The Cliff

With the genre of tragedy I wanted to explore that side of games that is generally a bad thing to do: Kill the player on purpose and in effect making it so that you can never win. How can this still be fun when all you do in the end is die? In most games the ends DO justify the means and that's why things are meant to give you a sense of accomplishment in the end after all the hard work you've done. I've done the complete opposite to see the reaction.

The main design of this level is that the whole level is made to represent the story structure of a tragedy. In tragedy they for the most part will follow the classic hero's journey, but when it reaches the highest point of drama and expect to be eased out of all the climactic moment you are suddenly running off of a cliff. At that highest point of the cliff the tragic figure dies or dramatically changes.

The structure of the level is of a cliff in order to visually represent the struggle and fall of the hero

I was originally going to make the level into one giant ramp that the player has to drive a vehicle up. I wanted a vehicle because they were hard to control so that by the time the sudden ending comes you have little time to react and will probably drive right off. After working with it for a bit I decided that the use of a car felt too impersonal and more like part of an action movie.

So I tossed out the idea with the car and stuck with seeing and controlling the player pawn.This makes you feel more attached to the pawn because it's humanoid and you feel like you have more control over it, as if it was your own body in a virtual space.

That's you, right there. You're a robot.

The actual level looked like the image below. It didn't change very much as I progressed. The level is meant to resemble a stage in some way. This is a reference to live plays because that is where Tragedy really grew into maturity as a genre.

In the beginning...

Then after I got the length and angle of the cliff the way I liked it I added in gaps where the player has to jump. These represent the different trials characters go through as they become the hero. They also worked as a way to break up the constant running the player has to do.

Without lighting

Now I got to adding the lights to the level. Keeping with the theme of being on a stage I wanted to keep it mostly dark with a spot light on the player as if this was their big moment. I also added lights under the gaps so that the player could see in time to jump. At the end I simply added a particle effect that looked appealing and a light of a different color to show that this was the ending they were trying to achieve.

With lighting

To try to emphasize the feeling that you are on a stage I wanted the camera to follow you from the side, as if you were also a part of the audience that is watching this play. Then I decided to have the lights for the gaps to turn on only at a specific point like there was a stage crew turning these on. Now I knew the things to script and I needed to set up the camera and lights in Matinee through Kismet.

This was just simply laying down keys for everything.

Because the camera moves independently from the player I was able to

time everything to happen at a specific moment.

The stage was set but the tragic moment had yet to be made. In order to make sure the player never made it to the other side the player had to run through a trigger volume that set off the console command "feigndeath". This makes the player go into a ragdoll and cannot regain control to save their selves from the fall. To make more sense of what was happening I made the player appear to be "tripping". This was done by attaching a force actor to push the player when they go ragdoll.

Whoopsies...

Just made a few more tweaks to gameplay through scripting, such as the jump height of the player and the screen size and I was finished.

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