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Bottles

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Bottles

by

Brooke Jaffe

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
INTERACTIVE MEDIA & GAMES DIVISION

May 2020

Copyright 2020 Brooke Jaffe

ii

Acknowledgements

There are so many people who helped me along the way throughout this project. I would
like to thank my thesis artistic committee for all of the help and support they have shown me
over the course of this long and often tumultuous process. Tracy Fullerton, my chair, for seeing
this through from start to finish and keeping me honest every step of the way. Maureen McHugh,
for every pep-talk and shared lunch that kept me going when things got tough. To Jesse Vigil, for
offering fantastic advice and concrete actions that never steered me wrong. I would also like to
thank Martzi Campos, Jane Pinckard, Carl Schnurr, Richard Lemarchand, and the rest of the
USC Games faculty who were instrumental voices I could always turn to when needed. Thank
you to Sam Rosenthal, my industry advisor, for his sage advice when I needed it most, and Chris
Bell, who helped me at the start and set the tone for what a helpful voice from the outside sounds
like. I would like to thank my USC Games MFA Cohort class of 2020 for their company, their
critique, and their camaraderie. And certainly not to be forgotten: I thank my family and friends,
who grounded me when everything else was overwhelming.
Finally, I would like to thank my Team. Jack Foster, Jess Bui, Sze Ka “Jessica” Tse, Mia
Glenn-Schuster, Jack Bailey, Andy An, Naixuan Zhao, Claire Hu, Blair Devereaux, Natasha
Mandvi, Alec Sievern, and Minxing Zhao. This game would (obviously) not have happened
without you, but beyond that I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to create
something with. In particular I want to thank my leads: Ryan Zubery, for his rock-steady
presence, inspiring dedication, astounding ingenuity, and fantastic sense of humor. Ferdi Yu, for
taking a chance on becoming a full-time producer and stepping up to the plate like a champ. Lee
Emig, my first team member and my right hand. I was the head of this project, but you were the
heart and soul.

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Bottles may have started as my idea, but it has become our game. And we have a lot to be
proud of. Thank you all so much for taking this journey with me.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. v
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
What is Bottles? ...................................................................................................................... 1
Ideation ........................................................................................................................................... 2
Origin of the Core Concept ......................................................................................................... 2
Early Drafts ................................................................................................................................. 4
The First Complete Prototype ..................................................................................................... 6
Original Experience Goals ...................................................................................................... 9
Pre-Production .............................................................................................................................. 10
Prior Art .................................................................................................................................... 10
The Production Process................................................................................................................. 12
What Story Are You Trying To Tell? ....................................................................................... 12
So Many Ideas, So Little Time ................................................................................................. 16
Why The Octopus? ................................................................................................................... 18
Experience Goals - Revised ...................................................................................................... 20
Developing Controls ................................................................................................................. 21
Reaching Alpha ......................................................................................................................... 22
The (Slightly Longer) Road to Beta .......................................................................................... 24
Reflecting on Challenges, Mistakes, Breakthroughs, and Victories ............................................. 25
Scope, Time, and Self-Comparison .......................................................................................... 25
Right Idea, Wrong Time ........................................................................................................... 26
Accepting Critique versus Maintaining a Vision ...................................................................... 27
Dealing With Unforeseen Circumstances ................................................................................. 30
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 31
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 32

v

List of Figures

Figure 1: An Illustration of the first Bottles Concept……………………………………………. 5

Figure 2: The first digital prototype of Bottles…………………………………………………....7

Figure 3: The first fully-functional prototype of Bottles………………………………………….8

Figure 4: An Illustration of The First Bottles Prototype Concept………………………………...9

Figure 5: Art from UsTwo Games’ Monument Valley…………………………………………..12

Figure 6: Early concept art of Adi……………………………………………………………….14

Figure 7: Adi Turnaround………………………………………………………………………..15

Figure 8: Concept art of the Bottle shop…………………………………………………………17

Figure 9: Early experimental prototypes…………………………………………………………18

Figure 10: Early experimental prototypes………………………………………………………..18

Figure 11: Octopus Concept sketches……………………………………………………………19

Figure 12: Concept Art Of the Shrine on the Cliff………………………………………………19

Figure 13: Screenshot from the Alpha build of Shipwreck……………………………………...23

Figure 14: A screenshot from the Office level Alpha build……………………………………...24

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Abstract
This paper is a post-mortem look into the development of the game Bottles. It walks through the
process behind creating the central idea, honing the concept through multiple rounds of iteration,
and developing playable prototypes through the Beta deadline, which is where the project was
when this thesis was written. The challenges behind maintaining a creative vision despite
logistical setbacks, the skills needed to manage a team, and following through on development
are highlighted as primary lessons learned from this experience.

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Introduction
Writing a post-mortem is difficult when the game is still in development, and even more
so for a project with so much to reflect on.
Bottles is my first project as a director of a true team— it was the first time I spearheaded
the manifestation of an idea on a deeper scale, it was the first time I had to juggle critique against
creative vision, and the first time I truly learned what being a director means to me, and where it
means I fit in the context of the creative current of game development. The daily, weekly,
monthly, and now (almost) yearly process is what has stuck with me through the duration of
working on Bottles. What does it mean to ideate a project in an early stage, show it to a team,
and all push towards the goal of bringing it to life? What does it mean to see something from the
highest of the high concept to the smallest of the minute details and keep your sights set on every
increment of progress between? If you had asked me those questions back in the early Spring of
2019 I may have had an answer; but it wouldn’t have been an informed answer backed by
experience.
So I hope this pre-mortem post mortem can be useful to someone, anyone who is looking
to step into the process of creation and may learn from my mistakes, or be inspired by hard-won
little victories in the greater machine of making.
What is Bottles?
Before I get ahead of myself, I believe it would be best to introduce the project in
question.
Bottles is a mobile game that fuses the tactile, handheld feel of analog puzzles and the
delight of mobile indie magic. You play as a small character inside a bottled diorama world,

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navigating yourself through lush, delightful spaces filled with challenges and stumbling upon
charming surprises behind every obstacle.
Ideation
The idea for Bottles arrived in two parts— one, the central mechanic of rotating a bottle
around a character, and two, the intention to make a mobile game that could be played with one
hand.
Origin of the Core Concept
First, the mechanic. This was one of those rare, precious ideas that came in a very finite,
very distinct moment that can be pinpointed later as “this is the exact time when the idea
occurred.” The moment was in the middle of a session with my therapist in February 2019. I had
brought a bottle of soda with me that day and had finished it off over the course of talking, and
being a fidget-prone person I ended up playing with it as I continued. Staring at the droplets in
the bottle collecting and running along the inside of the plastic was, in a strange little way,
mesmerizing. Absently I thought: “this would be a fun game”. It was as simple as that. Never
before has a game concept come into my head so politely, and I don’t count on it ever happening
in the same way ever again.
Second, the greater game concept. Though I already knew what I wanted to base my
general gameplay around, the mechanic of rotating levels with the player inside could be taken in
myriad ways. Would it be a big, action-y console title? Would it be something you could
manipulate in VR, holding the level in your hands? What did I want to make? When it came
down to it, I thought about what games meant a lot to me in a practical, down-to-earth sort of
way. This mechanic wasn’t fancy or convoluted; it was simple, and the game should follow suit.

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So what simple, engaging games meant something to me, both as a player and as a person? I
thought of the games I used to play when I got my blood drawn.
In the Summer of 2011, I was diagnosed with Thyroid Cancer
1
. I was 19 and terrified,
and even though my prognosis was overwhelmingly non-lethal the spectre of sickness and
hypothetical death was enough to shake the foundations of my teenage self-assurance. I went
under the knife two weeks after my diagnosis and came out of it dazed, in pain, and without a
thyroid. I was required to have my blood drawn every three hours for a day after surgery, and
even past that I would have to get it drawn every week, every few weeks, every month, every
year— further and further out into the future ad infinitum. It wasn’t great for someone with a
needle phobia.
The thing about being medically required to do something is that you are medically
required to do it. I had to get my blood drawn, and it was down to me to figure out how to make
that situation livable. What I settled into was this: I’d sit in the chair, rattle off my name and
birthday, and then take out my phone and hold it in one hand on the opposite side from wherever
they were going to poke me with needles. I’d open up a game. Usually it was a Bejeweled clone,
sometimes Monument Valley; whichever it was, the game proved intellectually engaging enough
that I’d be distracted while the nurses took vial after vial for blood work testing, and made it so I
didn’t associate the process with the visceral embodied horror of a needle piercing my soft,
fleshy, vulnerable arm. Instead I could relax into a pattern of lines and moves, a puzzle to be
solved, or a world to be navigated.

1
Papillary Carcinoma, if you’re curious as to the more specific name.

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So if I had this mechanic— this rotational level idea— I wanted to create something with,
what better way to honor that experience than to contribute a title of my own to the genre of
games that helped me through a trying time?
So it was: Bottles would be a mobile puzzle game.

Early Drafts
The game went through at least two conceptual iterations before the first prototype was
ever made. First was the pitch doc version. In this, the bottle was segmented into sections that
each rotated individually, which had channels cut into them that the player would navigate like a
3-D rounded hedge maze. In order to complete a level, the player would start at one side, walk
through those pathways, and have to move them into alignment in specific patterns to reach the
other side of the bottle (see fig 1). In this version of the idea the player was a firefly and the goal
was a second firefly you were trying to reach. The reason behind this was simply that I wanted
something that could be easily visible through layers of bottle material, so something that glowed
would be a good way to locate the player in the space as well as keep an eye on their goal.

fig. 1. An Illustration of the first Bottles Concept from the Pitch doc by Brooke Jaffe; March 2019

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This version was quickly scrapped in favor of something more involved, less directly
mechanical-feeling. I wanted to evoke emotion as well as engagement and felt that this dry,
procedural version of the idea didn’t lend itself to that. Furthermore, as I talked about this idea
with peers and other designers, I discovered that people continually brought up the idea of
“messages in a bottle” being the iconic image associated with the bottle as an object. That was a
compelling creative direction I wanted to pursue more intently.
One thing worth noting is that Bottles was at least a gyroscopic game from the get-go.
The slices of the bottle would be turned by rotating the phone toward or away from the player,
which allowed for single-handed play more fluidly than if the controls had been entirely touch-
based.

The second iteration that happened before the first prototype leaned a lot more into the
central concept of “message in a bottle” than the first one had. In this, the bottle was still divided
into slices but the environment inside the bottle was much more like a diorama. The player was a
traveler, and each of the levels was based on a message in a bottle they wrote about an
experience they had had on their journey. The player still had to work to traverse the space but
now in a far more organic way: they would not move in set channels, but would need to
manipulate ramps, rocks, branches, and other various pieces of the environment to create a path
to the goal. Each thing they could interact with was stationed in a different slice of the bottle.
An early digital prototype of this idea was never finished, but involved ruins sticking out
of sand in a desert. The player would reveal these ruins by rotating them out from the sand,
discovering their complete shape as they played with the world and then having to use them in
more practical ways to create what they needed. For example: rotating one piece of ruin into

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another, to break the weaker one and let it collapse into a ramp that would take the player to the
goal.

fig. 2. The first digital prototype of Bottles by Brooke Jaffe and Lee Emig; April 2019
This proved harder to implement than anticipated, even after enlisting the help of a
talented friend who would later go on to be my Art and Design lead on this project. However, in
attempting to make this prototype work and considering the ways in which it forced the player to
move, I stumbled on an important design choice: Why not just move the bottle as one unit?

The First Complete Prototype
That decision having been made, a cascade of other choices followed. Though I have a
background in game development, creating a prototype of an entirely new mechanic means not
having any foundation of code to rely on from developers past. My strength wasn’t to be found
in programming, but I do have an extensive background in hobbyist fabrication of props and
costumes— so I made a physical prototype.
The challenge was: I had to design a prototype level I could feasibly make a physical
version of, and also plan out how to make it. With the magic of thermoplastic, hot glue, and self-

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drying clay covered in paint, I put together an analog level that used a small glowing ball as a
stand-in for the player.

fig. 3. The first fully-functional prototype of Bottles from Brooke Jaffe; March 2019
The narrative of this level was a departure from the prior idea of the traveler. In
discussing the concept with advisors and colleagues, the recurring question remained: what is a
message in a bottle, and why does it matter? At this point in the development process I decided
that a message in a bottle was an attempt to connect with someone. Reaching out into the world
without certainty that the world would reach back.
Inspired by that idea, I came up with a story about a child who ran away from home and
returned to a place they felt happiest: the desert, where their family would take them camping in
better days gone by. They set up a tent, ignorant of a storm about to roll through and flood them
out; but before they had left home they had written a message and stuffed it in a bottle. The
player was someone who found the message and had the power to go back and save the child—
they were following the path that the child had left, seeking to find them and assuage their
loneliness and take them home before the storm hit.

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fig. 4. An Illustration of The First Bottles Prototype Concept from Brooke Jaffe; October 2019
In retrospect, this was an ambitious tale to tell in the medium I was attempting to tell it in,
but at this point I was far more interested in finding the boundaries of what I could do and work
inwards from there. The puzzle would have the player turn the bottle so as to see that what
appears to be a wall from the side is, in fact, a canyon when viewed from above. Then, they
would need to reach a high ledge with a tunnel that allowed them into the next area. This proved
a more difficult and finesse-worthy task than originally anticipated, and solidified my decision
that this game shouldn’t require flick-of-the-wrist mechanics as they were very frustrating and
didn’t lend themselves towards the kind of calm and thoughtful feeling I wanted to evoke.
Finally, they would find the child in the tent— another glowing light to match the one in the
player character. Though I couldn’t render it in clay and plastic, the finale would be that
together, these two characters push the cork out of the bottle and leave.
The feedback I got from players was generally positive. Outside of the difficulty of the
second challenge, players loved turning the bottle, putting their eyes up to the plastic, and
looking at all the tiny details. Even if it wasn’t representative of a digital mobile experience it
evoked the things that I wanted to express about the larger feeling of the game: so I would count
it as a general success.

9

Original Experience Goals
My original experience goals changed with iteration, but the primary set that carried
through the first few months of the development process were as follows (taken directly from a
pitch document written in the spring semester of 2019):
1. Feels Good - This game should be like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket, or
re-reading a favorite book: a comforting experience that makes players want to
come back to it.
2. Replayable - To make people want to come back to it, not only does the game
have to feel good but also provide experiences worth returning to. New ways of
solving things, new fun details to explore, etc.
3. Escapism, With Souvenirs - Being a place to return to for comfort and
enjoyment, Bottles is a game of conscientious escapism—a place to go for some
time, but with a narrative that stresses the importance of connection and coming
out of our own metaphorical emotional “bottles” that drive us to escapism in the
first place. You can hang out here for a while, but it’s important to go back, too.
And we want the player to feel just a little bit more prepared to face that.
Our experience goals ended up changing later in the production process, but are useful to
consider in the light of how development unfolded around them. These tenets didn’t leave the
broader aim of Bottles as a game per se, but were refined and sharpened in the crucible of
critique and iteration, and since then have found their way into the play experience following the
the changes we made to gameplay in service of our newer, more precise experience goals.

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Pre-Production
With that foundational work under my belt, and my first true team member already
committed to the project, I pushed ahead into the important task of taking this idea into a
practical development process.
Prior Art
I already had a lead on prior art going into pre-production, which ended up being key to
expressing my game concept both to potential advisors and teammates alike. First, I knew what
mobile titles I wanted to evoke similar experiences to, and second, I knew how I wanted Bottles
to be different— which meant finding pre-existing games that I could use to help explain what
set Bottles apart.
First, I looked to Monument Valley by Ustwo Games. This is a mobile game in which the
player uses very simple tap and swipe controls to manipulate an M.C. Escher-esque world of
mind-bending pathways, leading your tiny princess character through beautifully-designed pastel
spaces. It was a favorite of mine, both when I was getting blood drawn or was simply bored on
the subway. In my conception, the audience for a game like Monument Valley was similar to the
player base I imagined seeking out a game like Bottles. People who enjoy puzzles, who are
attracted to lush worlds, who want a more intellectually and artistically stimulating experience
out of mobile puzzle games than standard match-three fare. Furthermore, the things I felt when I
played Monument Valley were similar to the experience goals I had outlined in documentation.

11

fig. 5.Art from UsTwo Games’ Monument Valley. Ustwo Games, Ustwo Games,
https://www.ustwogames.co.uk/games/monument-valley/.
In a change of pace, another inspiration that was influential in how I conceptualized
Bottles was not digital at all: puzzle balls. These are plastic toys in which a clear shell contains
an obstacle course and at least one metal marble. The goal is to start your marble at one location,
and through careful manipulation of the ball, guide it safely through the course and to the goal.
While sometimes being riotous fun, more often than not they are enjoyed more for their
infuriating challenge than their ease. In drawing inspiration from these I sought to take the tactile
analog feel of moving a puzzle ball in your hands and translate it into a digital object, hopefully
removing the infuriation element that is endemic to the original.
Often in describing Bottles to people who had never heard of it, my shorthand was
something along the lines of “imagine a mobile game that is like if a puzzle ball was crossed
with Monument Valley”. However, there is one more title in particular that became more and
more valuable as a point of reference for me as the development process went on.
Windosill is a browser-based game by the studio Vectorpark. In it you move a small toy
left to right through a series of vignette-like scenes, each one with a different mechanic. The

12

beauty of Windosill is that the game never has a tutorial. It never tells you what to do— the
player is left to explore and experiment and figure out the goal of each scene on their own.
Though it became clear that Bottles was not a game that could go without a tutorial, when
thinking about the design of our primary level, Shipwreck, I often went back to the experience of
Windosill in trying to understand how to make something that is parsable by players while not
suffocating their drive to explore with over-sharing exactly what to do when and where.

The Production Process
What Story Are You Trying To Tell?
Once I gathered a team and began development in earnest, we quickly ran into a few
problems. Though from a technical standpoint we were up and running quickly with a prototype,
conceptually there were a lot of holes that ended up requiring us to do a few major pivots in the
creative concept of what the game was.
The idea that had been shown in the prototype— the story of someone helping various
people who had sent out messages in bottles to the world, where the player took on each message
as represented by a level-in-a-bottle— was what we initially pushed forward with. We liked the
openness that came from each level being a different location because it provided a creative
freedom to try any setting, play in any space we could think of. The arc we had pictured was one
where the player’s home base was a desert island in the middle of the ocean, and each bottle
level washes up onto shore, one by one. Over the course of the story the main character would be
helping all these other people and the final bottle would resolve this narrative by being a bottle
belonging to the player character themself; and instead of you playing as them to help other

13

people, you would be playing as those you have helped in previous levels as they sought to help
the player character. The narrative as a whole was a bit esoteric, sure, but the focus would be the
gameplay, not the story. Or so I had thought— but we will get to that later.
I worked with my leads and one of our artists to come up with a main character who
would be the person visiting everyone else’s bottles. An early decision was that we wanted a
distinct human person, not an abstracted character or something so cartoonish as to be not
interpreted as human. We also made the decision to have the character be AFAB (assigned
female at birth) and non-white because representation is important to me as a creative director,
and there’s no good reason not to put work out into the world that represents people who don’t
often get to see themselves in the spotlight. After batting around more ideas and trying to figure
out who this person was, we settled on Adi. Adi was a young adult. She was new to the working
world, still out of place within her life, but someone tenacious, creative, and above all else, kind.
The kind of person who cared deeply about others and would go through the crazy, strange
process of helping them through mystical conceptual bottles, and who people would both be able
to empathize with and see themselves in, even if she wasn’t a faceless, nameless protagonist.

14

fig. 6. Early concept art of Adi by Jessica Bui; May 2019

fig. 7. Adi turnaround by Jessica Bui; May 2019
The unfortunate thing about having any kind of specialty is that you’ll often start to see
your own area of expertise as the solution to everything— a pitfall I definitely fell into when it
came to developing the concept of Bottles. As a writer and as a narrative-focused designer, I
went deeper into the existing concept and started building a world around it. How did she end up
on the island? Was the island real or metaphorical? What if the island was of her own creation—
a manifestation of loneliness in the midst of social isolation inherent in moving from the world of
being a student to the working world of adulthood, and this entire game took place within her

15

concept of the world around her and how her projected mental demons began spiraling out of
control?
It’s evident how this quickly got off the rails. Me, in my high-Romantic-and-classical-
Gothic-literature-loving English-BA-having self started crafting a strange metaphysical world
that this story took place in. We started designing around the idea that reality was the setting, but
the puzzles were caused by the things Adi was projecting onto the environment; and the deeper
narrative significance was that she was her own worst enemy. At the time I did not see the irony.
We crafted a first level that took place in a subway station. I pulled from my time living
in New York for the setting, and we sketched out a level in which the bottle acted as a kind of
side-scroller mechanic that would encapsulate the whole level but be far more symbolic than
literal. If it were a real object it would be shaped like a long, glass pipe. Adi’s obstacles took the
form of nature encroaching on the urban environment: we had schools of fish schooling in an
ocean that flooded the subway tracks, a peanut-butter loving octopus swimming through air as
your guide, and finally a giant hermit crab decorated in bioluminescence that would block your
way until hit with rays of moonlight. It was whimsical, colorful, and a thoroughly fascinating
setup for a very involved, very intense story.
After receiving feedback from professors and advisors, some of which contradicted each
other, it became clear I had to make a choice. Do I go for the more conceptual, narrative version
of Bottles? Or do I set aside the immense story and return to the simple little mechanic that
started it all?
I genuinely still like the idea I came up with for that eccentric world of colorful creatures
and bleeding realities— but it wasn’t the game I had set out to make. In the process of trying to

16

find the heart of what Bottles would be, I had delved so deeply into the narrative of a game that
was really all about the beauty and fascination of a single mechanic.

So Many Ideas, So Little Time
After making the choice to pivot and getting my team onboard with my logic, we went
back to the drawing board. The next concept similarly began as a potentially simpler narrative
framework about a seaside shop full of bottles, but quickly became a strange and esoteric world
all its own separated from time and space— so we decided to scrap that, too. Luckily the level
design work we had begun was progressing without the strict hang-together of an overarching
plot. There was a lot of designing.

fig. 8. Concept art of the Bottle shop by Andy An; October 2019

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In the interim we had brainstormed myriad ways in which you could take the core
mechanic of rotation. We changed the shape of the bottle from a simple cylinder and found
endless inspiration in containers of every shape and size, from bulbous rum bottles to flat flask-
shapes to hourglasses and beyond. Changing that shape alone was a compelling way to
manipulate the affordances of the player’s space, and furthermore to give character to the level
by matching the bottle shape to a certain environment or mechanic. That was the origin of levels
like “Office”, which was a flat bottle divided by cubicles and whiteboards that was navigated
like a pachinko machine you could turn over and move through front to back or back to front.
There were ideas of ways in which rotation could be linked to the progression of time in the
bottle, and like putting a finger on a record and pulling it back, one could forward and reverse the
movements of objects within the bottle along a set timeline to solve puzzles.
One of the most validating parts in this entire process was the joy of seeing my designers
take my base concept and extrapolate it in the most creative, fantastic ways. We were never at a
loss for new and innovative level mechanics throughout the entire process. The problem was
narrowing that down to things feasible with our time and resources, which were dwindling as
weeks passed by. A lot of fantastic ideas were cut in the name of being able to take just one level
to complete polish. Though I know it was the right call to make as director, I was still sad to see
so much raw creativity set aside.

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fig. 9 & 10. Early experimental prototypes by Lee Emig, displaying mechanical possibilities of alternate
bottle shapes (right) as well as small-space navigation puzzles (left).
Why The Octopus?
Over the course of development, one thing became increasingly clear: we all loved our
octopus. It was a model holdover from earlier iterations of the game, but the octopus had
somehow become our mascot, our rallying creature, and when it came time to dream up yet
another idea for what the overarching narrative of the game would be it seemed natural to use the
octopus as a starting point. That’s how we came to our penultimate iteration of the story: the
Octopus and the Shrine.

fig. 11. Octopus Concept sketches by Naixuan Zhao; October 2019

19

fig. 12. Concept art of the Shrine on the cliff by Naixuan Zhao; November 2019
The story went something like this: once upon a time, there was a small town on a cliff
over the ocean. For as long as anyone can remember, on the outskirts of town sat a little shrine
dedicated to the local protector spirit that kept the town safe. The shrine was old and made of
stone and had an octopus carved into it, and it was said that if you made a wish, wrote it down,
and put it in a bottle to leave at the shrine, your wish would come true. However, wishes don’t
just come true on their own; someone has to make it happen. Enter the helpful and dedicated
octopus spirit that lives in the shrine. Playing as the octopus, you use the bottles as a microcosm
of the querent’s environment that you can manipulate to fulfill their wish. The larger arc of the
story essentially became one about emotional labor and reciprocation, and I’m sure you can
already guess that, once again, we went off too far into the narrative for the game’s own good.
This version of the story has since been all but cut as well. However, it did lend us the
framework we needed to pare down the level list we had into something more manageable. Also,
it created a cohesive aesthetic that fit really nicely with the concept at large. All of that has
stayed with us as we develop into the Beta deadline.

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Experience Goals - Revised
In pivoting the story so many times, we had to solidify what about the game was going to
stay the same, what was going to be the heart and soul that any new content we ideated would
have to be supporting? After a lot of thought and discussion with both my team and my advisors,
we came up with these three key words to use as our experience goals:
1. Surprising
2. Delightful
3. Satisfying
Every level should have surprises, and the result of those surprises should always seek to
bring delight and joy to the player. Furthermore, everything from the controls to the environment
should seek to satisfy that analog feeling so key to the original concept of drawing from physical
objects and games.
In doubling down on the goals of creating a game that was surprising, delightful, and
satisfying, we also made a conceptual shift that helped inform the way we thought about every
level. Instead of focusing on the image of a message in a bottle, we began designing around the
visual of a ship in a bottle instead. We were already making dioramas, so why not lean into that
impulse? The joy of a ship in a bottle is the impossibility of it, the detail and intricacy and beauty
of something small replicating a larger space. It slotted into our existing concept and mechanic
perfectly. Even that little change of thought helped streamline our design process both
mechanically and artistically, and in retrospect I wish we had decided to focus on that sooner
instead of trying to shoehorn in messages and text where they weren’t fitting.

21

Developing Controls
One of our chief challenges across the development process was our control scheme.
These mechanics, in seeking to feel handheld and tactile, needed to be so precise and juicy while
still being one-hand friendly. A problem we encountered early on was that creating an entirely
gyroscopic control system got sloppy very quickly. The two axis were difficult to control,
frustrating, and slippery.
In order to narrow down what we wanted to do, playtesting was key. My engineering
team developed three potential sets of controls: fully gyroscopic, fully swipe-based, and a hybrid
version that was swiping for rotation and gyroscopic for character movement. Putting those
controls to our first playable build level, we gave all three versions to our test participants, sure
to introduce them in a different order every time to prevent bias. Going in we weren’t sure what
to anticipate with regards to what people would prefer.
Our results showed a relatively even split between the fully gyroscopic and fully swipe
controls, but the one system that pulled ahead of both of them was our wildcard, the hybrid
control set. It seemed that having some degree of precision with swiping combined with the
tactile leaning of the left-right gyroscope ended up being a perfect combination for the
experience we wanted to provide. It was a discovery we wouldn’t have made without some
fantastic peer feedback and thoughtful user testing, and highlighted to me as a director the
importance of putting your game in front of people who have never seen it during the course of
development.
Something small that I am proud of my team for implementing is the left-right switching
UI system. Because we set out to create a game fully playable with one hand, it was important to
us that it be as inclusive as possible of all people, and that meant opening up one-handed play for

22

lefties as well as right-handed folks. My UI team worked to create a UI system that could be
mirrored at-will throughout the game, and even meant all gestures and swipes could be
performed anywhere on the screen.

Reaching Alpha
Three weeks before our Alpha deadline the team was in a slump. We had just returned
from winter break, our momentum from December had run out somewhere around Fall semester
finals, and we had precious little time to scope down to something that we could feasibly
complete if we wanted to make Alpha.
I went to my advisors and a trusted professor, asking for help. How could I rally my
team? How could I renew their investment in the project, instead of simply driving them into the
ground by brute forcing our way to a deadline?
What they recommended was this: Take a week. Get the team to do something creative
and completely different. Let them design any kind of level they want, no restrictions on setting
or content save that it has to use the rotation mechanic and take place in a bottle. Emphasize that
it must be completed in a week. Then, people will be creating something that they can be excited
about, can get invested in, and the product will be finished. It’s possible that if the content is
good enough, you can put it right in the game.
It was a risk to take that week off, to do something that had no guarantee of pushing us
towards Alpha, but to this day I think our “jam week” was one of the best things we did on this
project. In that week we separated into two teams and spread artists, designers, and engineers
between us. I stepped back and let them take the creative wheel, offering suggestions or opinions
but largely trying to make way for my team’s own ingenuity to shine through.

23

By the end of the week we had one completed level, and another halfway done but with a
more ambitious concept. The ambitious level is still an idea I think is ingenious to this day: an
hourglass-shaped bottle, where the player controls two characters at once by switching back and
forth between each end of the hourglass. One side is the past, one side is the present, and in order
to solve the level you must pass objects back and forth through the aperture, as well as through
space-time. Even though this level was never completed and eventually was set aside, it still was
a fantastic testament to the kind of off-the-wall things you could do with our rotation mechanic.
The other level, the completed one, quickly became our flagship level to show off the
foundational idea of what Bottles’ mechanic had to offer. This one was simply called
“Shipwreck”.

fig. 13. Screenshot from the Alpha build of Shipwreck; February 2019
Shipwreck was, true to its name, a bottle in which the player navigates through a sunken
Titanic-esque cruise ship by rotating and swimming through the rooms in what was essentially a
3D maze. We already had the fully-rigged octopus model, and wanted to play around both with
the simple act of weaving through doorways and also with the idea of a dark level, where the
player must light their own way. Though many rooms are dead ends, in creating a space that felt
complete and meaningful, we wanted to encourage exploration for exploration’s sake. The level
itself leans heavily on the soundscape and art for that reason. At the end of the first iteration of

24

this level we had our player find an old radio that still functions after all this time underwater,
and the octopus settles in to listen to music as the scene fades to black.
In order to make the milestone we scoped down to two levels: Shipwreck, which was
fully functional by the end of Jam Week, and Office, which had been in progress since earlier
iterations of the game and was already up to par. We made the Alpha deadline on February 6th,
2020, with both levels fully functional as well as the menu system.

fig. 14. A screenshot from the Office level Alpha build by Lee Emig; January 2019

The (Slightly Longer) Road to Beta
Post-Alpha we moved towards a redesign of Shipwreck, prioritizing that in production to
ensure that we have at least one level to Beta quality before attempting to take on a second.
Anyone who was not able to do work on Shipwreck was given tasks on Office, but generally
speaking our approach was that a smaller, high-quality product was better than a larger, less-
quality one.
The advent of COVID-19 changed a lot of things. We began working remotely, and I
confirmed that every member of the team was somewhere safe, secure, and was staying healthy.
We have adjusted our production schedule and it’s looking as though Office is less likely to be

25

complete by Beta, but the quality of life of my team comes before any final product. We have all
needed time to adjust to a new normal of life.

Reflecting on Challenges, Mistakes, Breakthroughs, and Victories
Even though we are pre-Beta and still in development, I can look back on the process up
to this point and pick out some of the lessons that stand out to me; however I know that there are
countless more I cannot articulate, and I’m certain there will be more before this project is
through.
Scope, Time, and Self-Comparison
Scope, scope, scope. Though I went into this project with the intention of keeping the
scope as sparing as possible, even the most diligent developer can fall into overextending
themselves or their team. In my case, I think the primary problem was less one of a lack of
consideration, but more a misunderstanding of what it would take to bring a level to polish.
For example: post-Alpha my leads and I went to talk with my industry advisor. I was
having trouble feeling like we had lost momentum, lost focus, and were having trouble moving
forward according to our production plan. I expressed this to him and he invited us to his studio
to talk through the process, one he was familiar with having been in our position years before.
One thing that I found really enlightening was how he pointed out that our puzzle development
process was inherently different from the one that some of my peers were working with. I had
been trying to understand why we were moving slower, iterating less rapidly, but those projects I
had been comparing myself to subconsciously were ones in which they had static building blocks
they could move around to create as many new levels as they wanted. For Bottles, on the other

26

hand, every level, every puzzle, every interaction was bespoke. Looking at it that way it only
made sense we had a smaller volume of content. And furthermore, looking at other projects
wasn’t a useful metric of comparison because even within “mobile puzzle game” there is a huge
breadth of what a game can look like, and what a game can require to bring it to completion.
It seems so obvious now as I reflect on it, but at the time it was a logical inconsistency
that I needed someone to point out to me.

Right Idea, Wrong Time
A recurring theme that surprised me throughout the Bottles development process was
how often ideas we had used or pitched early on in the production cycle ended up being
implemented later down the line in new forms.
Even though we went through so many iterations of the conceptual structure of the
narrative surrounding the gameplay and had draft upon draft of ideas and levels and characters
that were tossed out, organically details from those past ideas seeped in as we were editing and
ideating on the final product. For example, when we were trying to decide how to end Shipwreck
as we were re-designing it post-Alpha, someone brought up the idea of a hermit crab blocking
the way towards the goal that the player must convince to move. This hearkened back to the
subway station level era of the game we had been trying to make back in September/October of
2019 that had long since been scrapped. The context was entirely different, but the idea felt like
it fit more organically with this change of pace months later that we couldn’t have predicted
would happen in the fall.
This happened again and again. The idea of the Octopus as the main player character, Adi
always came up even when we had decided that she was not the main character of the story, the

27

idea of bottles within bottles— all of these and more came into play long after their original
ideation. It confirmed to me something that I hadn’t actively considered, but deeply felt:
sometimes it is not a matter of an idea being good or bad, but whether or not this is the time for
that idea to be used. Judicious and conscientious deliberation became our best friend in
developing this game, and never completely throwing away iterations past meant that the lessons
we learned and concepts we created were open to us down the road.

Accepting Critique versus Maintaining a Vision
My thesis had more people than most offering critique at every turn. Being both a thesis
project and an AGP game, not only did I have a standard thesis committee but also a complement
of twelve other professors, and also an entire cohort of MFA students all providing feedback and
commentary. This meant that, as director, it was up to me to listen to their voices and sift through
the suggestions to figure out what the “note behind the note” was, and decide whether or not we
should act upon those notes in how we developed the game going forward.
I discovered early on that I had been taking feedback, particularly from professors, as an
inherently weighty gospel that needed immediate addressing. I would return to my team and
instantly start re-composing everything based on one set of feedback assuming I had made a
directorial misstep that needed correction; particularly when I was talking to people whose
voices I deeply respect, or whose work I admire.
Often I saw developers (both professional and student alike) who never took any
criticism, who buckled down and got defensive as soon as anyone “attacked” their work by
claiming it wasn’t perfect. I saw them when I was an undergraduate in a writing program, too,

28

fiercely defending faulty prose or botched symbolism or unintentionally offensive content, and I
had vowed I would never be that brand of creator who ignores constructive criticism.
However, In trying to avoid that bad practice I had overcorrected. It took receiving
several sets of conflicting feedback for me to stop myself and really consider: this feedback is
important, but is it bringing me closer to the vision of the game I want to create? From that point
on I tried to take in every session with a conscientious mind. When faced with a volley of
suggestions, corrections, and comments, it took more effort to go one by one and think critically
about the value of the note in the context of my game; but it meant that I was able to walk the
thin line between becoming a stubborn dictator of a director who would take no critique and
bending my vision to every new piece of feedback thrown my way. Sometimes that was
particularly difficult when faced with people I respect telling me that my directorial choices
weren’t the right ones. Still, I feel like I took a big step forward in my evolution as a creative
director by learning how to stand my ground.

Managing People is Labor
We learn a lot of “hard” skills in the course of study, but seldom do we focus on the
practice of “soft” skills when it comes to game development. There were a few classes in which
we addressed and discussed strategies for people management, interpersonal conflict resolution,
and other kinds of team-centric disciplines (and I found those incredibly helpful and insightful)
but I had never considered the weight of those tasks in the scope of “task management”, a la the
way most development is handled. You have tasks for “create a 3D asset of a tree” or “program
a button interaction script”, but how do you measure in work-hours the amount of time it takes

29

to coordinate with external legal counsel and artists, or make design decisions based on
feedback? Those things, when examined closely, are often hard to pin down in concrete ways.
At the beginning of the year I hadn’t thought much of it— I could juggle these “soft”
tasks alongside more traditional content creation without thought. I knew how to manage
writing design docs, creating pitch decks, and working on my prototypes. As my team grew and
time went on, however, I spent less and less time implementing things in-engine, or drawing up
hard assets for the game. As director my job wasn’t to micro-manage or change the hard work
my team had put in, but to make sure they had the information they needed so that they could do
their jobs to the best of their ability. For me, that meant stepping aside and relinquishing direct
implementation to people who were far more technically-minded than I.
As someone who likes to have their fingers in everything going on with the project, it
was a hard thing to accept. What work was I actually doing, if I didn’t have as many task hours
on our tracking software? Was I being a bad or lazy director for not spending all my time in-
engine alongside my team? Why was I still exhausted by the end of the day?
I asked my leads about how they felt, if they needed or wanted more hands-on support
from me. They didn’t. I consulted my advisors and fellow MFA students, seeking advice; the
answer I got back was uniformly “managing people is a full time job all its own”. And the more
people to manage, the more time and effort it takes to keep everyone moving together. All those
hours I spent in meetings and discussions with various disciplines on my team, all that time I
spent getting up early to get everyone snacks before our five hours of team meeting every
Sunday, checking in with advisors and fielding comments from weekly faculty check-ins— all
of that was my labor. That was where my energy was going. And though that couldn’t be so

30

easily quantified or broken down into sub-tasks to be checked off on a list, that didn’t mean that
I wasn’t putting all my effort into making Bottles as good as it could be.

Dealing With Unforeseen Circumstances
One of the hardest things to deal with hands down has been adapting to forces beyond my
control.
COVID-19 swept in like a hurricane and tossed every carefully-laid plan for Spring 2020
aside; we had been rolling through with tasks post-Alpha, carefully scoping and pruning
production so that we can make our Beta deadline, and then all of the sudden the entire world
was turned upside down around us. No more team meetings in person. No more in-class talks.
We aren’t special, either— the entire world has come to a screeching halt followed by a shy,
tentative scooch back into the flow of work progress.
So as I write this I am also learning one of the biggest surprise lessons of the Bottles
production process: how to press on in the face of world happenings that have shaken every
member of my team down to their core, myself included. How do we keep up our spirits and
motivation to work? How do we adjust to doing everything from home? To working without the
school-bound assets we once had access to and are now cut off from?
We are making it work. We are meeting online, we are pressing forward, improvising
where necessary, and we will make this game come hell or high water. Knowing I have my team
behind me even as we all struggle has been both humbling and validating.

31

Conclusion
This past year of development has been one of the most challenging and rewarding
undertakings of my life, and Bottles is far from over. However, even retrospecting from here I
can see how much I have learned as a director and how far this concept has come since that day I
looked at a bottle of soda and said “wouldn’t it be fun if…?” Back then I had only fantasized
about what leading a team as Creative Director might be like. There was no way to predict how
much positive feedback I’d get on that initial pitch written at 1AM, or the overwhelming support
from my peers and professors and team, or the wild rollercoaster of an experience this has turned
out to be. The fact that my simple idea bloomed into what Bottles has become never ceases to
floor me.
The very name of a post mortem implies a completion, a finish, the apotheosis of a
project that has already come to pass and the subsequent vivisection thereof.
2
Instead, I would
like to take a page from the book of a wise professor I once had who called papers like this a
“post-partum” essay rather than a post mortem one. Sure, the process isn’t complete; but from
where I am standing it feels far more like looking to the lively future of what we have
accomplished than an autopsy of the past. Every step of the way Bottles has been a celebration of
exploration, creativity, and wonder— so it’s only right that we turn to the end of this road with
eager eyes on what comes next.

2
Writing this now before development is done is a difficult task; I can’t be certain what other problems
may crop up. To say that “it can’t get worse than this” is to invite certain disaster, surely, but one can
hope that global pandemic is the most dramatic obstacle thrown in the way of a small graduate thesis like
this one.

32

Bibliography

Wong, Ken, and David Fernandez Huerta. “Art from UsTwo Games' Monument Valley.” UsTwo
Games, 2014, www.ustwogames.co.uk/games/monument-valley/.

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Jaffe, Brooke (author)

Core Title Bottles

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 05/06/2020

Defense Date 04/16/2020

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

Tag Bottles,creative director,directing,game development,Games,leadership,Mobile,OAI-PMH Harvest,video games

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Wixon, Dennis (committee chair), Fullerton, Tracy (committee member), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member)

Creator Email brooke.m.jaffe@gmail.com,brookej@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-298446

Unique identifier UC11663454

Identifier etd-JaffeBrook-8438.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-298446 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-JaffeBrook-8438.pdf

Dmrecord 298446

Document Type Thesis

Rights Jaffe, Brooke

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