wixon, Dennis (
committee chair
), Fullerton, Tracy (
committee member
), Lemarchand, Richard (
committee member
)
Creator Email
cacique@usc.edu,mariana.cacique@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-288544
Unique identifier
UC11663606
Identifier
etd-MotaCaciqu-8340.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-288544 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-MotaCaciqu-8340.pdf
Dmrecord
288544
Document Type
Thesis
Rights
Mota Cacique, Mariana
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
Tags
game development
mobile game
murder mystery