LUTE: Ludonarrative Modules

See also: LUTE Framework

What are the LUTE Ludonarrative Modules?

The LoGaCulture Unity Toolkit/Engine (LUTE), is a modular framework for creating locative games and available fully open source (MIT license) on GitHub (https://github.com/LoGaCulture/LUTE). Consequentially many of LUTE’s modules allow the designer to deliver both narrative content and gameplay interactions to create Ludonarrative experiences.

Initial research (both literature and with players and designers) helped identify fundamental forms of storytelling and play suited to the locative digital cultural heritage games that LoGaCulture was investigating. This includes interactive fiction, adventure games, puzzle games, collection games, creative games, and combinations of these genres. LUTE games are built out of nodes and orders – nodes define individual sections of games or scenes, each of which has a collection of orders that define game content such as interactions, assets, media, or interface for that node. Orders are highly modular – each defining core gameplay and media functionality for their nodes using Unity scripts and prefabs.

Figure 1: Orders in LUTE can be used to build up game mechanics and interactions.

LUTE uses these orders to deliver Ludonarrative content – defining modules for key game mechanics. These include:

• Dialogue to handle the branching conversation trees and interactions with characters common to adventure games and interactive fiction
• Characters to define the assets and objects for specific NPCs to be used in scenes or other mechanics for adventure games and interactive fiction.
• Inventories to handle items and collections that support collection focussed games but also the keys and item logic common to adventure games
• Quests/Achievements to direct the player to specific objectives, detect their completion, and drive the game forward. Both enabling quests for adventure games and achievement systems for all genres.
• Canvas’ to enable the creation of images and montages for creative experiences.

Figure 2: The LUTE Ludonarrative modules cover dialogue, characters, inventories, quests/achievements, and creative canvas’.

As well as the orders to deliver these modules LUTE has a robust conditional and variable system to handle game logic and deliver both puzzles based on combinations of interactions with game elements and story events. These mechanics do not pretend to be exhaustive, and LUTE designers can still use the flexible extensibility of LUTE to create their own mechanisms using LUTE’s custom orders (which then fit into the rest of the LUTE system and can be used on nodes) or to duplicate and modify existing orders to create custom variations, such as inventory systems with different layouts.

LUTE Ludonarrative and WP5

The LUTE Ludonarrative modules are based on research conducted by Bournemouth University into the needs of locative game designers, the attitudes of players, and the potential of the medium. They form part of the Ludonarrative engine developed under WP5 for D5.2 and are part of the wider LUTE framework and open technology collection. Furthermore, the Ludonarrative modules within LUTE are further enabling the creation of a range of locative cultural heritage games as part of CS1 and CS2 which will in turn enable further analysis of the Ludonarrative potential of cultural heritage locative games towards D5.3.

See also: LUTE Framework

The LUTE Team is:

Dr Jack Brett – Lead Engineer
Dr Charlie Hargood – Academic Investigator and Architect
Dr David Millard – Academic Investigator and Architect
Dr Yoan Malinov – Engineer
Dr Bob Rimmington – Qualitative Researcher