The Last
Solo Student Environmental Storytelling Project at DigiPen Institute of Technology
Roles: Level Designer, Narrative Designer.
Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Microsoft Word.
Skills: White-Boxing, Creative Writing, World-Building, Environmental Storytelling, Blueprinting, Playtesting.
Genre: First-Person, Horror Walling Simulator.
Target Audience: Players driven to become immersed in the world they are exploring and put themselves in the shoes of the game protagonist to experience a story told through the actions of the player and their journey.
Environmental Storytelling
The Last is a level design study in using environmental storytelling to tell a complete multi act short story, not cutscenes, no dialogue. For this project I both outlined the story and designed the level to tell it. See below my creative process from start to end for realizing this short horror story!
Project Direction
Setting the Vision to drive the Design Work
A Thesis Statement Approach
Something important to me in every project I work on is understanding what the themes and intent behind the game is all about. These can manifest in varying levels of specificity from Design Pillars to a more direct Thesis Statement.
As this was a solo project, keeping a cohesive vision can be done much easier than it can be with larger teams, so I chose a more Thesis focused approach.
My first step of this entire process was determining what that Thesis would be, as it would core to both my Level Design and Narrative Design work on the project.
To determine this, I looked to balance ideas I was interested in playing around with at the time with emotional concepts that I thought would match those ideas well, and be ideas I likewise was interesting in diving into.
Some ideas that were prevalent to me at the time were:
-
A simulated space, particularly inspired by a scene from Spider-Man: Far From Home.
-
A Science Fiction vibe, similar to series like Star Wars or Dead Space.
-
A Horror Direction would be fun to do Environmental Storytelling with.
With these ideas spinning around in my head, I considered the budget restrictions I had as well for this project. I could use asset packs (and I eventually did), but things like NPC characters or extensive gameplay work were fairly out of scope for the project, both because of the time constraints, and because I was still fairly new to programming at the time.
With this in mind, I focused on ideas that could keep the player moving, since that was something I was confident would play to my strengths. This then led to me adopting a Thesis about accepting that sometimes in life, you have to move forwards without getting all the closure you might want.
You can dwell on things hoping that may wrap up nicely, but there's almost never a guarantee of that. What is always certain though, is that when you move forward, and try something new, new things will happen.
This idea works well for a project like this because narratively it gives me a lot I could explore for sure, but scope wise, it meant it could realized practically from just asking the player to keep moving through the space.
Pre-Production
Designing the Plot, Act Structure, and Design Document
Purpose
My Pre-Production work on this project is much the same as what you may expect from Level Design Pre-Production work. The difference however is that for this project, I had a few additional responsibilities.
On Team Projects Professionally or in School, a Narrative Designer might provide an Act Structure and/or Script to go along side the level, and then my job as the Level Designer would be to interpret that into a Spatial Design, accounting for the needs of the Narrative work and creating opportunities to tell and reinforce the story. In this case, what those notes are, I also had to come up with, and I began this part of the process by doing just that.
Structural Bounds
A few limitations I had for myself helped me to shape this work quickly.
-
No dialogue, only Environmental Storytelling.
-
Environmental Storytelling can include notes.
-
The Level will be broken down into a 5 Act Structure. This being complete with a Setup, Hook, Development, Turn, and Resolution.
-
Given the Act Structure, the Plot should Progress as the Level Plays out, and not just be a single scene.
Based on these thoughts, I assembled a Design Document. I used the rigid Act Structure to guide my story, and worked off of the ideas and concepts which inspired the Thesis to come up with the specific moments.
During this time, I also collected a variety of reference images to help develop the look for space, and include them in the documentation. These references also then helped me determine what kind of asset packs I would look for to support my design, in addition to my own modeling work using Unreal Engine 5's built in Modeling Tool Kit.
Level Design Document
Hindsight Thoughts on Improvements
While this document served my needs for creating the level, if I were to do this project again, I would also wanted to create a Level Flow Diagram to help me identify each moment of the design very clearly, and then from that also create a Timeline Diagram. These are useful for identifying room for improvement, and removing ambiguity going into the block out stage.
While I later did create a few Top Down Maps for different portions of the level, creating those at this time as well would have also been very useful similarly for removing ambiguity.
A final note would be that in regard to Reference Images, going further to make callouts for the specific things I liked or disliked from an image could have been helpful, and going further to make a Mood Board as well likewise could have been useful for removing ambiguity in relation to the visual elements of the space.
Level Design
Stepping onto the Lunar Nemesis
Top Down Maps and Thumbnail Sketches
My next step was created Top Down Maps of the level spaces, since they didn't come about with my Level Design Document.
-
These are inspired architecturally by the reference images I pulled from.
-
Creative liberties are taken to enhance the level layout itself.
-
Sight lines and scene compositions matter more to me when building a fictional environment than being consistent with how other fictional environments may have been designed.
-
Once I knew where sightlines should be, I began sketching Thumbnails of how the actual composition should look.
-
This is both to identify foreground, mid-ground, and background elements, but also to define what landmarks should look like, and what helps the player recognize them as such.
From here, I then move in Unreal Engine to start building the space.
In Engine Production
In Unreal, I used a combination of Asset Pack resources and my 3D Modeling with Unreal's built in Modeling Tool-kit to quickly construct the space. These in combination allow me to recreate my sketches in playable 3D.
Here's that sketch again of the of the Space Station's center point, meant to be a landmark in the space, which can be seen from the windows.
And here is that same space built in Engine. This composition marks the Player's first view of the outside world!
Level Streaming allows me to quickly move between levels during gameplay.
Being able to switch between these files helps me to convey the passing of time and create real progression in the game scenario, still while being entirely player driven.
Set dressing is used to create leading lines that guide the player's eyes to places they wouldn't normally look.
Players don't normally look up or down, and certainly wouldn't think it wise to take an unprompted lead of faith, but these leading lines help direct the player so, and dissolve reservations about if it might not be an actual path.
This lighting effect could easily be disable in Unreal's Global Illumination Settings, but left on it creates a unique astatic that adds to the scenario.
Since it looks cool, I use it as an opportunity to play into it, rather than remove it.
The Text Render Object is useful for my purposes as a Level Designer, because it helps me specify information to assist Environment Artists, but also be very clear about what the player is supposed to take away from Notes, Walls, or Chalk Boards in the space.
Adding a locked door can force the player to explore the space more thoroughly to find it's key.
This then pushes the player towards examining the environment, finding new narrative information in the process.
My technical skills and familiarity with the intricacies of Unreal Engine 5 have come a long way since this project, but at the time a strategy I used to create the ending cinematic was to duplicate the environment, rotate the geometry, and just let gravity and a trigger volume to eventually fall into handle the entire operation.
If I were to do this again, I would certainly use Unreal's Sequencer Tool, but this little trick helped me to create functionally the same moment in a matter of minutes.