Shadow's Grove
Senior Year Student Team Project at DigiPen Institute of Technology​​
Roles: Producer, Narrative Content Designer, Level Designer, Systems Designer, Technical Designer, Gameplay Programmer, Tools Programmer.
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Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Figma, Subversion / Tortoise SVN.
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Skills: White Boxing, Environmental Storytelling, Combat System Design, Narrative Systems Design, Encounter Design, Blueprinting, Project Management, Agile, Scrum, Playtesting.
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Genre: Third-Person, Action-Adventure Game with Third Person Shooter Elements.
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Target Audience: Players driven to become immersed in the world they are exploring and put themselves in the shoes of the game protagonist.
Emergent Storytelling
On Shadow's Grove I focused on using Systems Design and Level Design practices to create storytelling opportunities directly through the gameplay. You can see below how I used Combat Design, Encounter Design, Environmental Storytelling, and Interaction Design to create storytelling opportunities throughout the game.
Combat Design
Characterization through Combat
Understanding Astrid and Eri
In Shadow's Grove, you play as the character Astrid, a young woman who is grieving the loss of her pet wolf, Eri.
Astrid's journey sees her performing a ritual to travel into the underworld in an effort to bring her friend back to life. This ritual is forbidden, and she quickly finds out why as she comes face to face with past travelers, now taking the form of the Shades. The Shades are travelers who lost their way while traversing the underworld, and found themselves consumed by their grief. Astrid must do battle with the Shades to escape the underworld, and along the way she must learn how to live independently of Eri to move past the loss which drew her to this place.
The combat design of Shadow's Grove pays close attention to this scenario to highlight two core things:
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The Relationship of Astrid and Eri
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The Characterization of the Shades
When I began working on Shadow's Grove, a known problem with the game was that Eri played very little role in the gameplay loop, and especially so in combat. To solve this problem, I leaned heavily into the existing narrative bible and world building to refine the system to now ask the player to rely on a back and forth balance of both characters to defeat the enemy Shades.
Bringing This Dynamic to Life
My design process for this began with ensuring that I understood the characterizations of each of the characters in the game. Astrid isn't supposed to be an aggressive character, she isn't out for blood, and she acts only in self defense. Eri on the other hand is more aggressive. He can take the life of enemies before him, but not without assistance of Astrid. Their dynamic relies heavily on each other, but makes combat impossible when they are apart.
Adapting this to gameplay, Astrid is a magical character that uses here arcane powers to knock down enemies temporarily. This can be enough to get by threats, but they will always come back, which is where Eri comes in. Eri cannot get enemies into a vulnerable state, but once they are, Eri can take them out. What this sets up is Astrid will act in self defense to ward off threats, and Eri can then be used finish enemies off so they do not threaten the player anymore.
My Design Documentation
Encounter Design
Exploring Reliance and Relationships when the going gets tough
Partners in Crime
Before reuniting with Eri, encounter design is used a tool to make the player feel powerless against their foes. I wanted to throw the player into combats before introducing Eri into the gameplay loop to emphasize that Astrid isn't the kind of character that thrives on the field of battle. These encounters see the player needing to keep moving, and taking advantage of Astrid being and to temporarily knock down enemies.
Acquiring Eri changes everything, because now the player has a tool at their disposal for completely dispatching enemies, but the narrative context of this expresses that this isn't the way for Astrid to get over her loss. Encounters past this point in the game force the player to rely on Eri to come out alive, but this codependence is dangerous emotionally, which is ultimately highlighted in the ending of the game, when Eri is once again ripped away from Astrid.
Deeper into Hel
The encounter design throughout the game is also used as a tool for detailing the location in the underworld the Shades are most concerned with.
The Shades can be found in larger groups in areas like the cathedral than they do in more in-between portions of the cave environment, which helps us communicate to the player what areas they find important. This element, matched with the narrative and environmental storytelling, all work towards creating a well rounded and consistent world.
Environmental Storytelling
The World Warped by Loss
First Steps in a New World
Shadow's Grove depicts a take on Norse Hel which explores the fantastical underworld rather than the frozen wastelands. I collaborated a great deal with our writer to figure out how to both bring this kind of space to life, but also how the player should feel in reaction to the space moment to moment.
In the early areas, I designed the space to invoke a feeling of awe and wonder in the player, and presented the player with complete safety from threats while they get acclimated to their new setting. The deeper they travel, taking their first steps into the caves, the tone shifts to invoking feelings of discomfort and uncertainty, while still breaking up the mood with moments of relief and awe around major landmarks the player will be circling back to.
The space is built to pull the player to constantly lower elevations as they are making forward progress, and moving to higher elevations when they are getting distracted by their attachment to Eri. Throughout this space are various structures created by the Shades to communicate to the player that they have lost track of their goals, and have moved in to this eternal liminal place. Movement and progress are important ideas in Shadow's Grove, and exploring the uncomfortable by going deeper into problems (expressed by the elevation design) is always the true path forward in its design. Having the Shades and their civilization stuck at this elevation helps to ground that idea and express where they stand in that process as well.
Signs of the Great Shade
The Great Shade is presented in the game as the main antagonistic force. While he isn't seen until much later in the game, his presence is known all throughout. Broken bridges and ruined structures help to convey this, not just by their current status, but also the scale of their ruin. Scratch marks etched into the rocks near by these destructions also help to pull these ideas together.
I built a lot of moments into the level design to provide the sight lines and vistas for the player to see directly where the Great Shade would have walked through, and how he would have been able to enact the destruction that he did. These moments, even without seeing the Great Shade enacting the destruction in real time, communicate to the player a history of the space, and build up a villain without ever showing the player behind the curtain.
Interaction Design
What it means to interact
Who's talking to who?
One of the challenges I encountered when first joining the team was figuring out how to create content variety in the way the player would interact with things in the space to progress the game. To solve that, I took some time reviewing the art assets we had that weren't actively being used in the game, and I found an asset that would do the job of serving as a new kind of interactable component.
In Shadow's Grove, the player interacts with the spirits of past travelers which can be found at the base of various Swords left in the ground. The change I made to this was making these spirits people that only Astrid is able to converse with. With the new asset I was repurposing, I designed a new interaction system called 'Howl Points', which would be places where Eri would interact with spirits of the lost.
What this design did for us is provide a way to characterize both Astrid and Eri further as separate entities. Astrid converses with characters which try to help guide or misdirect her journey of moving forward and getting past the loss of Eri, whereas the characters Eri converses with draws to question the moral implications of not letting Astrid go, and enabling her to repeat her pain.
Room for Improvement
While mechanically, this solution helped offer further diversity in the gameplay experience while also providing our writer more room to explore the characters, the specific asset did present issues in the level design. The Howl Pad being flat made it difficult to see from most angles, which made it difficult to use as a landmark and focal point for guiding the player to it.
To solve for this, I collaborated with our VFX team to add a ray of light effect which stemmed from the Howl Points before the player interacted with them, which can be seen from all over the map. I also implemented a series of cameras which would highlight each of the Howl Point locations to the player when they first begin the quest to search for them, and I was able to make use of a cut particle trail system to further help guide the player to the first Howl Point, in a similar fashion to the way Fi guides link to the Goddess Sword at the beginning of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
