LUTE: Authoring Tool

What is the LUTE Authoring Tool?

The LoGaCulture Unity Toolkit/Engine (LUTE), as a technology framework for creating mixed reality games, includes a range of tools and functions. This includes a comprehensive visual authoring tool (aka a creativity support tool) for building LUTE games using the framework available fully open source (MIT license) on GitHub (https://github.com/LoGaCulture/LUTE).

The LUTE authoring tool is built on top of the frameworks flow engine – this engine describes a game in terms of ‘nodes’ that represent sections of play or scenes. Each node then has orders assigned to it as declarative content that dictate the content in that scene such as assets, gameplay, UI, and media.

Figure 1: The LUTE Authoring Tool Flow Engine.

Using the flow engine the designer can specify the order of content in the game and the conditions of one scene following another based-on game state. LUTE is an engine for locative games and consequently player position and location in the real world is a critical piece of context for design – using LUTEs map the designer can define locations and make these conditions on game content. Consequentially the designer can design both a digital and physical flow through the experience such that the player must travel to specific places for defined gameplay.

Figure 2: Adding new locations for locative games using the LUTE authoring tool map.

Technology to support the design process

Collectively this allows the designer to specify content on nodes, and the flow of game play from one node to another through a mixture of causal connections and/or open exploration restricted by location. These make use of Hypertextual calligraphic and sculptural structures research has identified as of value to interactive locative content. To help the designer organise this work LUTEs authoring tools come with a range of design aids that assist the management of game content. This includes practical elements such as grouping nodes allowing the game to be divided up into chapters or phases (with groups themselves able to be conditional on game state and context). But also, there are features without impact on the game purely for the designers benefit such as colour coding nodes and annotating the work with notes and lines to aid in organisation and collaboration, as well as a blueprinting system for replicating collections of nodes and objects as collective game systems.

Figure 3: The LUTE authoring tool has annotations, colours, groups and more to help collaboration and organising projects.

The LUTE authoring tool and WP3 Research

The LUTE authoring tool has been instrumental to WP3 research in LoGaCulture. In seeking to understand how authoring tools impact the designer experience. The creation of LUTE has enabled both a co-design process with professionals to capture and understand the needs of locative game creation, but also has enabled a longitudinal study where a group of designers working with the technology can be observed over the creation of multiple games and compared to other tools to better understand the author experience with different design paradigms and the impact on the resulting games.

The opening research for WP3 as documented in D3.1 directly informed the design of LUTE’s authoring tool and the technology requirements to best support designers and the medium, where as the authoring tool itself as part of LUTE comprises D3.2 extending the LoGaCulture open technology collection with co-designed creation technologies. Finally, the data provided by the longitudinal study that LUTE enables will inform D3.3 and our understanding of the impact of creation tools on the designer experience for locative games.