Zhenghao Chu

Level Design Documents

Overview of the Level Map

Goals

The design goals are mainly focused on the narration and flow of the whole level.

• The player should always have a chance to see the next goal, and even from the beginning of the area he/she should have a chance to see the destination.

• The player should have a clear impression about the main storyline, while if player only chooses the downside option, he/she should have essential and enough information to understand the story.

• Besides the dialogue, the player should have other options to collect the information about the story, including environment and extra text records, even from gameplay.

• The whole environment should be consistent with the story, specifically the function of the room, the theme of the environment and the flow of the movement. Also considering the Fallout 4 art style, the environment should be more realistic and reasonable.

• Reuse of the space is essential, and the player should have a chance to revisit the same room/space with different gameplay experience.

• The player should be able to see the result of their action as soon as he/she finishes the action.

Design

1.  The player should always have a chance to see the goal:

The layout of the whole area is designed to make sure that every time the player enter the room, he/she could see the next goal straightforwardly.

2.  The player should have chances to collect extra information:

I set several terminals to provide more information for the player:

I used these terminals to provide the background information and some narration from the other people except the NPC in this mission. This information is not essential but providing more detailed and exhaustive narration about the story.

The second building is built for the scientific research by Julia. The first floor is the abandoned area, and Julia hidden her research center below this floor. In my opinion, Julia used this abandoned area to better hide herself, while she secretly built her research center under the camouflage from the first floor.

4. Reuse of the space

To reuse the space, I set a ‘central area’ inside the second building:

As this screenshot showed, the central area connects nearly all the room in this area.

1. The player will enter this room from the first floor of this building for the first time. 

2. Then the player will see the goal through the window.

3. After that, the player needs to go to two branch areas to unlock the gate towards the final room. And the player will get back to the central room from different direction to continue.

4. So, every time player enters the central room, some enemy will spawn in different direction. And player has chance to attack them from different location as the entrance of the room is various. And finally the player could enter the room after the two locks are unlocked.

5. The player should be able to see the result of their action as soon as he/she finishes the action:

Every time the player interacts with the terminal, he/she has a chance to see the result of their action immediately. I use the light as the conveyance for explaining the result of the player’s action.

Additional Screenshots

Post Mortem

What went well:

1. The process of decorating environment is smooth

The reason can be concluded as two:

Firstly, from the very beginning, I do consider how to make the environment and narration consistent. As my story goes, there are several sceneries needed for building up the experience and the conveyance for the player. Therefore, I do have plan about what props I should use and which environment reference I should consider.

Secondly, as I have a basic idea about the environment (the function of the room, what has changed over time and what is the main narration props) With my game experience of Fallout 4, I could easily find the best reference from the original Fallout 4 level. They are so great and all I need to do is just considering the flexible combination of these wonderful props according to the reference.

2. The iteration of the layout is efficient

Now I have to admit that the layout design in my early LDD is very confusing and scattered, with little consideration about the flow. Luckily, I realized it later and tried to communicate with the stakeholder(professor) about what I should do. It is an iteration process, and I can tell that I am doing better and better. Now when I compare my former design with the final level, I am very amazed.

3. The whole process is not so overwhelming

The production plan does give me a chance to consider what I should do in every milestone. When I am writing my plan, I surprisingly find that there are so many tasks I could have arranged much more efficient before. And when I finally fill out my plan, I realize that once I scatter my task into several pieces and finish them step by step, the whole task is not so thrilling anymore. That gets proved in the later work and I feel much easier than before.

What went wrong:

1. The text of the dialogue is too compressed for player to understand

In my level, I focused on the narration design and tried to tell an interesting but complicated story. The price is that there is plenty of information the player needs to know if he/she wants to understand the story. From the beginning, I put too much text in the dialogue so most of the time the player needs to suffer from listening to the NPC speaking for a really long time. Meanwhile, I didn’t scatter this information into branches and just compressed it. The result is that most of the playtester feels confusing and uncertain about what is my story.

2. Underestimate the importance of the M/L objects

At early milestone, I underestimate the importance of the M/L objects, therefore I hadn’t considered seriously about the setting of these objects and what/how they will influence the flow of the level. The result is that my level looks rough, empty and full of placeholder, and it is hard for the player to have fun fighting with the enemy or searching the whole area. So I spend a lot of time to adjust the setting of the M/L objects and it collides with other layout setting which results in plenty of time for fixing.

3.  The combat setting is unreasonable

I set the Assaultron in my level as one of the elite enemies. What didn’t realize is that though I have decreased the Assaultrons’ Hp a lot, it is still very powerful. The severest problem is its laser can kill any player ignoring what armor he/she is wearing. And it is hard to predict when the Aassaultron will emit the laser. And since the HP of the Assaultron is not high, it causes a problem: the play tester will kill Assaultron before it could get to the player, or if the player hesitates to fire, the Assaultron will kill player without too much effort. I add pillars and make NPC follows the player to attract the Assaultron’s attention later and finally solve this problem.